Donald Trump doubles down on one of his biggest idiotic failures

| 2:01 pm EDT August 1, 2019
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Just how bad is Donald Trump at this whole economy thing? He’s instituted so many bad policies, at this point the stock market takes a tumble each time he merely mentions the economy, as investors begin to worry that he’ll find a new way to screw it up. It looks like Trump has managed to do it yet again.

America figured out a couple centuries ago that trade tariffs are nearly always a lose-lose proposition, and that using them as a negotiating tactic is like putting a gun to your own head. But Donald Trump, who apparently went to the Beavis and Butthead School of Economics, has spent the past year and a half insisting that tariffs are somehow his secret weapon for giving the United States superior trade deals.

To that end, Trump put a 25% tariff on numerous Chinese goods earlier this year. This move was supposed to squeeze China into giving the U.S. a favorable trade deal. But today Trump admitted defeat when he tweeted that China is still playing hardball in trade deal negotiations. So now Trump is announcing an additional 10% tariff on some Chinese goods. Suffice it to say that investors were less than happy.

The stock market had been having a good day. But within twenty-five minutes of Donald Trump’s tweet, the Dow Jones Industrial Average suddenly plummeted four hundred points. This kind of thing isn’t a coincidence. Investors know that Trump doesn’t know anything about economics. Not only does he not know that tariffs are a disaster, he still doesn’t appear to know which country pays a tariff.