One, Two , Three, Four, Now It's Time For a Trade War!
Update on America's dumbest self-inflicted wound of all time
On April 2, Trump boldly LIBERATED America from a boring, stable economy to one driven by his own erratic, nonsensical whims. Tariff everybody, or not tariff everybody, or maybe tariff some penguins, who knows!
Wednesday he backed off on LIBERATION DAY and made tariffs 10 percent for those countries except some of our enemies (like Canada and Mexico) and China, which would be getting tariffed at 125 percent, wait, no, they told him to fuck off, so 145 percent. And NOW China has reciprocated to 125 percent. Can’t wait to hear the administration tell Walmart shoppers how the soon-to-be-double-plus prices on Chinese goods are all Joe Biden’s fault!
Oh, and US Customs and Border Protection has announced that their levy-collecting system is glitching now, with shipments that were supposed to have been exempt from tariffs getting charged for them anyway, so now nobody is paying them, and everyone is supposed to send in a form with the money later or something, because Customs was not prepared for the trade strategy of changing the trade strategy every other fucking day.
It’s all the biggest, stupidest self-inflicted wound of all time. Pausing the tariffs may have tapped the brakes on a total market freefall, but we still have the highest tariffs since the 1930s, and confidence in the US economy is FUCKED with that unstable lunatic at the helm. The odds for a recession are still looming large, consumer sentiment is the weakest it’s been since 2009, the dollar is dropping, mortgage rates climbed to 7.1 percent, and possibly scariest of all, investors are selling Treasury bonds in search of more stable investments than the US economic system. Also not helping that stability vibe, the way the government has effectively made bribery and money laundering legal around here.
Are Dear Leader’s ever-changing tariff moods a dump-n-pump-n-dump handjob so insiders can sell high and buy low? Is Art O’Deal holding cards, and giving away cards, like an eight-year-old playing Old Maid? Is this a 4D chess plan to “reset the American economy” so that Americans can have the opportunity to try to make iPhones from domestically sourced materials?
Or, is the man perhaps simply dumb as shit, gets his mind fixated on an idiot idea, and then the incompetent suck-ups around him all tell him what a brilliant idea it is with tears in their eyes?
WTF is even going on here?!
Rep. Steven Horsford also had that same question! And as it so happened, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was in the House testifying at a Ways and Means Committee hearing the moment Dear Leader announced he had changed his mind and was going to pause those global tariffs due to a case of the YIPS. Only two days after Trump insisted he for sure wasn’t going to change his mind on tariffs this time, for real, and sending Karoline Leavitt and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to huff all over the place that it was FAKE NEWS that the Big Man would even consider such a thing, LOL. Trump sure does like to embarrass his minions!
Yep, Trump TruthSocialing “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” hours before the tariff “pause,” and crowing that billionaire Charles Schwab made more billions sure smells like intentional stock market manipulation, which would be a crime for anyone other than Dear Leader Who Cannot Commit Any Crimes. But for him, claiming intentional market manipulation is better for his ego than admitting to some combination of weak, dumb and impulsive.
And so now the party line from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and spokes-pancake Karoline Leavitt is he meant to do that. But if the intention was to “reset the economy” so we can hurry up and have a New Big Glorious Economy with big beautiful robots assembling smaller beautiful robots that are screwing screws into iPhones with American workers overseeing all those robots, like Howard Lutnik promised, then what’s the holdup?
According to the insider dirt via the Wall Street Journal, “Trump privately acknowledged that his trade policy could trigger a recession but said he wanted to be sure it didn’t cause a depression.” Oh, okay then.
Sounds like the stunting has already gotten Trump what he really wanted the most, the White House phone ringing off the hook with histrionic lawmakers, CEOs, and even Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer making him the center of attention and object of begging.
For the sake of her state, poor Gretch reportedly even sat at a lunch table with him and Charles Schwab (actual person), told him he was brilliant for wanting to bring back American manufacturing, then pleaded that the tariffs were already gutting Michigan. Trump loves nothing more than a beautiful Democrat lady with lipstick on acknowledging that he’s the Big Man man in charge! No wonder she looked so queasy after she got dragged into that photo op.
And now Karoline Leavitt claims the extortion strategy of announcing tariffs and rescinding them after someone calls the president to beg is going great because the “phones have been ringing off the hook” with more than 15 countries that want to “make deals.”
Yep, stock market down, bond sell-off, weak consumer confidence, mortgage rate up, dollar down, but the important thing is that people are calling him and begging, with tears in their eyes!
That’s our Trump.
America’s Dumbest Self-Inflicted Wound, Now with Extra Stupid
Nothing screams “economic genius” like launching a trade war with your own supply chain and then bragging that people are crying because they have to call you.
Trump’s April 2nd “Liberation Day” unleashed a tariff tantrum so incoherent it made “America First” sound like a punchline at a G7 roast. First, it was tariffs for everyone! Then a quick walk-back for some friends! Then he nailed China with a 145% wallop because being unpredictable is the same as having a policy.
The result? Absolute chaos:
-- Customs systems are glitching like a 1997 Dell.
-- Consumers are seeing price hikes before tariffs even hit shelves.
-- Markets are tanking.
-- The bond market is in revolt.
-- The dollar is slumping like it just read the news.
Meanwhile, Trump is on Truth Social whispering, “This is a GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” while billionaires like Charles Schwab magically “earn” billions on market timing. Is this insider trading or just national gaslighting with a side of securities fraud?
Spoiler: If you or I did this, we’d be booking time in Club Fed. But Trump? He’s “just playing the market,” like an eight-year-old playing Monopoly while the house is actually on fire.
What This Is Really About:
The tariffs aren’t policy—they’re extortion.
Trump doesn’t want stability. He wants leverage, so CEOs, governors, and foreign diplomats are forced to call and grovel. That is the currency. Attention, ego-stroking, and manufactured crises he can resolve just in time.
It’s market manipulation, plain and simple.
Flip-flopping tariff threats are pump-and-dump tactics dressed in flag pins and stupidity. And he’s doing it out loud, in public, and no one is stopping him.
This is going to hit the poor and middle class the hardest.
Chinese imports, tech components, clothing, food processing equipment—it all gets passed down in the form of higher prices. So while Schwab counts his extra billions, you're paying more at Dollar Tree.
This is the dumbest possible timeline.
He’s building a fantasy “Great American Economy” where iPhones are handcrafted in Michigan by coal miners riding bald eagles. But so far? Nothing but supply chain shocks and inflation spikes.
There is no "Trade War," it's just plutocrats manipulating the market so they can short stocks.