By DEE-ANN DURBIN

Pizza Hut could soon be up for sale.

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Yum Brands, Pizza Hut’s parent company, said Tuesday it’s conducting a formal review of options for the brand, which has struggled to compete in a crowded pizza market.

Yum CEO Chris Turner said Pizza Hut has many strengths, including a global footprint and strong growth in many markets. Pizza Hut has nearly 20,000 stores in more than 100 countries, and its international sales were up 2% in the first nine months of this year. China is its second-largest market outside the U.S.

But Pizza Hut gets nearly half its sales from the U.S., where it has around 6,500 stores, and U.S. sales fell 7% in the same period. Pizza Hut was long saddled with large, outdated dine-in restaurants at a time when consumers wanted fast pickup and delivery.

In 2020, one of Pizza Hut’s largest franchisees filed for bankruptcy protection and closed 300 stores. Pizza Hut now controls 15.5% of U.S. pizza chain sales, down from 19.4% in 2019, according to Technomic, a food service consulting company.

“The Pizza Hut team has been working hard to address business and category challenges; however, Pizza Hut’s performance indicates the need to take additional action to help the brand realize its full value, which may be better executed outside of Yum Brands,” Turner said in a statement. “To truly take advantage of the brand we’ve built and the opportunities ahead, we’ve made the decision to initiate a thorough review of strategic options.”

Yum has not set a deadline for the completion of the review. The company said it will not make any further comments on the review.

Yum Brands shares were up nearly 7% in early afternoon trading Tuesday. The company also owns KFC, Taco Bell and Habit Burger & Grill. Yum said Tuesday that its third-quarter revenue rose 8% thanks to strong sales at both KFC and Taco Bell.

Pizza Hut was founded in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, by two brothers who borrowed $600 from their mother to open the store. They chose the name because their sign only had room for eight letters.

Pizza Hut’s familiar red roof debuted in 1969 and by 1971 it was the top pizza chain in the world by sales. PepsiCo acquired Pizza Hut in 1977 but spun off its restaurant division — which became Yum Brands — in 1997.

Domino’s, with its focus on delivery and carryout pizza, has since become the world’s largest pizza chain, with 21,750 stores.

The news of Pizza Hut’s uncertain future comes the day after another 1950s-era dine-in icon, Denny’s, announced it was being sold to an investor group and taken private. Like Pizza Hut, Denny’s has also struggled with customers’ shift to delivery and growing competition in casual dining options.

As a real estate developer, Donald Trump is deeply familiar with the three keys to success in that industry: location, location and location. Geopolitics, it turns out, also has three keys to success: leverage, leverage and leverage. But it’s not the kind of leverage (i.e., debt) that Trump loved to use in real estate. It’s geopolitical leverage — the power to impose your will on your adversary.

Seen from that point of view, Trump succeeded in bringing about a ceasefire in the Gaza Strip because he gained leverage over both Israel and Hamas — and he used it adroitly. He has failed to bring about a ceasefire in Ukraine, because he has refused to use all the leverage he has on Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who started the war. And Trump’s attempts to employ the leverage of tariffs to reduce China’s manufacturing exports to America — more necessary today than ever — has shown only limited gains largely because of the chaotic way Trump has gone about putting those tariffs into place.

Of course, Trump, with his usual bluster, scored his recent meeting with President Xi Jinping of China as a grand slam — “a 12” on a scale of 0-10, as he put it. In fact, at this summit, all Trump did was dig himself out of a hole with China that he himself dug a few months ago. As The Wall Street Journal noted, markets “yawned” at the deal because it “mostly restores the status quo that prevailed in May.”

So, if you’re keeping score at home, Trump is batting one for three — or .333. In baseball, that can get you into the All-Star Game. In the game of nations, it gets you sent down to the minor leagues.

Right question, wrong answer

Why .333? Let’s focus on China, which is the most important geostrategic, geoeconomic issue for America today.

Any analysis of China has to start with the fact that as a result of the devastating bursting of China’s housing bubble over the last few years, millions of Chinese have lost significant amounts of money and become burdened with debt. Not surprisingly, they are scrimping on spending. I am told that many of the half-empty restaurants I saw in Beijing and Shanghai when I was there last March are even worse off today.

In short, the world’s second-largest economy is having a crash in domestic consumption, so Chinese are also importing even less from abroad. Beijing’s response is not to stimulate domestic consumption — by giving its people something more than the bare minimums in social security and health care — but instead to fund the building of more factories to export goods to the rest of the world.

As one of my Times colleagues covering China, Chris Buckley, reported last week: “Days before meeting President Trump in South Korea, the Chinese leader Xi Jinping laid out the next stage in a strategy of long-term competition with the United States and the West.” The plan “makes clear that Beijing wants to double down” on industrial manufacturing “even as its trading partners worry that China’s expanding exports are undercutting their own industries.”

This is utterly reckless on China’s part. As another of my Times colleagues, Keith Bradsher, reported from Beijing last January, China already “produces about a third of the world’s manufactured goods.” That “is more than the United States, Japan, Germany, South Korea and Britain combined.”

