Trump is getting his little body parts caught in the wringer. So he's turning to his old friend, a Twitter tantrum:
The Washington Post called that passage in the second tweet — "ultimately [Harley] will not pay tariffs selling into the E.U. — "cryptic." But it's not cryptic. It's just a con job — a Trumpian fantasy that all tariffs between the U.S. and the E.U. will be reduced, someday, to zero.
Paul Krugman writes that to comprehend Trump's gibberish, "you need to understand two crucial points.
"First, the administration has no idea what it’s doing." He cites a 2016 white paper on trade distributed by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and trade czar Peter Navarro, which "was a display of sheer ignorance that had actual trade experts banging their heads on their desks….
"Second, this administration is infested … with conspiracy theorists."
When these two collide — the ignorance and the bogeyman network — the Trump administration "will start seeing villains under every bed," continues Krugman. "It will attribute the downsides of trade conflict not to its own actions, but to George Soros and the deep state…. The point is that the politics of trade war will probably end up looking like Trump politics in general: a search for innocent people to demonize."
It already has. To sell motorcycles in Europe, what choice did Harley have? It was facing a 31 percent tariff — up from 6 percent; a retaliatory increase by the E.U. Trump's response was that he "fought hard for them," but they "wave[d] the White Flag" — "they quit!" So the scapegoat, in this case, is the victim, which is usually the case. And of that, we'll see more.