Something tells me that both China and Russia know all this and yet, the US administration is completely blind to it or are naively playing into their hands.
I think his (and much of the far right's) mind is characterized by:
- a deep incuriosity and unwillingness to learn about the world
- extreme overconfidence in his own judgment
- an understanding of the world as being pervasively zero-sum (shared with Putin); your loss = his win
- obsessive preoccupation with the dynamics of humiliation: he feels an extreme need to be perceived as strong and to humiliate his enemies, and he greatly fears being humiliated
I feel like these characteristics explain most of his policy. The idea of tariffs arises from his zero-sum mindset: the only way to gain is by making someone else lose. This is of course factually wrong, but he's too incurious to learn from history or economics. And, of course, he's massively overconfident, so the thought that someone else could know better does not occur to him. And once the ball is rolling, his fear of humiliation will ensure that he has to stay the course. His perceived enemies (which is everyone) have to come crawling to his throne, begging to have their tariffs reduced while praising his brilliant policies, and then he might consider it. So if that doesn't happen, his only options are (a) perpetually retaliating with ever-increasing tariffs, disregarding the consequences entirely; or (b) capitulating in the trade war (lowering or abolishing tariffs) while not admitting that it's a capitulation ("don't worry, my brilliant policy fixed the mass influx of fentanyl and illegal immigrants from Canada, so now we can drop the tariffs on Sri Lanka" or something similarly incoherent).
Due to lack of adversity, his theories have never been tested, only reinforced. He thinks he’s been flying the plane his whole life when really it’s been on autopilot.
People are arguing about the economic rationale here and forgetting the philosophical.
They’ve broadcast a desire to send as much of the world to a new “dark age” as possible so they can sweep in and “save it”, reforming it as they desire. Vis a vis Prospero
That basically pushed the belief that if you believe something enough the universe will make it so, such as 'I won in 2020'.
Problem is, reigning in wages for labor after decades of encouraging rampant consumerism and being in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis especially for housing seems like a political earthquake in the making.
Like many of Trump's ideas, maybe they could work if carefully managed over a long period of time so as to give the economy time to readjust but these are not careful managers and patience is not their virtue.
> Problem is, reigning in wages for labor after decades of encouraging rampant consumerism and being in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis especially for housing seems like a political earthquake in the making.
My guess those people are fine with basically converting most of the American labor force into indentured servants but normally politicians wouldn't go for it. Trump probably assumes he is immune to any reaction, let's see.
Many factory blue collar jobs left the US two decades ago and most of those aren’t coming back yet somehow Trump is infatuated with this idea too.