I'm John Batchel. This is the new John Bachelor show. Josh Rogan, the Washington Post columnist, his new book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st century.

The story of the Trump administration's evolving policy

towards China, always double track, triple track, doubling back, never straightforward. But an event,

February of 2018, March of 2018, Robert Lighthouser, the trade representative. Josh, what was the Lighthouser report?

What is a 301 investigation?

Well, in early 2018, the Wall Street guys had lost their chance to make a quick deal.

And Trump had turned to his national security people to say, we need to raise the pressure on Beijing and we need to come up with some tariffs.

And the mechanics of that were handed over to the U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer,

extensive experience in this area.

And what he did was he compiled the most devastating report, government report to date,

about China's illicit trade practices. We're talking about unfair

subsidies and intellectual property theft and all economic espionage, economic aggression of all

kinds. And that was the 301 report. And what that does is that forms the basis of the tariffs

that the Trump administration would impose. That still remain to this day, by the way. Now,

Robert Leidheiser was an interesting figure because he wasn't a superhawk. He wasn't aligned with Bannon or Navarro, but he wasn't a Wall Street click guy either. He wasn't friends with Steve Mnuchin. He was a trade guy, a trade hawk, you could say, but one that was focused on these very specific issues. And of course, once he had put forth this report, you know, that's accused China of all of these, I would say rightly accused China of

all of these transgressions, that became the bar. That became the thing that the Chinese

government had to address. And that had two big effects.

One is that, you know, they couldn't really address it, you know, in a sense they were, we were asking at that point China to change its entire industrial policy and to stop its entire

industrial, you know, strategy. And there's an argument that they were never going to do that

anyway. But it also, so that that meant the trade would move forward.

But it also meant that when they actually struck the deal at the end,

that this was, again, Leitheiser back in the poll position,

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