Aside from the “criminals” and “rapists” in Mexico, one of Donald Trump’s favorite campaign targets was China. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he told a crowd in Indiana. China’s manipulation of its currency is “robbing Americans of billions of dollars of capital and millions of jobs,” he moaned to The Wall Street Journal. On his first day in office he would “direct the secretary of the treasury to label China a currency manipulator,” he vowed. But upon Trump setting up shop in the West Wing, Beijing suddenly plummeted on his blacklist, both because other problems demanded his attention (the border wall, it turned out, would not fund itself) and because he realized that China might be a useful ally in dealing with North Korea. After a chummy weekend summit with Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in April, where the two bonded over chocolate cake and Trump’s missile strike on Syria, the relationship seemed to be on sturdier footing than ever. Trump later told the Journal that Xi had even given him a helpful history lesson on North Korea. “After listening for 10 minutes, I realized it’s not so easy,” he said. “I felt pretty strongly that they had a tremendous power [over] North Korea . . . But it’s not what you would think.”

Unfortunately, based on his emotional venting over the weekend about China “doing NOTHING for us with North Korea” while simultaneously making “hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade,” it appears Beijing is no longer in his good graces. And now, per Axios, this is happening:

President Trump is considering an aggressive step against China over its theft of U.S. intellectual property and China’s other industrial policies that harm American companies. An announcement could come as soon as this week, multiple sources told Axios. Trump could signal, or implicitly direct, the U.S.Trade Representative to “self-initiate” an investigation of China under section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. Initiating an investigation under this section could result in either a new WTO dispute between the U.S. and China or unilateral retaliation by the Trump administration. It’s too early to say what form that could take, but all tools, including tariffs, would be on the table.

Of course, Trump has threatened to take economic action against China before and then completely reversed course, as he is wont to do. Just ask Enrique Peña Nieto and Justin Trudeau what happened when they pressured Trump not to dismantle NAFTA. Still, as we learned earlier this month, the president is desperate to start a trade war, even if virtually everyone in his Cabinet is against it. And there’s no better way to flex his nationalist muscles than by slapping China with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, as advisers Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon have been itching to do. As Axios notes, going after Beijing on intellectual property “is not nearly as controversial,” so perhaps he’ll take that incremental baby step in antagonizing Xi before moving on to bigger and better things.