‘Stupid people’: Donald Trump’s defenders stick with him after huge backflip on tariffs

There is one, sole question we should all be asking after Donald Trump’s humungous backflip on his global tariff policy.

ANALYSIS

Umm. What did Donald Trump actually achieve here?

That is the question which really must be asked as we assess whether Mr Trump’s triple corkscrew backflip on his tariff regime (7.85 out of 10, high marks for difficulty, a few points off for the embarrassing belly flop with accompanying “womp womp” sound effect) is a product of heretofore disguised strategic genius or just a whopping oopsie.

So. I present to you the sequence of events.

Mr Trump unilaterally imposed severe tariffs on pretty much the entire world. Which is to say he enacted one of the steepest tax hikes, in all of history, on American importers.

He tried to convince everyone the money would be paid by foreigners, because he either doesn’t understand how his own central economic policy works, on a disturbingly fundamental level, or does understand and merely hopes to avoid admitting it. Both of these explanations are fairly unsettling.

The stock market tanked – how could it not? – as did public support for Mr Trump’s handling of the American economy.

And now he has reduced the tariffs (except on China) to a baseline of 10 per cent, spurring the stock market to recover most, but not yet all, of what had been lost.

So the answer, when we ask what Mr Trump managed to achieve with this crazy brave, or possibly just crazy, tariff gambit is: a catastrophically steep fall in the stock market, followed by a bounce back which still leaves it in the red.

Donald Trump. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

And that’s about it. He secured no substantive concessions from other countries. All those pesky trade deficits he was complaining about, and using to justify the tariffs, remain as wide as they were a week ago. Trust in the US government as an economic actor has plummeted. Business and consumer confidence are both down. And all that juicy revenue Mr Trump claimed would flow from the tariffs is delayed by at least 90 days.

Should I put that more bluntly? He imposed the tariffs because other countries had trade surpluses with the US (even though he also put them on countries like Australia, which has a trade deficit with America. But what can I say? That was the stated logic. It’s not my fault if it’s obviously incoherent). And he just ditched those same tariffs, without those other nations doing anything to mollify him.

What was the point of it all, then? Why give the entire global economy a panic attack if you’re just going to reverse course 24 hours later, having accomplished bugger all? It reeks of a guy who realised stocks were diving, punched the abort button, and is now desperate to save face.

Donald Trump. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

At this juncture, having endured a decade of sycophants insisting Mr Trump is playing 8D chess, incomprehensible for mere mortals, when he actually appears to be trying to “play” a Nintendo Switch with the remote control from a 1980s TV and the digital dexterity of a six-year-old, you do wonder what level of screw-up would finally be too egregious to defend.

“I’m just loving the reaction of stupid people,” said conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity today, for instance. He’s one of a great many examples.

“All of these people that have been trying to create in other people’s minds that Donald Trump does not know what he’s doing.”

Sorry, who are the “stupid” people here?

The ones criticising an ostensibly conservative president, frequently described as the heir of Reagan, for being a bipolar protectionist, changing his mind on matters of importance every other week based on, as far as we can discern, vibes?

Or the ones who keep doing the most shameless 180s on economic views they’ve otherwise held for decades because they need to align with their chosen politician? Because supporting your team, and being a good obedient little fanboy, is more important than having anything resembling an actual principle?

For God’s sake. If Joe Biden had announced these tariff policies, a fair few of these folks would have called him a communist. If he’d then backflipped, they would have called him a senile idiot who had no idea what he was doing.

Yes, they would have. You know, dear readers, that some of you would have. Do direct your complaints about “Trump Derangement Syndrome” to the appropriate email address, but also, feel free to explain why you have one standard for Trump and another for everyone else.

Joe Biden. Picture: Roberto Schmidt/AFP

It speaks to the sheer blatancy of this particular blunder that even some of Mr Trump’s habitual defenders have broken ranks. Not all. But some. Here is an assessment from Charles Gasparino, of Fox Business.

“I want to tell you right now that Donald Trump outsmarted the world. Trust me, I’m an American. I support my president. But that’s not really what happened here,” he said.

“Make no mistake about it, you cannot divorce this decision right here from what happened last night, which was, you know – people focus on the stock market all the time. It’s the bond market, and the sort of lending markets that’s the plumbing of the economy.

