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Trump declares flawless victory in pointless trade war
Keep pulling the fire alarm, eventually no one will pay attention to the noise.
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President Trump ended the trade war before it started by preemptively declaring victory and going home.
On Monday evening, just hours after his 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada were scheduled to go into effect, Trump praised himself for having art-of-the-deal-ed a compromise to ensure greater cooperation with drug and migrant interdiction efforts at our northern and southern borders.
“I am very pleased with this initial outcome,” he wrote, announcing that the levies would be “paused” for 30 days to assess the impact.
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After dropping earlier in the day, the financial markets tacitly agreed to return to the lucrative fiction that Republicans are “good” for the economy and the key to Trump is to take him seriously but not literally. But the broad consensus is that Trump got rolled. Mexico and Canada agreed to token improvements in their already robust border security measures, and the president congratulated himself for having successfully bullied the neighbors.
All’s well that ends well … if you disregard the reckless destruction of alliances and soft power that took generations to build and made America the richest nation the world has ever known.
Tariff Man
On the campaign trail, Trump promised that tariffs would be the universal cure for all woes.
“I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time,” he babbled the Economic Club of New York in response to a question about the astronomical cost of childcare. “We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.”
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Trump’s plan to extort a vig from smaller countries is pure fantasy, premised on the lie that the cost of tariffs are borne by exporters and not passed on to American consumers. He blithely assured his supporters that those countries would “get used to it very quickly,” absorbing the tariffs as the price of access to US markets and never daring to think of retaliating.
And because the bullshit is baked in to everything he says, no one bothered to point out that this problem was supposed to have been solved in 2020 when Trump chucked out NAFTA and replaced it with the (virtually identical) US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. His corporate backers assured us he’d never be so monstrously stupid as to follow through on his threats and would instead cut taxes and blow up regulations like a normal Republican.
LOL.
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The Scut Trumpus Affair
Last week Trump announced that he was imposing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, our closest allies, along with a 10 percent tariff on China, our putative enemy.
Here, as always, Trump reaped the benefit of being treated if his words need only be true-ish, but not actually true. The Constitution gives Congress the power to levy tariffs, but Trump simply waved in the direction of several dubious statutory delegations and emergency powers and asserted the power by fiat. He claimed to be imposing the tariffs as punishment for Canada and Mexico’s failure to interdict drugs and migrants at the border, despite the fact that the majority of fentanyl coming into the US is smuggled in by Americans, and the traffic in immigrants and drugs across the northern border is negligible.
He barely bothered to hide that the real purpose of this exercise was to punish our neighbors for not buying more American stuff or, in the case of Canada, agreeing to become the a state.
"What I'd like to see — Canada become our 51st state,” Trump told reporters on Monday in response to a question about what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau could do to avoid tariffs. (Watch below.)
