TACO Time!
It's a learning disability, really
Global capital does not like Donald Trump’s attacks on the profit-generating engine that was the United States and the trade practices the nation supported. Trump is supposedly following the advice of the world’s greatest fictional economic advisor (“Ron Vara”), who was invented to lend authority to Peter Navarro’s cockamamie tariff worship. The scattershot tariff rates were set by a computer that does not know the why behind anything. Chances are good that the person entering the AI prompt that produced the chart (putting stupid ideas in neat order) had no idea how to calculate an effective tariff, either [n.b., On May 29, the Court of International Trade ruled: “The President's assertion of tariff-making authority in the instant case, unbounded as it is by any limitation in duration or scope, exceeds any tariff authority delegated to the President under IEEPA. The Worldwide and Retaliatory tariffs are thus ultra vires and contrary to law.” Thus the blanket “Reciprocal [sic] Tariffs” have been canceled.]
An effective tariff—a tariff that can move a market toward a desired state—requires a long-term strategy and the consideration of many abstract variables.
Donald Trump is an experiential learner, and is not capable of actually considering outcomes that he has not previously experienced. He may recognize they are possible, when others bring them up, but he will never have first thought of them himself. He will cover for his absence of foresight, and is likely to express anger or frustration at anyone who points out he did not consider other outcomes than the ones he desired.
Remember Trump’s 2016 warning that voting for Hillary Clinton would be voting for “a taco truck on every corner?” How about the one Cinco de Mayo he publicly recognized as a candidate that same year, with the Taco Bell wrappers on his desk?
It turns out the folks in finance have a new acronym regarding trading strategies: TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out. He wants so badly to be a tough guy with tariffs, but he relies on the donor class, and they have no use for his unprovoked trade wars. So they are calling him out for what he has shown himself to be.
Word about it got back to him, in the form of CNBC reporter Meagan Cassella’s query.
Here’s most of his response. Note that he acknowledges he lacked foresight (bold).
"Uh, it's called negotiation. You set a number. And if you go down...You know if I set a number at a ridiculously high number and I go down a little bit, you know a little bit, they want me to hold that number. 145% tariff. Even I said, 'Man, that really got up.' You know how it got up? Because of Fentanyl and many other things...And you added it up. I said, 'Where are we now? We're at 145%' I said 'Woo, that's high. That's high.'
"They were doing no business whatsoever and they were having a lot of problems. We were very nice to China. I don't know if they're going to be nice to us but we were very nice to China. And in many ways I think we really helped China tremendously. Because you know they were having great difficulty because we were basically going cold turkey with China. We were doing no business because of the tariffs because it was so high. But I knew that [n.b., not 10 seconds earlier he claimed not to]. But don't ever say what you said. That's a nasty question! To me that's the nastiest question."
The question is a question and, again, a woman asking him without flattering him is thrown into Trump’s “nasty” bin. He never describes men as “nasty.” He expects and reveres subordination, thus the “Sir Stories” Jeff Tiedrich has identified. Whenever Trump tells a story where a character addresses him as “Sir,” that is an indicator it is some dreamt-up bullshit he’s using to buff himself. Just watch. It’s a way of covering for the lack of respect people have for him. Trump recognizes stigmas and pretends he doesn’t suffer any, all the while employing the strategies of a man desperately needing to control personal information as only the stigmatized do.