“And those markets were imploding last night. And that’s why we have a 90-day freeze.”

That is, if anything, charitable. Other close Trump allies have issued statements which, how to put this, suggest they have no idea what the heck he’s doing.

“I still don’t know exactly what his total strategy is,” Republican Senator Ron Johnson, very much a Trump stan, said today.

“At some point in time, I think the markets will stabilise. Again, I don’t know what the endgame is here yet.”

Anthony Albanese. Picture: Jason Edwards/NewsWire

I’m really not sure there is an “endgame”. Rather we seem to be at the mercy of a guy who’s governed by whatever gives him a burst of dopamine in the next five minutes.

“I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” he said this week.

“They are. They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!’”

Yeah, OK. To longtime observers of Mr Trump’s anecdotes it has been obvious, for some time, that any story involving another person obsequiously calling him “sir” is made up. It is one of his little tics. A tell. If the person calling him “sir” also has tears in his eyes – this is the case pretty frequently – then hooooo boy, we have a proper fable on our hands. If he is “begging like a dog” for something, that’s full-on mythological.

So there’s that. But let’s go deeper here. What do those quotes above tell us about him?

Chuck them on the pile, nay, mountain of evidence that he’s ultimately fuelled by narcissism. Oh the prime minister of Belgium is on the phone, and sucking up to Donald Trump? Well, you know what, we like Belgium now. That is the governing principle of current-day American diplomacy.

That so many people now thrive on vicarious narcissism. That they assume anything in service to Donald Trump’s ego is also, inherently, a good development, regardless of its effect in the real world. That’s the weird part.

Donald Trump. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP

It doesn’t even matter, particularly, whether he has achieved something. Or whether he’s just claiming to have achieved something, absent any supporting evidence. The praise flows just as freely either way.

What actually happened here? The school bully demanded lunch money from every other child in the cafeteria.

Some replied by saying, “Hey, please don’t take my lunch money!” which I’m sure made Mr Trump feel like a powerful boy. But nobody actually gave him any real money. And now he’s declaring victory anyway, and bragging about what a successful bully he is.

Because he .... managed to get some world leaders on the phone, and on top of that, they were at least somewhat deferential towards him. Congratulations, my guy! That’s something literally any American president can do, with almost any world leader who doesn’t run a murderous dictatorship, at any time.

What’s next, here? Are we going to see Tiger Woods brag about sinking a putt, on a flat green, from two feet? Is Elon going to clap back at his teen cyberbullies by saying his DOGE staff laugh at all his jokes?

So after all that preamble let’s cut the crap. Trump folded. He thought his big tariff plan would be a roaring success, but when he announced it, the markets shat themselves. And he caved. And he got nothing in return. And there are now a bunch of folks telling you he’s a genius. Art of the deal and all that.

We have heard some attempts, in these past few hours, to argue that Mr Trump was laying a cunning trap for China.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping. Picture: Pedro Pardo/AFP

Because he ... hiked America’s tariffs on China, and then China retaliated, and then he hiked them again. Which is something he could have done without up-ending America’s relationship with the entire world, and without tanking the stock market.

Even the dimmer Bond villains would have considered that an unnecessarily convoluted plan.

Say I want pizza for dinner. Too lazy to cook tonight. I could just say to my dear wife: “Hey, let’s have pizza for dinner.” Or ....... I guess I could go to 79 different supermarkets, and blow money in all of them on ingredients I have no intention of using?

And then chuck those ingredients in the dumpster? And say: “Ha! You fool! I was going to order pizza all along!”

Look it’s not a perfect metaphor, but I’m trying to get at the sheer pointlessness of what Trump has done. If the master plan, the whole time, was just to throw bigger tariffs on China, then 99 per cent of this saga has been entirely superfluous.

You don’t need to announce and then rescind tariffs on an uninhabited Antarctic island to put bigger tariffs on China. You can just put the bigger tariffs on China.

Don’t insult your own intelligence by believing this nonsense. The guy has realised that he screwed up, and he has backed down, and he is pretending otherwise because to admit fault would be to admit that he’s fallible. And we can’t have that, can we?

Oops.

Twitter: @SamClench

Originally published as ‘Stupid people’: Donald Trump’s defenders stick with him after huge backflip on tariffs