Member-only story
Trump Blinked and the Dumbest Trade War Is on Pause
This is what volatility as policy looks like: climate collapse, market chaos, and a fossil-fueled tariff tantrum
It started, as things often do these days, . Standing in the Rose Garden, Donald Trump waved a big chart like a game show host unveiling a prize. “Reciprocal,” he , “that means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get simpler than that.” Behind the grin was a scrawled in oversized font and slapped together with a calculator and some political spite.
But what looked like economic patriotism was, in reality, something else: a blunt instrument, built on , designed to mask a first-class con. Because, for each country, Trump’s team took the 2024 trade-in-goods deficit, divided it by total imports, then halved the result to look “reasonable.” That was the tariff. Yes, really. That was the method. And the it took a simplistic approach to making this judgment.
Take China. The goes like this:
- Trade deficit: $291.9 billion
- Imports: $438.9 billion
- Divide one by the other = 67%
- Cut in half = 34% tariff
