Tag Archives: trade war

economic news

Trump’s callousness in full view

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You want a measure of the callousness of the Dumbass in Chief, the guy who said he looks out for the “little guy”?

On the second day of Donald Trump’s unprovoked international trade war, a day in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed more than 2,000 points , costing total investments to lose trillions of dollars, Trump jets off to Florida to play a few rounds of golf.

Hey, no worries, man. The MAGA Moron in Chief doesn’t give a rat’s red backside about the loss of millions of Americans’ retirement funds. He said he does, but you know how believable anything is that flies out of Trump’s overfed pie hole.

It kind of reminds me of the February 2021 escapade in which Sen. Ted Cruz sought to grab a few rays in Cancun while Texans were freezing to death in the killer winter storm that paralyzed the entire damn state. Cruz got caught escaping, returned to Texas … and then blamed his daughter for talkiing the family into the ill-fated family vacation.

This time, the callousness belongs to the president of the United States of America, who launched an unprovoked international trade war by imposing tariffs on virtually every product imported into this country. Nobel laureates have proclaimed this to be a catastrophe. So have politidians of both parties. Even the great President Reagan beomoaned tariffs in the 1980s, calliing them a national sales tax that falls on every Amerixan to pay.

One of the countless lies that Trump told voters while campaigning for the presidency is that he cares about them, their welfare and their livelihood.

He doesn’t give a sh** about ’em, the folks who followed him all over creation to cheer on the lies he told them.

Here’s a thought: If he truly cared about us, he would keep the golf clubs stashed away and he would rescind the tariffs he knew would cause the havoc they have caused.

Donald Trump, national news

Move over, President W.H. Harrison

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I long have held the late President William Henry Harrison up as the model for setting the dubious record for making stupid presidential decisions.

Donald Trump is challenging President Harrison for that title.

Harrison’s stupidity manifested itself on inauguration day, March 3, 1841. It was bitterly cold in Washington, D.C. Harrison’s medical team warned him to bundle up before delivering his inaugural speech. He ignored the medical advice and stood in the cold rain for well past an hour droning on about whatever was the issue of the day.

He then caught pneumonia and was bed-ridden until April 4. That’s when he died. They swore in VP John Tyler.

Profoundly stupid on the president’s part, correct? Yes. It was.

Trump has been told by Nobel laureate economists on the left and the right that the tariffs he has imposed will be catastrophic. They will punish Americans who will pay exhorbitantly high prices for goods and commodities imported from abroad. They will do little harm that Trump intends to inflict on the exporting nations.

But … he imposed the tariffs anyway. He has put millions of Americans’ livelihood in potentially dire peril. He launched without apparent provocation and international trade war that includes some of our strongest, most reliable and faithful allies and trading partners. Such as Canada, Mexico, France, Australia and Japan.

Yes, the dumbass in chief has decided to declare economic war on the entire planet apparently believing he is going to strengthen our hand in the world market.

Well, President Harrison’s stupidity had an obvious negative impact on his personal health and well-being. Donald Trump’s stupidity will reverberate all across Planet Earth.

Step aside, W.H. Harrison. You have company in the pantheon of pitiful presidents.

national news

POTUS needs to work on his comedic timing

“It was sarcasm.”

That’s how Donald Trump has described his much-derided remark that he is the “chosen one” to deal with China and to wage a knock-down trade war with the Asian economic powerhouse.

Critics have said the remark revealed some sort of “messianic complex” in the president, given that he did look to the sky when he made the statement to a gaggle of reporters at the White House.

I’ve seen the incident in question a few times. I don’t yet know what he meant when he said it. Was he joking or was he making some sort of statement about being selected by God Almighty to wage a trade war with China?

I’ll just offer this observation. If the president was “joking,” he needs to work on his comedic timing. The humor of the statement was lost on many of us who saw it.

national news

Party of Lincoln, then of Reagan, now of Trump

The Party of Lincoln morphed over time into the Party of Reagan.

Now it has become the Party of Trump.

The first men, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, both defined Republicanism to conform to the spirit of their respective times. President Lincoln sought the party to become a more inclusive body and he fought to preserve the Union. President Reagan instituted a contemporary form of conservatism, one that saw government as part of the problem that afflicted the nation.

Donald Trump? Well, he has taken it somewhere else altogether. It’s an angry political party. He calls himself a “populist,” but flaunts a garish, glitzy lifestyle every weekend he jets off to Mar-a-Lago or to Bedminster. He panders to the religious right while having to live down a past of philandering and obscene behavior.

