August 2019, for example, in a series of late-night tweets, Trump raged against Chinese trade policy and arrived at, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” When the media fact-checked his assumption that he can order companies to pull out of a country, he insisted that a 1977 law gave him the power to do so. More fact-checking followed: it appeared that, while the president could not actually order companies to do anything, he had the power to
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