Donald Trump just sealed his fate
It’s midnight eastern time, which means Donald Trump’s new tariffs on Chinese goods have officially gone into effect. Unless Trump changes his mind between now and the opening bell on Tuesday morning, the stock market will plummet in such ugly fashion, it’ll make the recent downturn look like a walk in the park. So why is Trump doing this, and what now?
Even the ever-delusional Donald Trump has surely figured out by now that his tariffs have backfired, and that his trade war has been lost. China isn’t going to back down. The Chinese government, which will still be in power long after Trump is gone, has the luxury of simply outlasting him in this conflict. Whoever the next president is, and whatever her or his policies might be, China will find it favorable to Trump’s economic lunacy.
The thing is, if Trump backs down now, he’ll be admitting – to himself and to the American public – that he lost and that he screwed up the economy in the process. That’ll cost him votes in 2020. But if he keeps going with the tariffs, it’ll wreck the economy to the point that it’ll cost him a lot more votes in 2020. So he’s doing what people often tend to do when they know they’re going to lose: he’s continuing with his losing strategy in the hope some random impossible thing will happen and he’ll get lucky in the end. It won’t.
The thing is, Trump set this hard deadline for himself tonight, and now he’s stuck with it. Maybe he thought China would cave. Wrong. At this point China has made clear that it’s willing to tank its own economy in the name of tanking the U.S. economy, if that’s what’s necessary to get rid of Trump as soon as possible. China’s government can survive a recession. Trump can’t.
Donald Trump can still post a tweet in the morning, announcing that he’s decided to cancel the tariffs because he’s reached some kind of imaginary agreement in which China has caved to him. But that would just get him laughed at. He can wait until the stock market goes off a cliff on Tuesday, and then perhaps one of his handlers will sit him down and explain to him that his presidency ends now if he doesn’t cave. Then maybe he will cave.
But as of a minute and a half ago, Donald Trump has locked himself into either 1) escalating this trade war at the cost of his presidency, or 2) backing down in humiliating fashion, which would also likely cost him his presidency. Either way, Trump just sealed his fate.
