The madness of King Donald
The global economy is now subject to the whims of a man who can't even seem to decide what he wants. Not great! PLUS: It's Masters week
Several years ago I was covering the Toronto Raptors on the road in Atlanta. At the morning practice the team announced that Jonas Valanciunas, the hulking centre, would be available to return from a long injury layoff.
I chatted with him after practice and he spoke pretty candidly about how desperate he was to get back on the court. The Raptors had been playing well, and he didn’t want the team to pass him by. I went back to my hotel and started working on what was shaping up to be a solid column.
Before I could finish it, Valanciunas was traded. Poof. Off to Memphis, with Marc Gasol arriving to play a key role on the team that would win the NBA title.
I still think it would have been a pretty good column.
I thought of this yesterday as I was half-finished a column on Donald Trump and tariffs, only to discover that the World’s Nuttiest President had completely changed his mind on tariffs. Honestly, this guy. He wants Big, Beautiful tariffs, but backs away from some, but not all, in a matter of hours, as economic indicators swing wildly in response. I don’t think it is possible to overstate how crazy all of this is.
This piece from The New York Times does a fine job of laying it all out, particularly how Trump was posting on Wednesday morning to encourage people to BE COOL as the markets tanked again, only to reverse course barely four hours later once it became clear that the bond markets were also spooked.
I think this is the key paragraph, referring to Trump’s Monday statement, amid a broad selloff, that other countries wanted to negotiate with him:
I keep banging on about this, but it is the incongruity that undercuts everything about the Trump “plan,” such as it is: if the tariff rates are negotiable, if they can be reduced in exchange for something, then they will not raise the billions that Trump insists they will, and they will definitely not create an American factory boom where everyone from Apple to Nike to Wal-Mart moves their low-paying sweatshops to Idaho and Alabama.
Lowered tariff rates also won’t reduce the U.S. trade deficits that Trump keeps saying are the main motivation for his whole stupid idea, because he believes for some reason that foreign nations selling their goods to America is bad unless they also buy a similar amount of American goods.
And if that is indeed his main beef, then it’s impossible to understand what “deals” could even be made with most of the nations that have a trade surplus with the United States. Vietnam, to pick an example I have used before, could reduce its relatively small tariffs on U.S. imports to zero and that would do nothing to change the trade imbalance between the countries because Vietnam exports cheap goods (some made by American companies!) and cannot afford to buy more expensive American items. In fact, Vietnam already offered to do this and was rebuffed by the White House. That article, you will note, was published on Monday and includes quotes from Trump adviser/loon Peter Navarro insisting that the tariffs would remain and that there was nothing to negotiate. Those negotiations that absolutely wouldn’t happen are now underway.
Other countries are now saying they are ready to negotiate, because of course they would. If the alternative is “disastrous tariffs placed on all exports to the U.S.,” you might as well see what it would take to get them lifted.
But that gets back to that main point from earlier: does Trump ultimately want to lift them? He’s been going around talking about how tariffs are going to be the main source of U.S. revenue, possibly even replacing income taxes once his genius moves are complete.
I think a few things are possible at the same time:
Trump really did want to tariff his way to a global re-ordering of trade and the forced relocation of manufacturing to America.
Few people believed he would go through with it, from his billionaire donors to Wall Street investors to even people in his own Cabinet.
Once he did go through with it, he realized that his plan wasn’t going to work if he completely crashed the U.S. economy at its very outset.
It is also entirely possible that even that basic analysis gives him far too much credit for even recognizing that his actions have consequences. Maybe he’s just mashing buttons on the keyboard while everyone around him tells him he’s writing a masterpiece.
Has he learned a lesson? Will he try again? I doubt very much that even he knows.
Masters Week!
Yesterday I was reading this column from Cathal Kelly in the Globe on the rite of spring that is the Masters when I had to chuckle at this part:
That was me. I was the colleague. Cathal was kinder in the re-telling than I remember the incident. I’m pretty sure I knelt down and stared at the grass, touching it and smelling it like a dog, so bewildered was I by this grass-like carpet that was too perfect to be real.
Anyway, Augusta National is a truly ridiculous place. My contribution to the Masters discourse this week is over at theScore, where I considered the many PGA Tour players who have become stars but could really use a major breakthrough. The Tour could really use one of them winning, too.