Illustrating that even the most strident of Donald Trump’s policy positions are only as firm as the last person who buttered him up, Chinese telecoms giant ZTE will benefit from the latest reversal by the Liar-In-Chief. In April, Trump hit the company with severe sanctions because of its sanctions-busting commerce with Iran and North Korea. Within weeks, ZTE was forced to the point of closure. But Trump — days after withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal — reversed himself yesterday.

This is impressive logic even by Trump’s standards — Iran complies with the terms of the nuclear deal, but the US walks away from it; ZTE deliberately broke the sanctions imposed on Iran before the deal, but Trump vows to help it. Go figure. 

It gets better: Fairfax today reported that ZTE had paid bribes in West Africa in the 2000s — including in one case paying out more than 20% of one contract’s value in bribes. The company is in the running for contracts with a Perth public transport provider (along with banned-from-the-NBN, and perpetual whiner, Huawei) and Telstra. 

Last week, ZTE suspended trading in its shares because of the US sanctions — it relies heavily on imported US chips and other components. But then China’s president-for-like Xi Jinping made a personal request to Trump to ease up. This is the second company where Trump has softened US sanctions — the other was (surprise!) Russian — the huge aluminium company Rusal which is controlled by Kremlin insider and billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. The sanctions were later softened to allow companies like Rio Tinto and Glencore that trade with Rusal more time to cut their links — with the prospect of further softening if Deripaska clearly cut his links with the company.