Donald Trump has delusional meltdown after losing his trade war

| 11:50 pm EDT April 4, 2018
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Whatever prompted Donald Trump to launch a trade war against major U.S. trading partners, it’s ended up going roughly as poorly as everyone but him was expecting. China has fired back with tariffs which can only serve to harm the economies of both nations, but will probably harm the U.S. ecnomiy more, meaning Trump has lost already. His resulting meltdown today was delusional even by his standards, and frankly quite surreal.

Trump had spent the past weeks tweeting about how a “trade war” would be a good thing for the United States. This morning, after China announced new tariffs on more than a hundred U.S. products in addition to its previously announced tariffs on dozens of U.S. products, Trump decided he no longer wanted to be in a trade war. Or perhaps he decided there never was a trade war. We’re not entirely sure.

Here’s what Trump tweeted in response to the latest tariffs from China: “We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!” So now his position seems to be that there is no trade war, after having spent all that time hyping up his trade war.

Then two hours later, he tacked this on: “When you’re already $500 Billion DOWN, you can’t lose!” This of course brought quite a number of jokes and punchlines on Twitter, many of them pointing out that this is the kind of logic that led Donald Trump to file for bankruptcy six times. From there, Trump went quiet about his failed trade war with China for the rest of the day, instead preferring to tweet phony approval rating numbers to make himself look good.