VERY, VERY GOOD BRAIN EXCELLENT BRAIN BEST BRAIN

Inside and outside the White House, advisers say Trump is unbowed even as the world reels from the biggest increase in trade hostilities in a century. They say Trump is unperturbed by negative headlines or criticism from foreign leaders.

Therein lies the appeal of Trump

Numerous more sophisticated approaches were developed than the one Trump selected, people familiar with the matter said.

Would mind sharing them?

The White House demanded that Britain and India change their health and sanitation rules to make it easier to export U.S. agricultural products.

Worry not, the nurglites are in control. Bird flu for everyone.

In Brazil, India and Europe, they targeted digital regulations that have entangled U.S. tech giants.

God I hope the EU doesn't use this as an excuse to scrap privacy laws (like they keep trying with chat control).

White House spokesman Kush Desai said Trump had assembled “the best and brightest economic team in modern history” to develop the tariff plan.

The best and brightest of mainstream economists? Wouldn't be surprised if this was actually true, given how dumb economists are.

Apparently, according to the AEI (the fact that they are lambasting this is notable in itself, but perhaps libertarians are constitutionally against tariffs, I don’t pay a lot of attention to them) even the equation they used has incorrect variables, relying on retail price instead of import price for the calculations, which is obviously incorrect, since that would conflate US markup as something the originating exporter was doing as a tariff. In any case, they’re saying the tariff calc delivers values 4x higher than they should be using this particular calculation. If it was correct, most tariffs wouldn’t be higher than the 10% floor the admin specified.

Yet the chart he comically showed had nebulous "currency manipulation" and "other trade barriers".

Foreign trade negotiators have been flummoxed by the White House strategy and occasional mixed messages coming from Trump and his top lieutenants. At times, U.S. officials appeared focused on pushing back on foreign tariffs, leading their foreign counterparts to wonder whether they could avoid U.S. tariffs by cutting their own, a development that would lead to more free trade, not less of it.

But at other moments, U.S. leaders appeared more focused on fundamentally reshaping global trade and the U.S. economy by breaking the generations-long U.S. dependence on imports. If that is the strategy, no amount of negotiation from other nations can shift tariffs, the diplomat said.

This is what's been driving my feeling that we're in for a doozy and why I'm not really buying the arguments that Trump has a master plan to use the dollar to snap the reigns on a world that's been trying to buck the US's control. They ran a vibes-based campaign on the white middle class's vague awareness of their eroding position, articulated through a crude losing/winning binary, and now they're trying to "win" but Trump has no clue what that even looks like. You can't negotiate with someone who can't define what they want. You can't even capitulate to it. The pain will continue until someone comes up with a clever way to satisfy Trump's ego and make him look like a tough guy in front of his voters and until then it's anyone's guess.

So you're telling me Donald J Trump himself was accountable for the tariffs and that basically JDPON Don is real?

Didn't we hear a similar story after the Soleimani assassination?

I'm still on the fence about whether these anecdotes are true, but it's pretty funny if his advisors give him a list of possible plans while leaving a real dumbass option in there, and he just goes straight for it like a toddler who got to choose between salad or candy for dinner.