Trump Postpones Tariffs 90 Days
(Except on China)
Not surprising. I’ll admit, sometimes the asshole does manage to effectively create uncertainty about what he’ll do. There genuinely was a question of whether he’d cave or hold out.
But it’s clear he chose a little bit of both.
Postponing most of the tariffs lets him keep their true strategic value to him, which was always as a threat, not as tariffs themselves, no matter what dumb-ass bullshit he purports to believe about them.
The threat gives him control — over domestic politics. He’s demonstrated that he can throw the entire country into chaos just on a word, like a decrepit orange Joffrey Baratheon degrading nobles in the middle of holding court.
Singling out China gives him his flashy showdown with the Big Bad. It allows him to rally his supporters to his side and pretend that he’s fighting for them.
The pause also allows him time to negotiate all his insane bilateral deals. It takes the heat off the negotiations themselves — they won’t be front-page headlines like all the ones you’ve seen about Bangladesh etc. the last few weeks — so that he and his cronies can extract maximum corruption out of the deals.
To be clear, all of this is degraded, authoritarian madness. The mealy-mouthed Democrats saying shit like “there’s a competent way to do tariffs” aren’t completely wrong nor craven, but they’re absolutely misreading the moment. Trump isn’t trying to do ANY sanewashed version of ANYTHING. He’s doing this as an authoritarian exercise, and must be opposed on such grounds. Once he’s stopped, we can go back to having rational conversations about how best to help the working class — it’s not knee-jerk neoliberalism, it’s not Bidenism, but nor is it idiotic populism either.
By manipulating the markets, the big stock owners who have gotten p*ssed about their losses have learned that Trump can and will do them dirty, but he turned things around to give them a chance to get back in the game. This is to show them he is the wellspring of their fortunes now and they should pay attention only to him and only do what he wants. Also, there are probably some in his orbit who made out just fine with the ups and downs and ups.
Well said, Dave. I do think, though, that in Trump's deranged worldview, he does genuinely believe that the revenue raised from tariffs will be enough to offset the drop in revenue that extending his 2017 tax cuts will engender.