The "People’s Daily," China's Fox News, yesterday announced via Twitter (a Trumpian imitation) that, beginning today, the People's Republic will impose tariffs on 128 U.S. imports, including a 25 percent tariff on pork, matching Boss Tweet's 25 percent steel tariff, and a 15 percent tariff on fruits and nuts, replicating Hair Führer's tariff on aluminum.
Thus marks the end of Adolf Twitler's economic Sitzkrieg, the lull before anticipated counterstrikes of less than symmetrical violence. U.S. manufacturers will suffer — one, in Iowa, told a local radio news director "that his costs to produce his product nearly doubled overnight" because of Trumps's steel and aluminum tariffs — but China won't do without its apples and walnuts. It will simply get them from Europe and South America.
Politico observes that China, in 2017, was the #3 importer of U.S. pork (behind only Japan and Mexico), and the #1 importer of assorted U.S. fruits and nuts. This year will see those exports decline. By the end of the year, our overall exports will have declined even more egregiously, since just days ago the extravagantly clueless, mercantilist Trump also imposed tariffs on $60 billion of Chinese goods — to be met, for sure, by more Chinese retaliation. As for your 401(k)'s "ranking," good luck. The stock market "has slid … [by] more than 10 percent since late January," notes the Washington Post. Expect the slide's conversion to a plunge.
To top off the mind-numbing stupidity of Trump's elective war, the Financial Times reminds us this morning that Cadet Bone Spurs defended his "aluminum and steel tariffs on national security grounds," even though "China accounts for less than 1 percent of American steel imports."
And yet, I wholeheartedly endorse SCROTUS's (So-Called Ruler of the United States) really awesome incompetence on trade (not that his awesomeness is confined to any one field of presidential incompetence). For here, the Fraud of Fifth Avenue is doing God's work for all of us.
For more than a year we have tortured ourselves with that inescapable question compelled by civic duty, How can we get through to the rank-and-file disciples of this "Cheeto Jesus"? as Republican strategist Rick Wilson once called him, adding that that particular moniker also reflects the "creepy, messianic … Jonestown aspect of his followers." They have sealed themselves off from reality; their brains rattle around in the echo chambers of Hannity's People's Daily and insipid-talk radio; they're abundantly misinformed about the FBI's wickedness but are mostly ignorant of Donald Trump's "ties to Russia or Jared Kushner’s real estate shenanigans," as the abovementioned news director writes in a NY Times op-ed today.
How can we get through to these people? We can't. But Trump can. He can do, and is doing, a lot of very necessary work for us — especially through his incompetence in matters of trade. For that hits many of his rural and farming supporters.
Writes the Iowa radio newser, Robert Leonard: "A couple of banker friends who work with farmers every day told me last week that with commodity prices down and the tariffs imposed, approximately 10 percent of our farmers probably won’t make it this year, and 10 percent more will likely fail next year." For Trump, it gets worse. "With the multiple scandals, rampant corruption and the Mueller investigation," continues Leonard, "the only thing keeping him near 40 percent approval — and most important, approval among most Republicans — is a strong economy. That, and Fox cheerleading. But if he tanks the rural economy … it’s just a matter of time before [agrarian America] will turn with the hope that a Trump impeachment and a Pence presidency will save the economy.... They’ll believe that they have no choice, and it will be swift and ruthless."
They had a choice, and they blew it. Today they'd be trading more prosperously with the entire Pacific Rim, after President Clinton smartly weaseled her way out from under her anti-TPP pledge. They instead went with Trump's colossal ignorance and guaranteed incompetence and their own unstoppable self-destruction. The Last Of The Mango Mohawkans' mocking of a disabled reporter and his adolescent boasts of penis size and his many other clown shows don't seem so funny to them now, in the face of their economic ruin.
We tried to tell them this was coming, but they wouldn't listen. Perhaps they'll listen now.