So Trump is responding to a real problem. But as he so often does, he is pushing the wrong answer to the right question. To have real leverage, his tariffs must be part of a quiet grand strategy, but Trump’s fire-ready-aim strategy has been anything but that.

For starters, if you want to move China, you don’t do it in a loud, haphazard way that is only going to embarrass its leaders and get their backs up. You have long secret negotiations.

Second, if you are going to threaten Beijing with economic sanctions, you had better know what it can threaten you with. I can’t confirm this, but I suspect that Trump started announcing his new tariffs on China without ever asking any expert whether China could retaliate in any meaningful way — aside from stopping purchases of American soybeans.

I assume Trump did not ask this, because if he actually knew beforehand that Xi had an economic weapon that could trump Trump’s tariffs tenfold, it would have been the height of foolishness to impose the huge 145% tariff rate on all imports from China that Trump did at one point.

That weapon was China’s control of 69% of the market share for the mining of the 17 chemical elements known as rare earths, 92% of the share for the refining of those elements and 98% of rare-earth-based magnet manufacturing, according to estimates from Goldman Sachs. Rare earths are used in all sorts of technologies, but rare-earth-based magnets are essential for most electric vehicle motors, semiconductors, smartphones, MRI machines, drones, radars, fighter jets, missiles and offshore wind turbines.

Had China gone ahead with its order to curtail rare earth exports in response to Trump’s tariffs, it could have significantly slowed down or shut down manufacturing all across America — and the world.

When Xi laid that card on the table, Trump’s leverage was sharply diminished. He quickly scrambled to have his Treasury secretary persuade China to postpone its curbs on rare earth exports for a year by offering to sharply lower U.S. tariffs and postpone some new bans on high-tech exports to Beijing.

This was the geoeconomic version of Mike Tyson’s famous dictum that everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.

Purposeful tariffs, incoherent strategy

Finally, I repeat, Trump was right to impose tariffs across the board on Chinese imports in his first term — and also now — because China has not been playing fair on trade.

It is forcing U.S. companies to compete with Chinese factories heavily subsidized by the government, and that are greatly overproducing manufactured goods for export. Tariffs that are limited in time can be useful in buying the economic running room for American manufacturers to develop their own homegrown replacement industries. But for that you need to have a comprehensive strategy — and Trump has none.

At a time when American companies are trying to compete with China’s advanced manufacturing exports, Trump is actually making it harder for U.S. firms to hire high-skilled workers from abroad. He has imposed tariffs that make the materials that go into steel more expensive for our manufacturers; he has slashed the very government-funded research essential for us to compete with China, let alone stay ahead of it; and he has imposed tariffs on virtually all of America’s key allies, whose backing we need to create leverage on China through collective action. It’s a completely incoherent strategy.

Xi’s game is risky, too

All this said, Xi may have leverage today, but he, too, is playing a risky game. By going nuclear on trade — that is, threatening to curtail rare earth exports — Xi has freaked out the rest of the world and stimulated the U.S. and other key economies to begin a crash program to replace these critical Chinese exports. It will take a long time, but the process has begun.

More broadly, the rest of the world is simply not going to let China take all the manufacturing jobs, especially as artificial intelligence starts to cut increasingly into blue-collar and white-collar work. China is courting a real global backlash.

Given how important the U.S.-China relationship has been for sustaining the relative Great Power peace and prosperity of the world since the late 1970s, Washington and Beijing need a quiet long-term dialogue — not a noisy long-term trade war in which both sides lose.

If we really are heading for a divorce in this relationship, oh my goodness, we will miss it when it’s gone.

Thomas Friedman writes a column for the New York Times.

 

President Donald Trump’s months-long effort to find a primary challenger to Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, a fellow Republican and MAGA devotee, is the latest proof that Republicans in Washington were never truly intent on achieving the agenda they sold to voters last year.

If they were, they would be endorsing Massie as exactly the kind of anti-establishment conservative they’d want to see more of in Congress. An MIT engineer who lives off the grid on his Kentucky cattle farm, Massie believes that Americans have so little understanding of how government spending is contributing to both the budget deficit and inflation that he wears a lapel pin he engineered to display a mini “debt clock.” It registers the growth of the national debt in real time (about $80,000 a second).

Massie’s not into the trappings of Washington life. For a couple of his 12 years in DC, he lived out of his camper truck. He’s one of those lawmakers who actually reads the fine print of bills before he votes. He blames the influence of the military-industrial complex for feeding a congressional addiction to “forever wars.” He votes against nearly all foreign aid spending. And he’s so true to his convictions that he’s often voted against his Republican colleagues this year because it’s “not what they campaign on,” he told me.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson told his podcast audience last week, “I don’t think there are many people in the country who live out Donald Trump’s own stated principles more precisely than Thomas Massie.”

