This congressman is either just engaging in the typical hustler-level political grandstanding of many congressmen, or he's a pig-ignorant idiot who doesn't know how to connect data points and form reasoned concepts of reality from them.

Total U.S.-China trade is roughly 760 billion dollars and includes some of the most wealthy and best connected companies in the U.S. Dollars of wealth and investments created through trade with Chinese companies (many of which are connected right to the CCP) pervade various levels of American society and the finances of who knows how many high.level politicians. The exact same thing applies to Chinese society and politicians with money gained from Chinese trade with American companies. That's how large.scale trade just works between two societies, and it's usually a good thing because it's better to trade goods and services than it is to trade bullets and missiles..

For his incoherent idiocy to be a bit more coherent, he'd have to talk about cutting off business relationships that affect and involve the majority of his colleagues in government and a great number of other powerful people.. But why think of that when some silly little media-popular cheap shot against a specific AI company can be vomited out for the public and your constituents?

There's a point to be made that the Chinese don't play by the same set of rules; I don't know why Hawley doesn't just make that point.

Oh, wait, I do know: he's an idiot.

Americans also tend to forget the tech they've stolen. Raytheon only exists due to radar technology stolen from the Brits in WW2 under the guise of American engineers underhandedly telling the UK they needed to bring the prototype to the US.

Or the USA taking the UK's research on nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project and cutting off access to it by British scientists.

I'm not even British and those are just two examples from the top of my head. The hypocrisy is absolutely infuriating...