The current president isn't wishing for a pony. He has aggressively, unilaterally changed USA trade policy with respect to China. One might suspect his goals in this exercise. Still, if he can do this in pursuit of his idea of "fairness", then some other president, perhaps with the cooperation of Congress, could have done similar with the idea of penalizing some of the more odious behavior of the Chinese state.

That hypothetical president who cared about e.g. Tibet or the Uighurs couldn't have expected any popular intellectual support for that effort, however, since our popular intellectuals act largely to feather their own nests with Panglossian tributes to how wonderful TPP could have been.