Trump Reveals He Has No Idea How Tariffs Work With New Deranged Idea
Donald Trump’s most recent tariffs announcement reaffirms what we already knew: He’s just making things up as he goes along.
At a North Carolina campaign rally on Monday that covered everything from the Space Force to Van Jones’s tears, the former president took time to offer some new economic policy on Mexico.
“We’re being invaded by Mexico. But now they have a new president in Mexico … very, a very nice woman, they say, I haven’t met her. And I’m gonna inform her, on day one or sooner, that, if they don’t stop this onslaught of criminals and drugs coming into our country, I’m going to immediately impose a 25 percent tariff on everything they send in to the United States of America.… You’re the first ones I’ve told it to, congratulations, North Carolina.”
Trump said the tariffs have a “100 percent chance of working” because if the 25 percent tariff doesn’t work, he’ll increase it to 50 percent and then 75 percent.
This isn’t the first time Trump has proposed sprawling tariffs on imports, and it’s something that economists everywhere think is an incredibly foolish plan. Such a steep tariff hike would lead to absurd price increases on good working families everywhere, especially on avocados, beer, and alcohol—all significant imports from Mexico. Trump has heard this all before, but shrugs it off because he believes that the tariffs will force companies to return to the U.S.
This is far from Trump’s most ridiculous take on tariffs. Just weeks ago he stated to Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait that he wanted “a 100, 200, 2,000 percent tariff” on imports. “The higher the tariff, the more likely it is that the company will come into the United States.”
But Mexico is the United States’ number one trading partner. And his latest proposal to increase tariffs whenever he feels like it reveals how little he understands about the impacts here.
This is a candidate that is so completely out of touch with reality that he would make goods incredibly expensive for the normal Americans he claims to care about, just to strongarm businesses into coming back here. Trump is flying blind, and we’re all stuck along for the ride.