Yes but you, like everyone I seem to talk to these days, is under the false impression that Trump isn’t a complete idiot who literally thinks tariffs are the solution to all problems. It’s more comforting to think there’s some massive conspiracy by Russia or that it’s a ploy to make money off the stock market, but I truly believe that Trump actually thinks tariffs will magically fix the economy and his reactions to the backlash are legitimate shock that so many people and the markets don’t agree. Yes Russia does stand to gain from this, but they don’t need to pull the strings when the guy in charge is innovating economic policy so stupid that a smart person would have trouble even imagining it.

Trump decisions make more sense when you realize he is actually stupid as fuck and there’s no hidden chess moves or anyone pulling the strings from the shadows. There is nobody at the wheel who is actually competent even if they’re evil. This is all just the whims of a complete moron who is probably also going a bit senile as well.

His goal is to enrich himself and hurt others while getting praised like a toddler that just shit on the toilet for the first time.

Yeah that would be reasonable policy that doesn’t ruin our global trade relations

There’s a thousand better ways to handle both tariffs and free trade. We fucked up the latter with NAFTA (and CAFTA), where the EU got it right. Bringing jobs home with tariffs isn’t something you just snap your fingers and do, shit takes a long time to re-align, it would’ve made a lot more sense to have it go through the legislature and say “hey, we’re starting out at a 10% tariff on this stuff we want to bring home, and we’re going to ratchet it up +2% every year until Congress doesn’t pass the law again.” Instead, we’ve got the most volatile president in history implementing tariffs by fiat: 10% 20% actually none actually 10% actually 125% for real this time. Yeah, in this situation, the best play is to just try and wait dumbass out, because there’s a non-zero chance he wakes up tomorrow and declares tariffs woke.

The orange man also could’ve given all the major CEOs a heads up since it takes years to build a factory.

Yeah, certainly if he were a normal President. But he’s a textbook narcissist who only gives a shit about himself and capitulating to the ultra elite. Throw some performance goals set up by his boss Vladimir Putin, and what do you get?

Absolute fucking chaos alongside fleecing the lower 99.99% for anything you can get and manufacturing a crash in the stock market so you and your elite friends can, you guessed it, profit from it tremendously.

A rational president, you bet. This dude is not that.

And giving more tax breaks to companies that stay and sell in the US?

that’s technically what tariffs do. topologically, it’s the same thing: using policy to give a price advantage to domestic producers.

talk about shopping locally and so forth.

talk gets one only so far. when those numbers start to chomp into the household budget, everyone forsakes the “made in…” label in favour of the price tag.

Trump doesn’t want you to buy local. He wants you to shop on Amazon and drive a Chinese-built Tesla.

Americans shopping local does help Putin. Full stop.

The goal is not to better the country or the economy. The goal is to make money, for his friends and connections to make money, and leave everything else destroyed while they laugh.

The tariffs not making sense is expected.

Are you referring to some kind of “opportunity economy”?

That would be “the carrot”. Trump prefers “the stick”.

Of course. Republicans hate paying taxes. you can give back taxes to companies by giving them more money. You can even “reverse tariff” by subsidizing products that you want to be cheaper than the same imported products from China.

Tariffs are one of the worst ways to deal with this type of problem.

Tariffs have been the one major actual policy position rattling around in Trump’s empty skull since at least 1988. He fucking loves the idea of tariffs, for some reason.

It’s harder to do insider trading if you aren’t manipulating markets by posting contradictory statements every morning from your gold-plated toilet.