Trump Has Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan | Hacker News Reader

Trump Has Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan

theatlantic.com

15 pointsnabla913 comments

The central point seems to be his declarations to steadfastness and flexibility at the same time invite disbelief: if the intent is to negotiate then the "not one inch" posture is unhelpful and if the intent is to push the Mar a Lago accord model, negotiating won't help because it undermines the financial consequences driving it.

Domestic investor sentiment isn't really the point, nor the effect on people's retirement income. It would not think empathy is really driving this WH.

Have you read the mar a lago accord essay?

In it, the author says:

- 10% global baseline tariffs

- Countries can be penalised with higher rates as negotiating tactic

- Countries that retaliate will be outside the defence umbrella

So the points aren't contradictory, just the comms is typically ham-fisted.

> - Countries that retaliate will be outside the defence umbrella

See the weird bit is, if you wanted to go that direction, then starting by loudly proclaiming that the defence umbrella is, at best, flimsy, and maybe just broken, is perhaps not the best tactic.

>Retaliation measures are within the scope of consideration

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/04/04/economy/jap...

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2025/04/03/economy/tru...

Oh, yeah, I mean retaliation is inevitable; China’s already announced it, the EU is discussing precisely _what_ it wants to do (the EC has historically preferred doing weird stuff to straight-up mirroring for this sort of thing), and as you say Japan’s talking about it. Really the game theory of the situation makes it more or less inevitable.

https://archive.ph/NrzC1

Let's go back to basics --- show me the evidence that a large scale trade war is "winnable".

It's the economic version of the "nuclear option". There are no "winners" --- everyone loses. And those who will lose the most are largely Trump voters.

WalMart shoppers, prepare to be gouged.

This is absolutely unprecedented. No country in history has ever intentionally engaged in economic self harm to this extreme.

Over $10 trillion wiped from equity markets in 4 months. The same companies that are supposed to "Make America Great Again" have just been handicapped --- in more ways than one.

This is how you "Git er' done" with Larry the Cable Guy as leader of the global economy. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

> show me the evidence that a large scale trade war is "winnable".

I don’t think there _is_ any, not for a “one country vs the world” one like this. Country v country, maybe, though even then they rarely in practice work out well.

I’m not sure any large developed country has done this in the modern era. The closest might be Brexit, in that the UK voluntarily exposed itself to all manner of tariff and non-tariff barriers on what was previously the free-est trade around, but it’s a bit different; EU tariffs are not particularly high, and the UK in practice mostly suffered from more nebulous non-tariff barriers (mountains of paperwork and inconvenience and shipping difficulty and so on, which previously didn’t exist within the Common Market).

Incompetence on an epochal scale. But DEI!

My retirement portfolio has given back half its gains under Biden.

There are no "winners" here --- everyone loses.

Update: it’s now 2/3rds. I’m only up all time 8% vs 24%.

Mad man theory comes natural to Mr T.

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