When COVID struck, folks inclined toward conspiracy and malicious explanations (such as our president) immediately pointed to the Wuhan lab and latched onto calling it “the China virus.” To this day, you can find years-long investigations leaning one way or another, no clear-cut answer.
This time around, it’s simpler. If the tariff trauma slashing through the global markets — to the tune of $10 trillion — is its own type of virus, it came straight from Wuhan Don.
COVID upstaged Donald Trump and made him look callous, scientifically illiterate, willfully ignorant, and inept as a leader. All of which contributed directly to the pandemic’s stock market swoon. You know he was thinking, “Dammit, if anyone’s going to wreak havoc and dominate headlines on my watch, it’s going to be me.”
So a few years later, here we are. Of course, not everyone is going to take it on the chin to the same degree. Are you ready for a coincidence?
Global stock shocks also aren’t so bad for people who have a pile of money sitting around just waiting to jump in and buy low.
ENABLERS & INSTIGATORS
Maybe something in the back of your brain is whispering, “But presidents can’t even levy tariffs,” and in that case, congratulations for staying awake in civics class. Trump can only do what he’s doing because Republicans in this Congress deployed special measures originally intended for emergencies to transfer that authority to him.
In this case, the “emergency” was that Donald Trump wanted to be able to start a tariff war. The GOP shrugged and nodded. The president was drunk on dumb ideas and ready for a joy ride, and Republicans tossed him the keys. They are culpable: see continued House surrender of its power and continued Senate capitulation.
Let’s give further credit where it’s due to Peter Navarro, the Trump White House trade advisor who went on TV at the onset of the 2018 tariffs and explained how he expected that neither China nor any other country would retaliate for those tariffs. Yet here is Trump, still pursuing these concepts because they offer a confrontational, simplistic opportunity to pose like the strongman he wishes he were.
More importantly, it’s a grift that allows Trump to hold court, forcing corporations and state leaders to come to him with hat in hand, pleading their cases and plying him with favors to carve out some leniency on a case-by-case basis.
This tariff gambit will line Trump’s pockets and pad his ego. For a money-is-approval narcissist, it doesn’t get better than that. Much like recent efforts to surrender U.S. influence and goodwill around the world, the real-life collateral damage of this entirely avoidable disaster is, of course, substantial.
But that’s a feature, not a bug, when you’re a natural-born chaos agent, a baron of bedlam, a …
“More importantly, it’s a grift that allows Trump to hold court, forcing corporations and state leaders to come to him with hat in hand, pleading their cases and plying him with favors to carve out some leniency on a case-by-case basis.”
I would add that it gives the felon the opening to claim corporations and state leaders are coming to him hat in hand. Our political media are allergic to actual facts, so the felon’s bald statements pass through without a murmur of “The President didn’t name any of the countries who are supposedly importuning him for tariff relief; we think he just likes to shoot his mouth off and pretend to be a big man.”
I can only assume that at least some of these leaders and corporations will be very, very large men, with tears in their eyes.