What do you think they are planning to gain out of the deal? They will sell the abandonment of Taiwan's democracy to totalitarianism with some crap about America getting out of the forever war business, but Trump/Musk would know that Taiwan is a hugely valuable bargaining chip that you could get a lot for by not defending it.

Money/power, one would assume. Musk has his cars made in China, so he'd be looking for long-term stability, market access, but what is Trump's motivation?

That's a tough call, unless Trump would also be scoring points with Russia in the deal. There's long been speculation that Putin has some deep dark secret he's holding over Trump. It could also be Trump setting up his family. it's clear what Musk gets out of it, agreed.

But why would they trust China? Didn't they learn anything from Hong Kong? China will keep its word until they have control, then any deal is history.

He's all talk about tariffs on China products (presumably not including Tesla), but that's purely business related, nothing to do with any moral stance on Taiwan. Is it the chip industry he's after? How would handing China control of Taiwan help that? America would like to develop its own, be self-sufficient, but that's a ways off, right?

It's years off, but not decades. My guess is that they could change the supply landscape relatively quickly. The US has already started building up chip production.

Trump would be thinking reward in his term. There must be some interim pay-off involved.

It could also be that there's an unspoken, seemingly unrelated side deal, possibly of much bigger consequence, going on. In fact I would guess there must be, something in addition to personal gain for Trump and Musk. It could have something to with, for example, a new currency (CBDC type) or something otherwise very big, and getting the Taiwan issue out of the way helps make this other thing happen, whatever it is. That's kind of a scary thought.

On another point, it's always eyebrow-raising when you hear about Vietnam being touted as the new manufacturing hub. Vietnam is another country run by a ruthless totalitarian regime. It's hard to escape the conclusion that if you're a Globo-player from the west, you like doing business with totalitarian regimes - there are less moving parts. The fact that it's idiotic to keep handing over your supply chain to totalitarian orgs, never seems to get addressed. I guess the thing is that it makes financial/power sense to the Musk-types, but it's a disaster for the poor old normal person.

Good point, and this ties into my previous comment about new alignments happening. There may be some big changes planned that we have not learned of yet.