Trump temporarily drops tariffs to 10% for most countries

A journalist successfully reverse-engineered the likely formula used to arrive at the figures for each nation, and it's not only implemented stupidly, it's also wrong from first principles. It's the same thing an actual school child might come up with if you asked them to. This is the same kind of "economic policy" cooked up by dumbasses on reddit who sincerely believe they are qualified to "fix US trade."

If our congress wasn't also packed full of ineffectual liberals and other fucking idiots, he'd be impeached by now for sheer incompetence.

It's the same issue we had in the last Trump admin. This nonsense is elevated to undue credibility by serious people discussing it seriously. It shouldn't be debated, it should be mocked, relentlessly, mercilessly, cruelly. As should Trump himself, as should his supporters, as should his sycophantic followers. Mock, belittle, make fun of, bully, parody, just continuously until every single one of these people refuses to approach a microphone.

Since I'm one of 'those people' who's been willing to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt in the past, I'll respond with my take. tl;dr Trump's handling of the tariffs have been such disaster, there's simply no possibility it was based on a strategically sound plan. So, in answer to your question, this episode has caused me to substantially foreclose my prior willingness to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt.

To be clear, while I've tried to remain open-minded re: Trump I've never felt that he's especially smart and certainly not someone I'd ever personally like or hang out with but I'm also one of those contrarians who doesn't think every politician or public figure needs to be someone I personally like or approve of in a moral sense. I've also been willing to concede that some things done by the executive branch during his first term were generally positive (whether because of or in spite of Trump isn't clear). I also think his policies and statements have been subject to an unprecedented degree of negative spin in the media - sometimes well-deserved but always hyped overwhelmingly to the negative. So I made an effort to look past the constant headlines of, essentially, "orange man bad in all possible ways." I also decided to ignore Trump's own bizarrely extreme pronouncements and focus only on what he really put into practice and, most importantly, the tangible real-world impact of those actions on the broad population and economy over time (not the extrapolated predictions in the media).

However, even to me, how he's handled this tariff thing has been a complete shit show. I've spent a fair bit of time trying to understand the various explanations, contextualizations and even 'hidden grand plan' theories proposed by some and they simply aren't plausible. It's not a 'master negotiator strategy' because he asked for concessions but never made any concrete proposals of quid pro quo. There was no attempt at serious negotiation with most major trading partners (according to the WSJ) and thus no possibility of meaningful deals.

Now suddenly (somewhat) reversing course like this a few days after going so extreme and then publicly doubling down on his long-term commitment to the 'grand strategy' is unbelievably damaging to any remaining shred of credibility his administration may have had. It nukes any possibility that he was doing a 'crazy guy on the subway' strategy of punching his adversaries in the face and making them believe he was so nuts he'd saw off his own arm just to keep beating them over the head with it - all to cleverly convince them to make meaningful concessions they'd never make any other way. Yeah, well now that he blinked in less than a week, nothing he can do will ever make them believe that. I mean, if that was the plan, it was a terrible plan and poorly executed to boot, but flipping like this is even worse.

All I can figure is that it was a 'crazy guy' plan but that he intended to keep it going for several months and then, when his opponents were bloodied enough he'd open negotiations and "win" in a master stroke. Except he completely miscalculated the degree of economic destruction he'd cause in U.S. markets and has now had to not only fold but reveal he was playing a weak bluff all along. I'm struggling to come up with any way this could have been worse for the U.S. and Trump's interests. After this, it's hard to imagine any trading partner negotiating in good faith, or perhaps, at all with Trump over tariffs in the next 90 days. The only rational strategy for them is to play along and gather info while conceding nothing meaningful and simply wait and see what Trump's ultimately going to do long term.

As far as I'm concerned, I bent over backward to grant Trump some benefit of the doubt and give him a chance to prove himself but the tariffs have been so bungled they're impossible to put it in any positive light. So far, it appears to be an epic disaster of hubris and naive miscalculation.

True. The odd thing is that the previous tariffs announcements on supposed allies, plus all the other sabre-rattling that Trump has been doing, NATO-bashing, flipping on Ukraine, etc., had already triggered a crisis of confidence. So what did they expect? That unexpectedly unleashing of wildly unreasonable and poorly-calculated tariffs would inspire _more_ confidence? If getting investors to flock to T-bills was the goal, it was always bound to fail. (It only worked in the short term because T-bills are the default in a time of market uncertainty; but when it became clear that the uncertainty was caused not by the market, but by the government's behavior, well then T-bills don't look so good anymore).

And so far we've been cool with that because it:

- continues to make the USD the dominant global reserve currency, strengthening our economic and political clout

- allows us to borrow cheaply to finance our military and whatever else we're spending $ on