Geoeconomics has become a defining element of international relations and international law in the post-Cold War era. A topic of growing importance among international legal scholars, geoeconomics is broadly defined as the use of coercive economic legal tools to gain a relative strategic advantage over rival states. Under the leadership of former President Donald Trump, the United States drastically expanded its use of geoeconomic tools and strategies, particularly towards the People’s Republic of China. Through various geoeconomic mechanisms (such as tariffs, circumventing WTO procedures, pressuring third state economies, and primary and secondary sanctions against firms), Trump undertook an aggressive campaign to gain strategic advantages over China. While the Biden Administration has continued many of Trump’s policies, it was Trump who first adopted such wide-ranging geoeconomic posturing. Yet the embrace of geoeconomics by the Trump Administration did not develop in a vacuum. Rather, certain segments of American society across the political spectrum supported and encouraged this move by the Trump Administration. Among the most powerful sectors supporting geoeconomic resistance against China was a group central to the rise of Trump’s political fortunes: his “base,” the American populist right. This article seeks to explain the reasons behind the populist right’s calls for resistance against China, and how such calls helped to pave the way for Trump’s geoeconomics. I argue that populist right-wing anger towards China is largely born out of an incremental yet profound social change regarding neoliberalism. Due to a variety of socioeconomic and philosophical developments, the populist right has developed the perception that neoliberal policies and institutions are beneficial to China—at the expense of American interests and global primacy. It is this decades-long social change among the populist right that helped to give Trump the political opportunity to use geoeconomics resist neoliberal policies and institutions, attempt to gain relative advantages over China, and end a long period of getting “ripped off.”