A Con Man President Is Destroying the Economy

In not even three months the Felon and his circle of "yes men" and sycophants have wreaked havoc on America's economy - actual much of the world's economy - through insane tariffs against literally every country in the world save Russia, North Korea and Iran. Since its high point earlier in the year, the stock market has lost roughly 6000 points (3900 in the last two days) and the nation's supply chain has been put into turmoil.   Meanwhile federal agencies that provide vital weather, health and economic support for millions of Americans are being gutted and destroyed, promising more disease, sickness and death and even more damaging natural disasters.  One has to wonder when the MAGA base will realize that "owning the libs" and new forms of white supremacy do not make up for economic pain and ruin.  Surely, rising consumer prices, an economy moving towards recession, and cuts to Medicaid and social programs most used by poor and working class whites at some point make these mindless and bigoted voters wake up.  Ditto for congressional Republicans who have cast the interests of their constituents aside in order to prostitute themselves to the Felon.  The most confounding thing is that all of this damage and destruction is deliberate and the work of a malignant narcissist who cares nothing about anything but his ego, settling perceived past slights and playing a Mafia like crime boss role.  The number of articles looking at the wrongfulness of  the Felon's actions and the harm being done to average Americans and the U.S. economy are many.  Here are highlights from a piece by a Nobel prize winning economist that looks at the damage being wrought:

The truth is that most of the time you should evaluate economic policies based on what they actually do, not with speculation about how you imagine they will affect confidence.

But this isn’t most of the time. This is the third year of the second Trump presidency — OK, it’s actually only part way through the third month, but it feels like years. And Trump is in the process of showing that a sufficiently chaotic and incompetent government can, in fact, do enough damage to confidence to inflict serious economic harm.

Standard economic analysis says that tariffs strengthen a nation’s currency. If the United States puts taxes on imports, this discourages businesses and consumers from buying foreign goods, which reduces the supply of dollars to the foreign exchange market and should drive the value of the dollar up.

But the dollar fell once investors began to see Trump policy in action. Permanent tariffs are bad for the economy, but businesses can, for the most part, find a way to live with them. What business can’t deal with is a regime under which trade policy reflects the whims of a mad king, where nobody knows what tariffs will be next week, let alone over the next five years. Are these tariffs going to be permanent? Are they a negotiating ploy? The administration can’t even get its talking points straight, with top officials saying that tariffs aren’t up for negotiation only to be undercut by Trump a few hours later.

Under these conditions, how is a business supposed to make investments, or any kind of long-term commitment?

Wait, it gets worse. You might have expected a lot of careful thought to go into the biggest change in U.S. trade policy since the republic was founded . . . . But since Trump delivered his Rose Garden remarks, we’ve had a series of revelations about how slapdash and amateurish an operation this was. . . . Trump’s tariffs were, instead, determined by a crude, and, well, stupid formula that made no economic sense. It’s still an open question whether that formula was determined by some junior staffer or derived from ChatGPT and Grok. . . . . the biggest trade policy change in history, hastily and sloppily thrown together at the last minute.

It’s no wonder, then, that confidence has taken a big hit. If you ask me, however, I’d say that confidence is still too high: business still hasn’t grasped how bad things are. For while tariffs are dominating the news right now, they’re part of a broader pattern of malignant stupidity. It may take a while before we see the effects of DOGE’s destruction of the government’s administrative capacity, or RFK Jr.’s destruction of health policy, but we will see those effects eventually.

And Republicans have just confirmed Dr. Oz to run Medicare and Medicaid. What could go wrong?

Personally, I’m feeling very confident. That is, I have high confidence in predicting that we’re heading for multiple policy train wrecks, inflicting damage like you’ve never seen before.

Similar sentiments are laid out in a piece in The Atlantic that looks at how the Felon's tariffs will have the opposite impact of what the Felon and his yes men and women are saying.  Here are highlights: 

According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.

The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.

In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.

But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.

The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers.

Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself.

The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet. . . .To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods.

The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me.

Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.”

If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.

Trump seems to welcome that possibility. . . . . the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.

About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.

The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.

What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.