If you can’t get China to agree to your tariff rate, why waste time haggling over banquet dinners and sending email threats back and forth? Just walk right past Beijing, knock on Nvidia’s front door, and say, “You’re gonna give me 15%… if you want to keep slinging chips in that territory.” (Bonus points if you do it in your best Walter White impression.)

Well, as crazy as that sounds, that’s more or less what just went down. For starters, in what might be the most gangster move by a President since Andrew Jackson paid off the national debt (and then basically told the central bank to get lost), President Trump went straight to Nvidia and AMD with (insert Godfather voice) “an offer they couldn’t refuse”: hand over 15% of all revenue from certain chip sales to China or forget about getting your export license. Naturally, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su looked at the mountain of money they stood to lose and decided the signature pen worked just fine.

But get this… the chips in question aren’t even Nvidia and AMD’s top-shelf creations. We’re talking about Nvidia’s H20 AI accelerator and AMD’s MI308, the “diet” versions built specifically to tiptoe around Biden-era export restrictions. Yet back in April, Trump’s team banned them anyway, waving the national security flag. Fast-forward to last week: Trump sits down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and suddenly those bans evaporate. Licenses get stamped, shipments can roll, and now… 15% of the revenue from those sales now heads straight to the U.S. Treasury. (No word on whether they plan to blow it all on lottery tickets or finally fix the potholes in front of my house.)

And you better believe the economists and trade wonks are losing it. Stephen Olson, a former U.S. trade negotiator, said calling this “unusual” would be a staggering understatement. Deborah Elms, head of trade policy at the Hinrich Foundation, flat-out said it looks like an export tax… which the Constitution kinda… forbids. (Maybe Trump sees legislation from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton less like the bedrock of American democracy and more like a choose-your-own-adventure book.)

Of course, this outrage comes because this isn’t Trump’s first time playing the US government Godfather. He’s already brokered tariff exemptions for countries that invest billions in the U.S., approved the $14.1B sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon with a “golden share” for the U.S. government, and leaned on Apple until they pledged another $100B in domestic spending. Next up: charging Starbucks a licensing fee for using “Americano.” (You think I’m joking, this could very well be a headline soon.) At this point, he’s basically running the country like Mr. Wonderful would… collecting royalties on every deal in sight.

The math makes this even more obvious why Jensen jumped all over this deal. I mean, think about it, Nvidia pulled in about $17B from China last year… roughly 13% of its total sales. AMD made $6.2B from China in 2024, which was 24% of its total. Bernstein estimates Nvidia could have sold $23B worth of H20 chips to China in 2025 before the ban. A 15% cut shaves 5 to 15 percentage points off gross margins for those products, so it’s still worth selling… but it’s far from a home run. (Some money is better than no money amirite?).

Critics say the whole thing reeks of a double standard. If selling the chips is a true national security risk, why allow it at all? If it’s not, why make companies cough up 15%? Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick insists the idea is to get Chinese firms “addicted” to American tech (even if it’s not our A-list stuff) so they can’t quit the U.S. “tech stack” later. It’s the dealer’s business model, but with semiconductors instead of meth.

Meanwhile, Beijing is grumbling about “unilateral bullying,” but their domestic AI chip industry is like a factory running on a hamster wheel… determined, and nowhere near keeping up with demand. They can stomp and pout in the press, but when the tech gap is this wide, they’ll still line up at the counter, wallet in hand, to buy from the very supplier they’ve been calling the bully. It’s a little like swearing you’ll never eat fast food again… until you find yourself in the McDonald’s drive-thru at midnight because nothing else is open.

So yeah, saying Trump “moved the goalposts” on U.S.-China trade is like saying Lionel Messi is “decent with a ball.” He basically ripped up the turf, built a tollbooth at midfield, and now makes both teams stop, pay, and (because why not) tell him he’s better than Lincoln, Washington, and Reagan before they’re allowed to keep playing.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Starbucks as mentioned in the article.