I have a lot of reactions to President Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on his horror plan, but overall one reaction keeps coming back to me: If you hire a clown, you should expect a circus. And my Americans, we hired a bunch of clowns.
Think of what ace; his main joint head Howard Lutnik (Commercial Secretary); his assistant chief knuckle head Scott Bessent (Treasury Secretary); his deputy assistant host Peter Navarro (Top Trade Advisor) has repeatedly told us over the past few weeks: Trump will not back down on these tariffs because – take your choice – he needs them to prevent fentanyl from killing our children, he needs them to raise income to cut taxes, and he needs to pay for future taxes, he needs to pay more to the world to buy more from us. And he doesn’t care about his wealthy people on Wall Street’s view of stock market losses.
After the market suffered from these firm “principles” – undoubtedly prompting many Americans to sell lows out of fear – Trump reversed most of the most tariffs on Wednesday, announcing a 90-day moratorium on certain tariffs on most countries, excluding China.
A message to the world and the Chinese: “I can’t stand the heat.” If it were a book, it would be called “the art of screaming.”
But don’t lose money in a second. A pile of precious trust is also smoke. Over the past few weeks, we have told the world’s closest friends – countries that stood shoulder to shoulder with us on September 11 in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of them are different from China or Russia. They will all be charged under the same formula – no friends and family discounts are allowed.
Do you think these former American allies will be in trouble with this administration again?
This is the trade exported by the Biden administration from Afghanistan and has never fully recovered. But at least Joe Biden has lifted us out of an expensive winless battle, and I think the United States is much better now.
Trump just takes us into a war of unwind.
how so? We do need to resolve the trade imbalance with China. Trump is right about this. China now controls one-third of global manufacturing and has industrial engines that can one day make everything for everyone if possible. This is not good for us, for Europe or many developing countries. Given that so much resources are put into the export industry, it is not good for China, and it ignores the meager social safety net and more clues to the public health care system it provides to the people.
But when you have a country as big as China (1.4 billion people) that has talent, infrastructure and savings, the only way to negotiate is to leverage by our table. The best way to get leverage is for Trump to incorporate our allies in the EU, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, India, Australia and Indonesia into the Unification Front. Make it a negotiation between the whole world and China.
Then you said to Beijing: We will all gradually increase your tariffs on exports over the next two years to urge you to move your export economy to a more domestically oriented economy. However, we will also invite you to build factories and supply chains in our country (50-50 joint ventures) to transfer your expertise back to us in the way you force us to do it for you. We don’t want a forked world. For all, this will be less prosperous and will not be stable.
However, instead of making it the industrial world of China as a whole, Trump resisted it from the industrial world as a whole and China.
Now, Beijing knows that not only Trump blinked, but that he has alienated our allies so far, that he proves that his words cannot be trusted for a second that many may never confront us in the same way against China. Instead, they can see China as a better and more stable long-term partner than us.
What a sad performance. Happy Liberation Day.
