Donald Trump, for the moment, has paused his dumb global trade war, except with respect to China, which he, for the moment, has decided to push even harder.
Heavy emphasis on “for the moment.”
The “90-day pause” on the Trump tariffs announced on Wednesday comes across, at the top, as a yuge f**k you to companies that have worked overtime over the past week to try to limit the damage to their supply chains, production plans and staffing.
Don’t expect them to return to business as it was before with a snap of the fingers, with Trump just as likely to change his mind as he is to stick to the last thing that he decided makes sense for the moment.
The markets are responding positively, but that’s more relief than it is an expectation that we’re out of the woods, because we’re not.
It seems that what’s going on here at the moment is, Trump, roiled by the markets tanking, his billionaire buddies revolting, and putting pressure on the congressmen that they bought and paid for to do something to reel Trump in, simply blinked.
The evidence there: just a couple hours before hitting the pause button, he was posting on social media about the need to “BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!”
But since it’s not in his DNA to admit that he f***ed up, he’s having his stooges, who had been on TV all day, every day, for the past eight days, that the tariffs were not negotiable, going back out on TV to claim that they have, in fact, been negotiating the terms of the tariffs with foreign leaders all along – which nobody is buying, because it’s not like foreign leaders have given any indication that they were preparing to do anything other than responding to Trump’s tariffs with higher tariffs of their own.
The chief lying liar here is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who insisted, after Trump announced the pause, that the pause “was his strategy all along.”
This is the same Bessent who told Putin’s useful idiot, Tucker Carlson, on Monday that “the ultimate goal of the tariffs, and the president says it all the time, is, bring your factory here.”
So, we have, the tariffs were about giving the U.S. negotiating leverage, and they were also about reviving domestic manufacturing.
And then also, fun note here, Trump seemed to delight in telling a conference of Republican cronies how much he enjoyed foreign leaders “calling me up, kissing my ass.”
Which is it?
Herein lies the biggest issue with all of this is, which is that Trump has been saying for the past couple of years that he wanted to use tariffs for a variety of purposes, all at odds with each other:
- to bring in “trillions” of dollars in new revenue, though that money would come from consumers paying higher prices for goods and services, and for Trump doesn’t come with it the thrill of people lining up to kiss his ass.
- to revive manufacturing in the U.S., though that would take years to come to fruition, years that would involve painful economic retraction as the market corrected itself for the new reality, and years that Trump, a morbidly obese 78-year-old, doesn’t have.
- and to open up more foreign markets for U.S. companies, which wasn’t going to happen with Trump’s onerous tariffs launching a global trade war; and doesn’t put a dime in Trump’s pocket, or get anybody to kiss his ass.
The pathetic thing here is, the whole point of all of this seems to be about Trump hoping he can leverage foreign leaders to call him up to kiss his ass.
That’s it; that’s the end goal.
Which is why this pause isn’t going to last all that long, because you don’t see anybody puckering up, do you?
Share
Chris Graham