Now he has gone against traditional Republican policy favoring free trade to something called “fair trade.” He has imposed punishing tariffs on imported goods, prompting our international trading partners to respond with tariffs of their own on goods they import from the United States.

American farmers are getting pounded.

Congressional Republicans, particularly in the Senate, are incensed with the president’s punishing policies. The GOP is at war with itself. House members are backing Trump, seemingly out of some kind of fear that he’ll strike back at them. Senators aren’t so reticent, to which I say, “Good on ya.”

Donald Trump is not your “normal” Republican. I will continue to declare that he is not a Republican at all. He stands only for himself. He demands credit he doesn’t deserve and pushes aside blame that he does deserve.

The president has redefined every parameter one can imagine. His followers say that’s a good thing. The rest of us just shake our heads.

Politico has posted a story on the GOP divide. You can read it here. It will open your eyes.

business news

Trade wars aren’t ‘good,’ really, they aren’t

I believe it was the character Gordon Gekko, portrayed by Michael Douglas, who said in the film “Wall Street” that “Greed … is good.”

That was about three decades ago. These days, we have another character, who happens to be the president of the United States, who is saying that “trade wars are good.”

Well, greed isn’t necessarily good. Trade wars aren’t good, either.

Yet the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has now officially gone to “war” with China, the world’s second-leading economic powerhouse.

Ladies and gents, we’re all going to pay for this.

Trump has imposed tariffs on Chinese imports. As the New York Times has reported: On Thursday, President Trump showed no signs of backing down from his fight, saying aboard Air Force One that the first wave of tariffs on $34 billion in goods would quickly be followed by levies on another $16 billion of Chinese products. And Mr. Trump continued to threaten Beijing with escalating tariffs on as much as $450 billion worth of Chinese goods.

How are the Chinese going to respond? That remains the open question. According to the Times: “At the moment, I don’t see how this ends,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is very much in the president’s hands because he’s got advisers that seem divided, some substantively, some tactically. I just don’t think we’ve had any clear signs of the resolution he wants.”

Trump’s war against our traditional allies and trading partners has reached around the world. He’s imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, on the European Union and on Great Britain.

Tariff is another word for “tax,” meaning that the tax will add to the cost of producing the goods being shipped. If we’re going to impose these taxes on imported products, then the nation from which they come will respond with tariffs/taxes of their own on the goods that come from the United States.

Think, too, for a moment about the U.S. Labor Department’s report today that non-farm payrolls grew by 213,000 jobs in June. Good news, yes? Of course it is!

Will we continue to experience this continuing job growth if manufacturers no longer can afford to do business in this world of growing tariffs and taxes?

That’s my fear.

Trade wars aren’t good.

International news

Build that wall … up north!

Leave it to Fox News’s Shepard Smith to add a peculiar twist to the burgeoning war of words between Donald J. Trump and Justin Trudeau.

The news anchor wondered out loud whether we need to build a wall along our northern border with Canada, to complement the wall Trump wants to build along our southern border with Mexico.

Trump left the G-7 summit in Quebec after leveling threats against our major trading partners. He and the Canadian prime minister got into a particularly angry exchange, with Trump accusing Trudeau of double-crossing him after he left the summit.

Trudeau responded with threats of retaliation against the United States over the tariffs Trump has leveled against Canadian steel and aluminum. A Trump economic adviser, Peter Navarro, said there is a “special place in hell” for anyone who stabs the president “in the back.”

As the Daily Beast reported: “Our biggest trading partner in all the world, our best friend from way back in World War II and every time in between, Canada” Smith added, laughing for a moment before dropping this suggestion: “Maybe we need a Northern wall.”

Do you get my drift here?

Trump announced his presidential campaign by declaring that Mexico is “sending rapists, murderers and drug dealers” into our country. He said he would wall off the country from Mexico and make the Mexican government pay for it.

Is there another such threat awaiting the Canadians now if Trump and Trudeau keep exchanging heated insults across the world’s longest unsecured border?

International news

G-7 meeting ends with anger, outrage

That went well, don’t you think?

Don’t answer that. You know how it went. Donald Trump showed up at the G-7 meeting of economic powerhouse nations in Quebec and proceeded to p** off our nation’s most ardent allies and trading partners.

Then he jetted off to Singapore in advance of his summit with North Korean goofball/dictator Kim Jong Un.

What do you suppose the president is thinking by launching into his tirades against our allies? No need to answer that one, either. I don’t believe the “thinks” anything. He fires from the hip. He relies on “instinct” and “attitude.”

