Trump caves! Trump backs down! Trump folds!

In the end, he did it again.  After days of insisting that his idiotic tariffs were positively, definitely for real this time -- days during which the stock market plummeted like a meteor, and other major economies like the EU and China announced retaliation instead of groveling as he had hoped -- Trump backed down yet again and announced a ninety-day "pause" in the tariffs on every target except China.  The stock market quickly shot up again, and sane people everywhere breathed a sigh of relief.

He had been under plenty of pressure to do so.  The dramatic fall in stocks affirmed that the tariff plan was going to be a total disaster.  Economists everywhere said the same.  Leaders of other countries said so.  Billionaire business leaders said so.  The fact that the stock market briefly recovered on a false report that the tariffs were on hold said so.  Evidently some combination of these got through to him.  (Trump has been claiming that lots of countries have gotten in touch wanting to make deals, but there is no evidence for this.)

There was never any chance that the claimed benefit of the tariffs -- bringing industrial production back to the US -- would materialize.  Factories take years to plan, build, and make operational.  No one was going to make such a large long-term investment on the basis of tariffs that everyone knew would be removed anyway the next time a sane president was in office, and the utter chaos of the US economy and government since the Trump-Musk Dunning-Kruger duo took over makes our country a singularly unappetizing place for investment.

The latter problem is not going away just because Trump has paused the tariffs.  As long as he's in charge, especially with Elon Musk also buggering things up, the chaos will continue.  There is no plan.  Unless Congress gets its act together and reins him in, the economy will be at the mercy of whatever random idiocy the sporadic sputterings of his senescent remaining brain cells happen to generate.  He's still doubling down on his bone-headed refusal to understand what tariffs even are, though this must have been explained to him countless times:


This fiasco affirms, yet again, that this country is now being run by a conglomeration of idiots.  There is no diabolically-cunning eleventeen-dimensional plan to, say, manipulate the stock market by staging this mess.  Trump imposed tariffs on places that are not independent countries or, in at least one case, even inhabited.  Even he must know that repeatedly announcing tariffs and then backing down -- for the third time now -- makes him look like a bungler.  Musk and his silly DOGE brats keep randomly firing federal workers en masse and then frantically trying to get them back when it turns out they do something critical like nuclear-weapons maintenance (not that what the other workers do isn't important, but it's often important in ways Musk is too stupid to understand).  Top cabinet-level nitwits not only discussed sensitive military plans in an un-secure group chat, but accidentally included a journalist who thereby had both the ability and the motive to expose their incompetence.  They also keep personal data, which could be used to hack their communications, publicly visible on the internet.  And on and on and on.  None of this stuff is the behavior of crafty supervillains.  The reason why they look like stupid, blundering incompetents is that they actually are stupid, blundering incompetents.

It's not clear why China alone is still being targeted for tariffs.  Trump said that it's because China retaliated, but the EU and Canada also retaliated, or at least made it very clear that they intended to do so.  Perhaps it's a hopeful sign -- somebody may have managed to get it through Trump's calcified skull that China is actually an enemy, which the EU and Canada are not.  As I observed during Trump's first term, if he had worked to get the other major democracies on board with a common campaign of economic pressure against China, it would have been a constructive policy that might really have achieved something.  China is the true modern-day Nazi Germany, and any company that does business with that abomination fully deserves whatever nasty consequences it suffers.  Trump's error was to start trade wars with everybody, thus unifying the world against the US rather than against China.  One can hope that he finally gets this -- although persuading the other big economies to join in such an anti-China campaign would now be much harder, in the wake of the belligerent tariff fiasco.

But the important take-away here is that pressure works.  Trump has repeatedly backed down when he faced enough resistance of whatever kind -- now even on the tariffs about which he seemed so bull-headedly determined.  He's an airhead, a lightweight, a balloon full of hot gas that can be blown from place to place by whatever winds grow strong enough.  We must be the strong wind.