I’m going to be scathing in my critique because these people are both dishonest and incompetent and deserve to be called out on it.
Here’s their formula:
It’s a ridiculously simplistic formula.
First, a stylistic quibble. What is up with those asterisks in the denominator? I’ll give the authors the benefit of the doubt and assume that they wanted the formula to be understandable by people who aren’t familiar with standard math notation, in which the juxtaposition of variables indicates multiplication. But to see it written that way in an official document is just… weird.
The i subscripts in the formula just indicate that the formula is to be applied to one country at a time — country i. I’ll therefore omit the ‘i’s from the rest of the discussion.
∆𝜏 is the amount by which the tariff currently being placed on that particular country should change (according to the Trump administration bozos) in order to drive the bilateral trade deficit to zero. In other words, 𝜏 (the existing rate) + ∆𝜏 (the change in rate) would be the correct final rate (according to the formula) to achieve the dubious goal of a trade balance.
The inanity of insisting on bilateral trade balances
We’re off to a bad start already, because the notion that every bilateral trade deficit should be zero is ridiculous on its face. Let’s look at a simplified example. Suppose Malawi sells us only mangoes, and the US (henceforth ‘we’, since I’m American) sells them only air conditioners. In order for the trade deficit to be zero, we need to buy the same dollar amount in mangoes that they buy in air conditioners, and we should adjust the tariffs we impose on Malawi until that happens. Why is this desirable? Why should the amount of mangoes be linked to the amount of air conditioners? Who the hell knows? It’s just Trump’s idiotic obsession, and it makes no sense.
To make the stupidity even more obvious, think of an analogous situation. Ernesto sells tacos from a taco truck, and George runs a landscaping business. George occasionally buys tacos from Ernesto, and Ernesto hires George to mow his lawn. Suppose Ernesto pays more to George each month than George spends buying tacos from Ernesto. Is Ernesto being cheated? Is he subsidizing George? No and no. George gets every taco he pays for, and Ernesto gets his lawn mown on schedule. It would be ridiculous to say that either of them is being cheated, and ridiculous to say that the goal should be to make the amounts even.
Why is Trump obsessed with trade deficits? It’s because he is confused enough to believe that the existence of a bilateral trade deficit — a trading deficit with a particular country, Malawi in my example — means that they are cheating us and that we’re subsidizing them. He actually believes that we are just handing over the money, getting nothing in return. In reality, we get every frikkin’ mango we pay for, and they get every air conditioner they pay for. No one is being cheated, and to demand that the dollar amounts should match is idiotic and pointless.
Trump actually declares in his executive order that trade deficits are a “national emergency”. He does this because he doesn’t have the authority to impose tariffs unless it’s a national emergency. Otherwise, the job falls to Congress, where it belongs. Trump is lying about the supposed national emergency.
The formula
According to the USTR statement, the x in the formula is the dollar value of what we export to a particular country, while m is the dollar value of what we import from them. The numerator, x – m, is therefore equal to the trade imbalance. If x is bigger than m, then the difference is positive, and we are running a trade surplus. If x is less than m, then x – m is negative, and we have a trade deficit. But note that they have it backwards in the formula: it should be m – x, not x – m. Why? Because the denominator is positive. If both the numerator and denominator are positive, as they would be in the case of a trade surplus, the formula would deliver a ∆𝜏 that is positive. In other words, the formula as written would actually increase the tariffs for the countries with whom we have a trade surplus, and it would decrease the tariffs for countries with whom we have a trade deficit. The formula therefore punishes the (supposedly) good guys and rewards the (supposedly) bad ones, which is opposite to the administration’s intentions. One more indication of their clown car incompetence.
They could easily have corrected the formula if they were aware of the error. Just put a negative sign in front of the formula, or swap x and m, or redefine x and m as the amounts exported and imported by the other country, instead of the amounts exported and imported by the US. Any one of those three would fix the problem, but no.
Let’s assume that we have corrected that mistake for them and that the numerator now equals the amount of the trade deficit, not the surplus. What about the denominator? Well, it just so happens that the values they chose for 𝜀 and 𝜓 are 4 and 0.25, respectively. Those multiply to 1, thus canceling each other. How convenient. These charlatans actually and blatantly chose the values so that they would cancel out, instead of using the most accurate numbers they could find in the literature. They cheated.
