Trump's tariffs regime aims for much worse than a global trade war - Salon

[justaprogressive]

Everyone knew that President Trump was going to pull the trigger on his big tariff policy on Wednesday, but he actually dropped a nuclear bomb. He put a 10% tariff on nearly every country in the world and added even more on a number of them based upon a goofy formula that reflected false assumptions at best or Trump's personal whims at worst. It sent shock waves across the globe, with the markets taking a massive tumble and economic forecasters scrambling to revise upwards their predictions for a recession. Let's just say it was not well received.

Everyone knew something was coming, but no one expected his plan to be so random and incoherent. The fact that it included tariffs on uninhabited islands and territories that are essentially U.S. military bases just proved that it was sloppily put together, likely by AI, and hadn't been vetted by anyone who knew what they were talking about. It is a radical reordering of the global trading system by a president who is clueless about how any of this works.

The big question hovering over all these tariffs, starting with Mexico and Canada and now the rest of the world, is what Donald Trump really wants. It's not been entirely clear. He claims that Canada must stop the flow of fentanyl into our country in order to get their tariffs lifted, but there is no flow of fentanyl. He wants Mexico to stop immigrants from coming over the border and likewise stop fentanyl from coming into the country, and they've done everything asked of them to make that happen. It didn't matter.

Canada has come to believe that Trump is actually serious about wanting to annex their country and is intent upon collapsing their economy in order to make that happen. Mexico almost certainly understands that Trump is readying a military incursion of some kind, ostensibly to "take out" the drug cartels. Neither of those things has anything to do with trade. In fact, Trump himself negotiated the USMCA trade agreement just seven years ago between the three countries, calling it "the largest, fairest, most balanced, and modern trade agreement ever achieved. There's never been anything like it." This is something else entirely.

https://www.salon.com/2025/04/04/tariffs-regime-aims-for-much-bigger-than-a-global-trade/

[tanyev]

1. Not only is he clueless about how it works,

but he is 100% confident that he understands it better than anyone on the planet and he does not want any advisors who might tell him otherwise.