The New Yorker:

The danger behind the President’s posturing is that, by so emphatically insisting on America’s indispensability, he may be undermining it.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Just after 1 p.m. this past Wednesday, President Trump posted a statement on Truth Social saying that he was pausing, for ninety days, the historically steep, economically nonsensical Liberation Day tariffs on virtually the entire world, which he had announced the week before. Retreat was inevitable. The tariffs had been so hastily designed that they imposed duties of ten per cent on Antarctic islands inhabited by only seals and penguins, and placed a duty of nearly fifty per cent on Cambodia, a producer of cheap textiles that is too poor to plausibly buy much of what we produce. The markets predictably plunged, wiping out more than six trillion dollars in value; Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said that the “likely outcome” would be a recession; and a sell-off of government bonds raised the ominous possibility that the U.S. Treasury market would no longer be the world’s reserve of choice. The labor economist Arindrajit Dube wrote, “Never in human history has a whimsical decision by a single person destroyed so much wealth.”

The markets, the President allowed, had become “a little bit yippy.” But Trump never really retreats; he repositions. In his Wednesday post (“Thank you for your attention to this matter!” he closed), he revealed that he would be leaving in place ten-per-cent duties on most countries and immediately escalating a trade war with China, imposing tariffs of nearly a hundred and fifty per cent. The stock market rebounded rapidly on Wednesday, when most of the more inane tariffs were rescinded, and then fell again on Thursday, when the reality of the conflict with China set in. Had the President actually pulled back at all?

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