Donald Trump: Tariff King!
A corrupt grifter at the center of the economy is right where he wants to be.
This auto freeze on tariffs is exactly the space Trump wants to be in: A mob boss/dictator/king who has countries, and individual companies to come begging him for help. They’ll have to flatter him with praise, grift, or payments to the slush fund of his choice in exchange for exceptions from tariffs or ICE raids.
Another fringe benefit?
This starting and stopping of tariffs — especially with specific sectors of the economy — has quite predictable outcomes with the market. Trump can easily share that information with key advisors and supporters. It’s literally insider trading at the presidential level. If you don’t think he’d do that to keep his loyalists loyal and convert more, you haven’t been watching.
Trump has never cared about policy or actually doing the work of governing. Sure, he believes the DEI stuff because he’s an old-school racist at heart. And he’s down with the Project 2025 agenda because the radical extremists helped him get elected. But he’d just as soon leave the day-to-day dirty work to Musk or Vance.
Trump is purely in the retribution and self-gratification game. If Canada plays ball maybe he’ll exempt lumber next. Maybe playing ball is some beautiful shipments of your finest hardwood for the interiors of Trump Gaza.
I’m barely kidding.
Look for the same thing when it comes to undocumented workers. Beyond the big agribusinesses and poultry and meat processing companies there are tons of sectors of the economy that hire a disproportionate number of undocumented workers. Think the hotel and resort business as Trump well knows.
Many of these companies would be decimated without that cheap labor. So, they’ll have to crawl to Trump and convince him why ICE (or Proud Boy thugs or the US military) should spare their company.
Needless-to-say none of this is normal or right. It really is mob boss as president. But like much all the new Trump 2.0 regime corruption, it’s all going to be pretty much out in the open and no one is going to do anything about it. The Republican party has already gone through the same exercise and have learned to live with themselves on the other side.
None of this is good for the macro economy. It’s the furthest thing from a free market economy as you can get — something conservatives have professed to worship for generations. It’s actually more akin to the rotten-to-the-core economies of a failed communist, state-run economies like the last days of the USSR. Or the oligarch economy of current Russia.
Is that where old-school Chamber of Commerce Republicans really want to go?
But, this is also exactly the kind of public adoration Trump so desperately craves, which is driving everything now. And the only thing short of little blue pills that arouses his most ardent cult members.
That’s what they both want.
It’s the I alone can fix it bullshit boast made real.
The other aspect is taking a good look at the fractured relationships. With Canada,the majority of Canadians don't want to restore the trading relationship with the US. We would rather trade with countries that are respectful to us. Trump demands respect but doesn't have reciprocal (a word he learned) respect. As long as he is in power or his MAGA influences, Canada isn't interested. It's nothing to do with the American people themselves but rather, the whole MAGA thing. There's no trust to be had.
Tarrifs don’t just fuel inflation and invite recessions.
Tariffs provide the conditions to create/expand black market commerce. They encourage smuggling goods across borders undeclared. They create revenue streams for law breakers and incentivize bad actors to set up networks of conspirators to handle the movement and storage of goods .
Those same networks can be leveraged to move drugs and people.