After that suspiciously convenient choice of parameters, the formula is now just ∆𝜏 = trade deficit divided by total imports:
Do they actually apply this formula? No. They massage its output even more. They divide ∆𝜏 by two, for no good reason. That means that for the formula to match the actual tariffs, they should multiply the denominator by 2. They fail to do that, as you’d expect. Why 2? My hypothesis is that even those dunces realized that the numbers they were getting from the formula were ridiculously large, and dividing by 2 was a way to get them down to a range that they considered reasonable. More number fudging with no theoretical justification.
Next problem: according to the corrected formula, ∆𝜏 should be negative in the case of trade surpluses. That is, we should decrease the tariffs on imports from those countries. If the existing tariff rate is small enough, it should even go negative, according to the formula, in order to balance our trade with that country. Trump doesn’t like that, so he has arbitrarily declared that everyone will pay a minimum of 10%, whether there’s a trade deficit or a trade surplus. In other words, the policy, which is already misguided, is also unfair — it says that it’s OK for the US to screw other countries by imposing high tariffs, even if they’re doing the “right” thing and allowing us to run a trade surplus with them.
The actual rates
Here are the charts spelling out the actual tariff rates.
The chart labels them “Reciprocal Tariffs”, but that is a lie, since the formula doesn’t take into account the tariff rate charged by the other countries on our exports to them. It’s completely missing from the formula. They aren’t reciprocal tariffs, they’re misguided tariffs in response to trade deficits, and they punish US importers instead of the countries selling us those goods and services.
The label on the middle column is wrong for the same reason, and it’s even further wrong because it depicts a bilateral trade deficit as a quantifier of “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, which it isn’t. We can run a bilateral trade deficit for no other reason than that Americans want more of what the other country is selling us than they want from us. That’s not “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, and the Trump administration is dishonest for trying to sell it that way.
The numbers in the middle column are apparently those that come straight out of the formula. You can tell, because the tariffs that are actually being imposed by the US are just the middle column divided by 2. That’s the arbitrary factor of 2 I mentioned above. The only exceptions are in those cases where dividing by 2 would leave a less than 10% tariff, in which case the tariff is set to 10%. Gotta make sure that everyone gets screwed at least that much.
The US Trade Representative’s explanation
Now some excerpts from the USTR statement. The very first paragraph:
Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reductions of imports.
Well, duh. The phrase “tariff and non-tariff factors” covers literally every possible factor in the entire world. Yes, there are actual reasons that we buy more in mangoes from Malawi than they buy from us in air conditioners. Therefore we should conclude that we’re getting ripped off?
While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.
Not by any reasonable person. You need to do the homework before making policy decisions that will affect the entire world economy. If they want less of what we’re selling than we want of what they’re selling, that can lead to a trade deficit, independent of all the factors they list above.
This doesn’t mean that trade practices can’t be unfair, but it does mean that to assume something nefarious is going on merely because we’re running a bilateral trade deficit is stupid.
If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair.
No. If we like Malawian mangoes more than the Malawians like our air conditioners, nothing is broken. Nothing is unfair. No reason to blindly punish the Malawians. It just means that American demand for Malawian mangoes is greater than Malawian demand for American air conditioners. No big deal.
A case could be made for nudging the US’s global trade deficit — which is the aggregate trade deficit we’re running with all of our trading partners put together — toward zero, but trying to eliminate every bilateral trade deficit is bonkers. These people are clueless.
Consider an environment in which the U.S. levies a tariff of rate τ_i on country i and ∆τ_i reflects the change in the tariff rate. Let ε<0 represent the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices…
Right there they say that ε < 0, but a few sentences later they assign it a value of 4. The last time I checked, 4 was greater than 0, not less. Their sloppiness is consistent, at least. What is wrong with these folks?
let φ>0 represent the passthrough from tariffs to import prices, let m_i>0 represent total imports from country i, and let x_i>0 represent total exports. Then the decrease in imports due to a change in tariffs equals ∆τ_i*ε*φ*m_i<0. Assuming that offsetting exchange rate and general equilibrium effects are small enough to be ignored, the reciprocal tariff that results in a bilateral trade balance of zero satisfies:
As noted earlier, they have the numerator backwards. It should be positive for a trade deficit, not negative, in order for ∆𝜏 to be positive, which represents an increase in tariff rates.
To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.
Which inside the Trump administration is less than 0, lol. And how convenient that εφ multiplies to 1, as noted above.
Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25.
It wasn’t to be conservative. It was to fudge the numbers so that the product εφ came out to be 1. And picking a value of 4 for elasticity isn’t “being conservative” in the sense of “this value is more likely to be correct”. It’s conservative in the sense of “we’d better make this number big because otherwise the tariffs will be so outrageously huge that everyone will see that we’re idiots.”
