Donald Trump doubles down on one of his biggest idiotic failures
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.
