President Donald Trump and his MAGA agenda are not shy when it comes to bending conservative norms. In his second term, states’ rights, once a rallying cry for conservatives, are under pressure. Trump has strong-armed private companies and universities, and is testing the approach to free speech, while showing flexible foreign policy when it comes to adversaries like China. This Washington Examiner series, Upend the Orthodoxy, will take an in-depth look at all of these.

In his first term, President Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok.

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Now, he’s fighting to save it.

The reversal marks just one example of how Trump is rewriting Republicans’ decades-old playbook on countering Beijing’s influence in the United States and abroad.

Like in his first term, the president has stocked his inner circle with a number of Washington, D.C.’s top China hawks in senior administration roles. That list includes Marco Rubio, who is pulling double duty as Trump’s secretary of state and national security adviser, and Mike Waltz, Rubio’s NSA predecessor until Trump nominated him as the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Since January, Trump has taken several actions that appear to be incredibly hostile, or at least defensive, toward Beijing.

Following escalating trade shots between Washington and Beijing in April, the president proposed a 145% tariff rate on all Chinese imports, which was by far the highest rate among his slate of so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs. In May, the State Department announced it would “aggressively revoke” the visas of Chinese students studying in America based on purported links to the Chinese Communist Party. In July, the Trump administration announced plans to pursue a ban on Chinese nationals and firms buying and owning American farmland.

However, the president has also pursued policies that have sparked confusion among some American China policy hardliners.

The president has repeatedly refused to enforce a legislative ban on TikTok operating within the United States, instead directing Vice President JD Vance to pursue a deal for the Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell off its U.S. operation to a group of American buyers.

Trump has similarly delayed the implementation of his whopping new tariffs on China multiple times since April, instead settling on an effective rate of 40% while Washington and Beijing pursue a bilateral trade agreement.

In August, the president announced a deal between the federal government and Nvidia, allowing the American chip producer to sell advanced semiconductors to Chinese buyers in exchange for a 15% cut of the profits.

Months after Rubio announced plans to revoke visas for Chinese students, Trump announced that he would instead issue 600,000 new Chinese student visas, insinuating that small and middle-level American colleges and universities would go belly-up without the higher tuition rates paid by international students.

The result is a set of policies that has baffled some China experts, or at least raised questions about the president’s stance on America’s friendly rival.

White House officials disagreed that Trump’s China stance has fundamentally shifted from his first term, but did concede that the president has adopted a heterodox position compared to many of the hawks within the party.

“President Trump has rightfully called out China for conspiring against the United States alongside Russia and North Korea. He is simultaneously willing to look anyone in the eye to deliver better results for the United States – such as fairer trade practices after decades of ripping off American industries,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “Thanks to this President, our country is strong again, and we are no longer ceding any ground to China on manufacturing, technology, or military capability.”

A second senior White House aide, granted anonymity to freely discuss the president’s strategies, suggested that the president is trying to “keep [the Chinese] on their toes.”

“The last thing we want, whether it’s on trade or security issues, is to be predictable,” that person suggested. “People fear what they don’t understand, and I think that’s factoring into his thinking here. At the same time, China isn’t going away, and our economies are deeply, deeply intertwined. It makes sense to — yes, not only make it abundantly clear that Beijing spying on American citizens or stealing American technologies won’t fly so to speak, but also pursue policies that stabilizes our relationship with the only other real power on the global stage.”

Ryan Fedasiuk, an American Enterprise Institute fellow focusing on US-China relations, told the Washington Examiner that it’s “plain to see” that Trump “is being torn in multiple directions on China policy.”

Fedasiuk said in an interview that the aforementioned policies could certainly be characterized as “a softening of his stance on China” compared to the first term and illustrate the administration’s focus on trade over security issues.

“The way I describe it to people is that under his first term, I think it was clear the president had a China strategy, of which trade and technology were a part. In his second term, it’s exactly the opposite,” he explained. “We have a tech and trade strategy of which China is only a part, and I do think that sometimes the administration has been missing the forest for the trees.”

Lyle Goldstein, the director of Defense Priorities’ Asia Program, rejected out of hand that Trump is a true China hawk, in the vein of Rubio and Waltz or Trump’s former CIA Director-turned-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and ex-National Security Advisor John Bolton.

Still, Goldstein argued that Trump “is wise” to recognize that the actual cost of implementing policies proposed by hawks on both sides of the aisle, including his “lieutenants,” may actually outweigh the benefits.

“They support policies that are very hard line, but putting these policies into practice has a lot of costs,” he said. “We really have a pattern here, and he sees this and finds it counterproductive.”

Goldstein noted that Trump frequently lauds praise on Chinese President Xi Jinping, which “could be seen as just sort of politeness or his attempt at diplomacy” and “among American leaders, is pretty rare.”

“I do think it is a bit of his style, but I still think that it’s, at some level, smart,” he continued. “I’ve long advocated for such pragmatic dealings with Beijing, so I’m pleased about it.”

Furthermore, Trump’s breaks from the more aggressive anti-China positions of his Cabinet have left Beijing itself “confused and muddled,” and potentially more willing to “play ball” with Trump compared to his first term, Goldstein said.

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“Trade economics, that’s kind of the school of hard knocks. Supply chains are what they are, and they cannot be changed overnight. Welcome to reality,” he concluded. “We’re very dependent on China. China is very dependent on us. It’s interdependence, and, I guess, my message to the readers would be, that’s not a horrible thing, actually.”