The New Yorker:

On a chilly Wednesday afternoon, the President announced he would single-handedly blow up a century’s worth of globalization.

By Susan B. Glasser

By the standards of world-historical events, much of Donald Trump’s Wednesday afternoon speech in the Rose Garden was remarkably forgettable. Trump opened the affair, which he had billed as America’s “Liberation Day,” with a rant about the dire state of the nation that could have been cribbed directly from Steve Bannon’s first draft of Trump’s 2017 “American Carnage” Inaugural Address: cities and towns “raped” and “pillaged”; factories “ransacked”; a country “ripped off.” The apocalyptic bluster, like the loud red tie and the strange riffs about Canadian milk and radical-left lunatic judges, was familiar stuff—we’ve heard this so many times before.

But, by the time Trump finished, something else was clear, too—we’ve never actually seen anything like it. About halfway through his speech, he called Howard Lutnick, his billionaire golf buddy turned Commerce Secretary, up to the podium with the big reveal: a chart with a list of countries and the previously secret amounts of sweeping retaliatory tariffs that Trump planned to impose on them. As the world squinted to find out its fate, Trump read the numbers off like a maga auctioneer. The global trade war that he’d long threatened and somehow never actually triggered finally seemed to be happening. “We’re going to have to go through a little tough love, maybe,” he said.

Tough love, indeed. Even as Trump spoke, the initial verdict from financial markets around the world came in—a global meltdown. The tariffs were worse than expected. Stock-market futures plunged. The dollar dropped against other currencies. By the close of the markets on Thursday, the damage was all too evident: U.S. stocks had recorded their biggest drop since the earliest days of the covid pandemic, losing close to three trillion dollars in value. Companies started preëmptively laying off workers. “Never before has an hour of Presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much,” Larry Summers wrote on X. Once again, the Wall Street boys, despite Trump’s many warnings, had failed to take him seriously. “Far more onerous than the market was expecting,” one hedge-fund manager told Politico. “Shockingly high,” another told the Times. “It’s a disaster.” Etc., etc. You get the point.

Go to link