Think about it. They want φ to be small (whether or not the evidence supports it), because they want to maintain the fiction that other countries will mostly absorb the tariffs and that importers and retail customers will shoulder less of the burden and therefore experience less inflation. On the other hand, a small φ balloons the value of ∆𝜏 to ridiculous levels. So they set 𝜀 to 4 to bring ∆𝜏 down, even while acknowledging that the true value of 𝜀 is closer to 2.
The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).
I haven’t verified that, but either way I would sure like to see the actual number. Why didn’t they include it? Is it really 0.25? In any case, the question of pass-through to retail prices is irrelevant when you’re trying to determine which country is absorbing the cost of the tariffs. It’s the pass-through factor to importers that is relevant, and that is close to 1, even if the pass-though to retail customers is less. That means that US importers are bearing the cost of the tariffs and passing some of that cost on to consumers. It’s inflationary, and it’s a tax by the US government on US importers, not a tax on foreign countries. Which contradicts Trump’s whole rationale.
The reciprocal tariffs were left-censored at zero.
No, they were “left-censored” at 10, as you can see by looking at the charts. 10 is the minimum tariff you’ll see in the third column of the charts.
Higher minimum rates might be necessary to limit heterogeneity in rates and reduce transshipment.</p
No explanation of why “heterogeneity in rates” is to be avoided, and no comment on the fact that it isn’t avoided, given the large range of new tariff rates in the third column of the charts. That means there’s still plenty of incentive for transshipment. Take Vietnam, for instance, with a new rate of 46%. There’s a *lot* of incentive for them to transship through one of the countries with a 10% rate.
Tariff rates range from 0 to 99 percent.
There is no inherent limit. Tariffs could be 100%, 180%, or 2100%. 99% is an arbitrary limit. Tariffs could even be negative in a perverse world, in which case the government would be giving importers a bonus for importing more and nudging us toward a trade deficit. Obviously that wouldn’t happen in practice, but my point is that the 99% is arbitrary, and anyone who thinks tariffs are limited to being less than 100% doesn’t understand tariffs.
The unweighted average across deficit countries is 50 percent, and the unweighted average across the entire globe is 20 percent.
It’s pointless to state the unweighted average. An unweighted average is really just a weighted average with all of the weights set to 1. That gives Liechtenstein equal weight with China, which is stupid. Our trade volume with China is some 1,770 times as great as our trade volume with Liechtenstein, but these geniuses are weighting them evenly and presenting the average as if it had some kind of significance. Morons.
Weighted by imports, the average across deficit countries is 45 percent, and the average across the entire globe is 41 percent. Standard deviations range from 20.5 to 31.8 percentage points.
Here, they tell us that the import-weighted average of tariffs is 41 percent. Combine that with their assumed pass-through rate of 0.25. meaning that exporters in other countries will shoulder 75% of the tariff burden. That’s unrealistic and it clashes with the actual data, but even if you take the Trumpers at their word and assume that only 25% of the additional cost due to tariffs is passed to importers, that’s still over 10%, because 0.25 * 41% is greater than 10%. 10% import inflation! So much for Trump’s campaign promise: “I’ll reduce prices on day one.” Idiot.
Good job, Trump supporters. By voting for him, you put power in the hands of these dishonest and incompetent economic doofuses.
Looks like you’ve seen this:
https://xkcd.com/3073/
Inserted a “read more” tag.
Hi Keiths
What is your position on the US balance of trade deficit?
Alan:
Thanks.
Alan:
Haha. He nailed it.
colewd:
I don’t know a lot about it, but I do know that most economists these days don’t regard global trade deficits as automatically a bad thing. It depends on how they are financed and whether it’s sustainable.
On the other hand, you don’t have to be an economist to see why Trump’s insistence on bilateral trade balance is stupid.
Something I should have mentioned in the OP is that the Trump formula, besides all of its other flaws, is entirely import-centered. It assumes that exports will remain constant and that the goal is to suppress imports until they equal current exports.
But exports aren’t constant, especially not when you’re slapping egregious tariffs on your trading partners. The partners are going to retaliate with tariffs of their own, which will suppress your exports. They’re also going to want to buy less from you (as in the case of Canadian consumers who are avoiding American products).
By Trumpian logic, the US needs to keep jacking up tariff rates as our exports shrink, in order to bring imports into line. Follow that logic and you’ll eventually succeed in equalizing imports and exports, but at the cost of shrinking overall trade, hurting everybody. “Ideally”, if we keep shrinking trade, imports and exports will both go to zero, and zero equals zero. Trade balance! Yay, Donald!
