I'm John Batscher. This is the new John Batscher show Josh Rogin, the Washington Post columnist, his new book, Chaos Under Heaven, Trump,

She, 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 Lighthouse 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 US Trade

Representative Robert Lighthizer extensive experience in this area.

And what he did was he compiled the most devastating

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 Lighthizer was an interesting figure because he wasn't a superhoc, he wasn't a lion, was banned in her 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,

that accused China of all of these, I would say rightly accused China of all of these transgressions, that became the bar.

That became the same that the Chinese government had to address.

And that had two big effects.

...