“What Trump is trying to achieve is to show business in a lot of this country they aren’t going to be ruined by absurd regulation by bureaucrats.”
.. Mr. Icahn was an early backer of Mr. Trump and urged him to support efforts to let U.S. corporations bring home offshore cash and to end the carried-interest tax break that benefits many on Wall Street.
.. Mr. Icahn, who has spent the past four decades battling big companies as an activist investor, already has been wielding influence in the president-elect’s transition team. He is playing a central role in selecting the next chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said people familiar with the matter
.. “Trump seems to want to run a flat organization with no real hierarchy, which leaves open the possibility of a lot of poles of power and tug-and-pull within the administration,” said Jeb Mason, a Treasury Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “This may leave everyone guessing about who holds ultimate sway.”
.. Several liberal economists said although they oppose many of Mr. Navarro’s policy ideas, he deserves credit for challenging both Democrats and Republicans to think differently about the costs of globalization.
.. He has written several books with provocative titles, including “The Coming China Wars” in 2008 and “Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action” in 2011, and struck up a correspondence with Mr. Trump several years ago after he saw an interview in which the New York businessman spoke approvingly of Mr. Navarro’s China analysis...Mainstream economists have taken a dim view of recent articles by Messrs. Navarro and Ross that characterize U.S. trade deficits as a drag on growth, which economists say present a flawed and confused view of elementary economic principles.“Peter Navarro, a friend, is just wrong,” Lawrence Kudlow, the CNBC commentator who advised Mr. Trump earlier this year on taxes, posted on Twitter before the election.
Trump’s Taiwan phone call was long planned, say people who were involved
The historic communication — the first between leaders of the United States and Taiwan since 1979 — was the product of months of quiet preparations and deliberations among Trump’s advisers about a new strategy for engagement with Taiwan that began even before he became the Republican presidential nominee, according to people involved in or briefed on the talks.
.. Several leading members of Trump’s transition team are considered hawkish on China and friendly toward Taiwan, including incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus.
.. In an article for Foreign Policy magazine titled “Donald Trump’s Peace Through Strength Vision for the Asia-Pacific,” Peter Navarro and Alexander Gray described Taiwan as a “beacon of democracy in Asia” and complained that its treatment by the Obama administration was “egregious.”
The article, flagged to China experts as a significant policy blueprint, described Taiwan as “the most militarily vulnerable U.S. partner anywhere in the world” and called for a comprehensive arms deal to help it defend itself against China.
.. Priebus is reported to have visited Taiwan with a Republican delegation in 2011 and in October 2015, meeting Tsai before she was elected president. Taiwan Foreign Minister David Lee called him a friend of Taiwan
.. Edward J. Feulner, a longtime former president of the Heritage Foundation, has for decades cultivated extensive ties with Taiwan and is serving as an adviser to Trump’s transition team.
.. At the Republican National Convention in July, Trump’s allies inserted a little-noticed phrase into the party’s platform reaffirming support for six key assurances to Taiwan made by President Ronald Reagan in 1982 — a priority for the Taiwan government. Also written into the 2016 platform was tougher language about China than had been in the party’s platform in its previous iteration four years ago.
.. Trump accused China of “raping” the United States by stealing trade secrets, manipulating its currency and subsidizing its industries.
.. “Calls like this may upset the diplomats, but they communicate to Americans that he’s not going to play by the same rules and isn’t just talking differently but will act differently.”
.. the call with Tsai “was deliberate. It was not an accident. Obviously he made a conscious decision to have the call arranged. She called him, but there was an agreement for it.”
.. “It doesn’t make sense that Tsai out of the blue would call Donald Trump. She is not known for taking big leaps into the unknown, and it would be politically embarrassing when it was learned that she called Trump and he would not take her call.”