Barackface: 7: Russia

The Emperor’s New Trade Deal Tariffs are bad. A deluded president is worse......... The Europeans, Trump asserted, had agreed to cough up $600 billion, which he described as a “gift,” not a loan. And he emphasized that this is “$600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.” ......... So Trump apparently believes that the European Union has agreed to provide him with a personal $600 billion slush fund. ......... European nations aren’t command economies in which government can tell the private sector where to invest, and in any case the European Commission, which negotiated with Trump, can’t tell the governments of member states what to do. ........ another Trumpian self-aggrandizing fantasy, like his belief that we have zero inflation, he has a 71 percent approval rating and “people love the tariffs.” ......... he’s lost touch with reality across the board. .........
there’s a very real possibility that the courts will rule many of the tariffs Trump has already imposed illegal (which they surely are) and order the administration to refund the money it has already collected
......... In 2024 the EU’s exports of goods to the United States were slightly less than 3 percent of its GDP — not a trivial sum, but not enough to make European prosperity dependent on U.S. goodwill. ........ the “Armington elasticity,” which measures how sensitive trade flows are to tariffs, and that a reasonable estimate of that elasticity is 3. If we go with that number, we would expect the 15 percent tariff currently in place to cut EU exports to America by roughly a third, to around 2 percent of GDP. ......... The higher the tariffs Trump imposes on imports, the less other countries sell to America. And the less they sell to us, the less they have to lose if we push the tariffs even higher. ......... the strong possibility that another round of Trump tariffs would provoke retaliation from Europe and other trading partners. The EU has so far chosen not to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs because its officials decided that making a deal, or at least seeming to make a deal, was better than getting into a tit-for-tat trade war. ...........
at this point the math of the trade war matters less than the madness that lies behind it.
......... There has always been a whiff of megalomania about Trump’s tariff policy — a belief that he can use the threat of tariffs to compel other countries to do his bidding on multiple fronts, from promising not to move away from the dollar as a reserve currency to abandoning the prosecution of wannabe dictators who tried to overthrow democracy. ......... Trump will be the last person to recognize that there are limits to his ability to bully the world, on trade or anything else. And that lack of awareness should worry us all.