As it turns out, the trade war’s a silly charade. Who knew?!

On Friday, reports indicated Beijing’s set to wave onerous tariffs on select imports from America in the interest of… well, in the interest of sanity, for lack of a better way to put it.

As Scott Bessent acknowledged privately this week, triple-digit tariffs aren’t sustainable. I don’t know if that’s widely understood across the US electorate (I doubt it, not much is), but you can’t tax international trade flows at 125%. That’s not just disruptive, it’s ruinous. It renders trade impossible.

Apparently, the Party’s going to exempt critical industrial chemicals and medical equipment from the most punitive duties, and may also carve out an exemption for aircraft leases. Reuters, Bloomberg and a handful of other mainstream outlets tipped the CCP’s hand.

The nature of the prospective exemptions underscores a simple, but crucial point: It’s not possible for the US and China to decouple economically. As I put it here on Thursday, “The two countries’ economies are inextricably bound up with one another, and cutting that particular cord will kill both.”

Take plastics, for example. As Bloomberg noted in their coverage, China churns out more plastics than any other country on Earth, but some of Xi’s plastics factories depend on US ethane. You don’t have to know a lot (read: anything) about petrochemical manufacturing to understand that if you tax the feedstock at 125%, the numbers won’t add up anymore.

Apparently, Beijing’s considering exemptions on 131 categories of products. A list making the rounds on Chinese social media, which Reuters said couldn’t be independently verified, included everything from vaccines to jet engines.

The same linked Reuters article indicated Xi’s Commerce Ministry is “collecting lists of items” for possible carveouts and is soliciting feedback from companies who were invited to “submit their own requests.”

Amusingly (and tellingly), the exceptions may be just as much about giving Trump an off-ramp as they are about giving Chinese firms near-term relief. It’s fairly obvious by now that Trump’s the one who “wants” and “needs” a deal, not Xi who, you’re reminded, isn’t entirely opposed to knee-capping his own industries if he thinks it’s somehow in the long-term interest of the country. Just ask big Chinese tech about that.

The exemptions, Reuters went on, would “take pressure off US exports at a time when the Trump administration has shown signs of wanting to make a deal with Beijing.”

According to the average of all public polls, Trump’s approval rating is down 8ppt already, and sits at just 44%. As The New York Times noted, the decline’s a glide path, which is to say it looks structural, not necessarily issue-based.

“Though few high-quality polls have been conducted before and after the tariff announcement, most showed no major decline after what Trump called ‘Liberation Day,'” the Times said, but wrote that “on average, across all polls, Trump’s numbers continued to fall after he issued sweeping global tariffs.”

A Fox poll, which I cite in the interest of balance, likewise shows Trump’s approval at just 44%. Although the numbers are mixed under the hood, the network (begrudgingly, I’m sure) conceded that 44% ain’t great just 100 days in. Specifically, it’s “lower than the approval of Joe Biden (54%), Barack Obama (62%) and George W. Bush (63%) at the 100-day mark [and] also lower compared to Trump’s 45% approval at this point eight years ago.”

Meanwhile, Xi’s domestic approval rating was steady this month at 100%.