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In China, the real estate sector plays a pivotal role in shaping domestic sentiment due to significant household exposure to this asset class, notes Casanova. The sharp decline in real estate activity from May to July may have dampened consumer confidence, potentially weighing on retail sales.

The headwinds from Trump's trade war , meanwhile, are making things even tougher for China's pre-trade-war, pre-existing conditions. These include a property crisis, high youth unemployment and local governments struggling under the weight of crushing debt burdens.

Yet it's the mutually-assured destruction dynamic emanating from Trump's tariffs that's dampening the global outlook.

It's not just the US and China, of course, but economies from Canada to Germany to Japan. As British Columbia Premier David Eby puts it:“The trade war that we're in right now, that neither Washington state nor British Columbia asked for ... but is being imposed on us by the president, is a recipe for mutually assured destruction.”

One of the great ironies of Trump's recent attempts to stop Beijing is his aping of Chinese Communist Party tactics in a nation that prides itself on being a model of free-market transparency. Exhibit A: firing Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, for, in Trump's telling,“fakin g” weak employment data.

“For six months, I've said that threats to economic data have been more collateral damage than intentional harm - no longer,” says Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank.“Firing the head of the BLS is five-alarm intentional harm to the integrity of US economic data and the entire statistical system.”

Economist Michael Strain at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute chimes in,“it's imperative that decision makers understand that government statistics are unbiased and of the highest quality.”

No longer, indeed. Upcoming US data on employment, inflation, gross domestic product and international trade may require an asterisk in much the way Wall Street has long viewed Beijing's official numbers with suspicion.

Yet this Chinafication dynamic doesn't stop there. Trump's desire to eliminate the Fed's independence is an effort to morph the most respected US institution into another People's Bank of China . Though PBOC Governor Pan Gongsheng wields certain powers, big decisions on interest rates, reserve requirements and yuan levels are made far above his pay grade.

Trump's intensifying assault on the media is also right out of the CCP's playbook. Trump's moves to dismantle the Voice of America news agency, kill off the Public Broadcasting Service, browbeat ABC and CBS into submission via settlements and sue The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and others must have information censors in Beijing blushing.

“There's real Ministry of Truth stuff going on right in front of our eyes,” writes political pundit and podcaster John Archibald .“Just like Orwell wrote it.”

Yet for Trump, who was elected mainly a second time to hasten GDP, the tariffs are proving to be economic poison. Whichever loyalist he names to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics will have a hard time masking the inflationary pain from Trump's tariffs.

Six-plus months in, it's abundantly clear that the US is sustaining bigger blows than Asia's biggest economies. All this throws cold water and new suspicion on the surprisingly strong 3% growth rate the US produced in the second quarter.

Case in point: Don Bacon, a Republican Congressman for Nebraska, claiming that“GDP here has decreased by 6% over the last year. And it's all about trade. It's all about getting corn and soybeans out the door.” As he told CNN:“We're now in a troubled time.”

Chief Goldman Sachs economist Jan Hatzius says that even if the US is expected to avoid a recession, GDP is forecast to only expand about 1% this year as tariff rates rise. Core inflation, meanwhile, is projected to climb to about 3%.

As such, he notes,“there are signs that consumer spending is stagnating.” At the same time, Hatzius adds,“investors are increasingly focused on the outlook for US deficits , and those concerns are beginning to drive up yields on longer-maturity Treasuries.”

The US national debt has topped US$37 trillion. Trump's recent“Big Beautiful Bill” will add $4.1 trillion to that pile through 2034, says the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Against this, Trump is playing the economic version of Russian roulette with the Fed, the globe's most important financial institution.

Trump's obsession with bilateral tariff deals also missed the point that the global financial system is increasingly interconnected, like borderless supply chains. This extreme bilateralization of trade is a reminder that Trump's economic strategy is ripped from the pages of the mid-1980s.

The rationale behind Trump's tariff policies dates back to a time when the five most industrialized nations held vast sway over economic dynamics. The problem with a US leader prioritizing 40-year-old sticking-time strategies is that“Made in China 2025” is upending the global economy in real time.

And at a moment when China is investing in industries and sectors it thinks will lead the world in 2035. This goes, too, for a Global South that's increasingly forging its own path – one that barely factors in where the US might fit in a decade from now.