My favorite part of his departure was when he said if our trading partners don’t do what he wants — which is give in to our demands for high tariffs — then he’s going to punish them by refusing to do business with them.

Yep. The president of the nation that possesses the world’s strongest economy is threatening extreme economic punishment on our friends, the nations with which we are allied.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau now is threatening direct retaliation for the tariffs Trump has imposed on steel and aluminum produced in Canada.

I feel all warm and fuzzy. Don’t you?

Oh, and then he tells them that Russia — the nation that swallowed up Crimea and went to war with Ukraine, all before meddling in our 2016 election — deserves a place at the table. He wants the G-7 to become the G-8 again.

This is how you “make America great again,” how you engender “respect” among the rest of the industrialized world?

I do not believe it’s working, Mr. President.

Intgernational news

Yep, Trump is a ‘joke’

There he goes again, “telling it like it is” even when it isn’t.

Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a chat the other day, discussing the president’s decision to impose steep tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum.

He said the imports present a “national security threat.” Trudeau took serious issue with that assertion, to which Trump said, “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House” during the War of 1812?

Um. No. They didn’t. The British set the White House on fire.

Is this another “joke” that came from the president? If so, and that’s becoming one of the throwaway responses from the White House. someone will have to tell me how the “joke” is relevant to anything.

If it is a joke, then I also will need an explanation as to how the remark is supposed to generate a laugh.

The president already has demonstrated a shocking lack of historical perspective. To his base, that doesn’t matter. He’s “telling it like it is.”

Stupid.

business news

Good news, then a trade war … nice!

Donald J. Trump has just managed to piddle on his own good-news report. This is weird, man.

The U.S. Labor Department this morning released some seriously positive news: 233,000 non-farm jobs were added to the payrolls in May, which is greater than what economists expected; the nation’s jobless rate fell to 3.8 percent, the lowest rate since 2000.

We’re cheering the news! Yes, the economy is showing signs of rocking along. The president deserves his share of credit for the serious uptick in employment activity.

But … wait!

The previous day, the president announced a huge tariff on imported steel and other goods. Who’s going to get slapped with this protectionist measure? Our major trading partners and allies: Canada, Mexico, the European Union.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a statement this week about how this policy might make sense to someone in Washington but at this moment he cannot figure out what Trump is trying to do.

I’m not an economist, but I know enough about global economics to understand that trade wars rarely produce winners. Everyone loses. The cost of manufacturing items goes up because companies — that are in the business for make maximum profit — must increase the price of what they produce to cover the cost of sending it to trading partners.

Who pays the cost? You do. So do I.

This is classic protectionist policy, favored by union leaders who understandably want to protect their members’ jobs against foreign competitors.

Free trade? It’s out the window, flushed down the crapper, tossed onto the trash heap.

I’m still unclear about what Trump is trying to do.

I’m delighted with the jobs report. The trade war might tamp down a lot of our enthusiasm.

Goofy.

business news

Donald Trump: RINO in chief

Donald J. Trump keeps proving that he’s a Republican In Name Only, but the real Republicans aren’t buying it. They remain attached to this guy as if it doesn’t what he says or does.

A trillion-dollar-plus infrastructure plan? Is that “fiscal conservatism”? Hardly.

How about the latest example? He has imposed protectionist tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. Classic Republican ideology is supposed to oppose this kind of classic liberal protectionism. For the record, I am a free trade advocate, even though I am no GOP guy.

We keep hearing the roar of potential trade wars developing between the United States and our leading trading partners. China? Mexico? Canada? Western Europe? There might be retaliatory measures enacted to respond to the president’s desire to “protect American jobs.”

The president is a classic, categorical RINO. There can be no denying that he is the RINO in chief. I just cannot understand how his “base” keeps insisting he’s the real deal, when he clearly is not!

I have accepted the notion that Trump is succeeding in reshaping the Republican Party into a party of his own making, his own definition and of his own “ideology” — if we can just figure out what it is.

The president’s penchant for disclosing policy via tweet creates even more chaos than he brings simply through his revolving-door personnel changes. He is inclined to say one thing via Twitter, then change his mind when he talks to someone — anyone! — with a different point of view.

A true Republican — as well as a true Democrat — would stick to a set of governing principles and then perhaps tinker around the edges in the quest for common ground with the other party.

Trump’s trade war threats and constant berating of his foes tell me he doesn’t stand for the principles under the party banner on which he was elected to the presidency.