Trump sold voters on giving him another term in the White House by focusing on their fears and resentments. He promised to end American engagement in foreign countries, bring prices and interest rates down, close the border, revive investment in U.S. manufacturing and find criminals who were operating above the law — including releasing files relating to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein — and bring them to justice.

But when Trump started to pivot away from his own promises on inflation, foreign affairs and Epstein, Massie tried to use his leverage — House Republicans can only afford to lose two votes on every vote in the House — to pull him back.

He was one of only two Republicans to vote against the president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” because, he told me, “You can’t cut taxes and increase spending at the same time in the same bill” without causing “inflation and high interest rates.”

He pushed for Congress to restore its war powers after Trump bombed Iran without authorization.

He’s been a consistent “no” vote on what he calls “genuflecting resolutions” that “put Israel on a pedestal in the midst of their war in Gaza.”

He railed against aid to Ukraine, condemned the influence of the pro-Israel lobbying group American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and blasted Trump’s bailout of Argentina.

And when the White House balked at releasing the FBI files on Epstein, Massie filed a discharge petition to force a House vote on a bill to release the files.

“Part of the reason (Trump) wants to sweep that under the rug is some of his rich and powerful friends and even donors are implicated in these files,” Massie alleged. Trump has responded to such claims by calling the whole thing “a hoax.”

But Trump and his pugilistic advisors don’t see dissent as an opportunity to listen and strengthen their argument. It’s a reason to take down the opposition. Last week, the president endorsed former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein to challenge Massie in next year’s GOP primary.

The campaign will be heavily funded by three billionaire supporters of Trump and Israel – megadonor Miriam Adelson and hedge fund managers Paul Singer and John Paulson. The trio financed a $2 million stream of attack ads that began running against Massie this summer; he expects the campaign to spend about $20 million more.

For some Trump supporters, it’s a baffling development. Massie may be an iconoclast, but Trump isn’t targeting him for going against the MAGA agenda. He is targeting Massie for doing what Trump said he would do — but didn’t.

“When leaders of my own party protect sex traffickers, spend our grandkids into oblivion, fund endless wars, lockdown our citizens, bailout corporations, bow to other countries, and hurt small farmers, it’s true that I won’t be their yes man,”  Massie wrote Thursday on X. He was responding to Vice President JD Vance who told students at the University of Mississippi that the president’s attacks on Massie were “because we can never count on him for some of the most difficult votes.”

“The president’s political strategy is to intimidate my colleagues by attacking me,” Massie told me, speaking from the parking lot of a feed store in his district.

The political intimidation tactics are working — in part because Congress is a dysfunctional disaster.

Massie says that no matter which party has had the majority in Congress, or the White House, there is a unifying theme to how DC operates: “The whole game is rigged.’’

Congress exists in a “black box that Americans can’t look into and see what’s going on,” he explained. “The lobbyists love it that way.” The Speaker of the House is given too much power. Representatives don’t work hard enough to understand what’s in the laws they’re passing. And the practice of stuffing omnibus bills with unrelated provisions intended for undisclosed special interests is a “sneaky trick.”

Despite this brutal critique, Massie somehow still harbored hope that, “this time, Trump wouldn’t get off-track in his second term.”

Massie waited until October 2024 to endorse him, but he “thought for certain that he would go in there and really disrupt the system,” he told me.

Massie, no slouch at math, also knew those odds were slim. Trump lacked “a consistent ideology” and that made it impossible to follow through on his promises because he’d be “on two different sides of the same issue,” he explained.

He also warned Trump’s advisors not to “underestimate how the swamp can stop all forward progress” because Congress has been captive to special interests for decades. And while Massie didn’t expect Trump to focus on the deficit — because he “never campaigned as a fiscal conservative” — he said he was “hopeful that they could get that job done” because the president had surrounded himself with people who portrayed themselves as budget hawks — like Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

“But they’re not getting that job done,” Massie added. Instead of disrupting the system and demanding reforms, Trump has “kind of been pulled into it.” The deficit keeps growing and “waste, fraud and abuse is going to continue relatively unabated.”

Other conservatives, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, dismiss Massie’s opposition and contend that Trump is being consistent. But as Trump’s popularity declines, the public is increasingly aligned with Massie’s assessment — 63% of the country disapproves of his handling of the cost of living, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.

Meanwhile, Trump’s political pressure on Massie is working. After Trump’s primary threat, Massie had a record fundraising quarter from grassroots contributors. But his fundraising consultant for his political committee recently resigned. Too many large donors had been warned by Trump and House leadership not to contribute.

“I don’t think Thomas Massie understands government,” Trump told reporters in May. “I think he’s a grandstander.”

The president was wrong. I’ve covered legislators for more than three decades. Few lawmakers are as adept as Massie at identifying the flaws with the system while simultaneously having the guts to call it out. It’s Trump who doesn’t understand. He’s demonstrating that he doesn’t really care to halt inflation, stimulate jobs, and put America first as his MAGA agenda promised, because if he did, he’d be listening to the Kentucky congressman — instead of trying to defeat him.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.