Let’s just stop international trade altogether, and then we won’t run a trade deficit (or a trade surplus) with anyone.
I care not for formulas as they don’t work in real life…In my view… Those who have gas vehicles enjoy the lowest prices on gas in Canada since the scamdemic: $1.17 per liter today…
Chicken at most stores is on sale some people wonder if Kill Gates got them vaccinated… and that’s why the price is so low..
I watch comedians to update me on “news” once a week and that is good enough…
Piss and Love
Senator Mark Warner grills US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer — the guy responsible for the abysmal document I criticized in the OP — over the fact that we are imposing a 10% tariff on Australia, an ally with whom we are actually running a trade surplus, not a deficit:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/politics/video/trump-tariff-greer-warner-australia-digvid
Do you believe it? If yes, why????
This guy is good too. Apparently, running a large trade deficit (or surplus) is subject to a negative feedback loop caused by the adjustment in exchange rates that results from the unequal counterflow of cash. But the USA has been uniquely protected from the devaluation of their currency that would normally occur if you ran a massive global trade deficit for decades by the fact that the dollar is the de facto currency of international trade.
If that were to change (and if I was a European finance minister…) then the dollar is in for a massive devaluation. American consumers are going to like that even less than the 10% inflation that even Trump reckons is the direct consequence of his tariffs…
DNA-Jock makes a good point about the negative feedback of exchange rates. You’d expect a global trillion-plus dollar deficit to trigger a fall in the dollar exchange rate and yet so far, everything is fine.
History has an example for us to compare when the Roman Empire imported anything it needed from wherever it wanted without consequences,
until there were alternatives.
I see by far the biggest inequity in trade is between US and China. Nixon’s doing?
I don’t think is about trade balances per se. I think it’s a military operation.
Seven years ago trump warned Germany about becoming dependent on Russia for energy. Actually, the cartoonist Bill Mauldin warned them 43 years ago.
Superpowers have to think about things other than economics, and for the United States, it’s important to keep the means to be self sufficient in mining and manufacturing, even if it isn’t the most efficient thing to do. You cannot instantly find skilled workers in an emergency.
China currently has a near monopoly on rare earths. Not because the minerals are rare, but because China has an active industry. Rare earths are essential, among other things, for making the magnets for generating electricity. Having an alternate supply is not about maximizing economic efficiency. It’s a strategic necessity.
That’s just one example. China is to manufacturing what Russia was to Europe’s natural gas.
+1 for linking to my favourite online stand-up mathematician.
keiths in the OP:
That trick he learned from Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán who has repeatedly been granted the right to rule by decree without parliamental consent by several extensions of the state of emergency. The radical right here in the Netherlands tried to pull the same stunt by claiming there was a “migration crisis” but luckily this was denied because the minister of asylum and migration could not produce the required “dragende motivering” (supporting motivation) after lying for weeks that it was almost finished.
Let me warn all you US Americans that your democracy and rule of law are in very real danger. The Trump administration apparently is using the same tricks the radical right have been using here to neutralize opposition and criticism. They will target the political opposition, judicial system, independent journalists, universities and artists.
Obama: “Stroke of the Pen; law of the land. … elections have consequences.”
It’s okay when we do it.
petrushka,
How long are you going to keep making excuses for this inept madman? It’s fentanyl, it’s trade balancing, it’s punishment, it’s reciprocity, it’s revenue raising, now it’s control of materials of war?
Now he’s paused for 90 days, apart from people who stood up to his petty, vindictive ass. How on earth are businesses supposed to plan in this capricious climate?
I notice that no one ever responds when I point out the idiocy of Germany dismantling all of its energy infrastructure, leading to total dependence on Russian gas, signaling that Europe could not afford to oppose a Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Idiots indeed.
How many hundreds of thousands of people have died or been crippled as a result?
Personally, I am not inclined to pay attention to lectures on stupidity from people who insisted Biden was mentally competent.
petrushka,
“But Joe Biden”…
Yes, Europe was over-reliant on Russian gas. Canada should probably likewise bypass the US with pipelines, as it is becoming an equally dubious partner.
Still, this is about tariffs.
?
Was the stock market plunge following Trump’s announcement imposing tariffs and today’s recovery following his subsequent announcement of a 90 day postponement deliberate market manipulation?
Opportunistic, I think; his motivation seems to be this inexplicable obsession with deficits, and the partial reversal due to the effect on bonds. But there is some evidence that a rally started before the official announcement. Some politicians might have some questions to answer.
As a minnow, I bought a modest amount which was executed after the 5% rise on the rumour of a pause. Denial comes, back down it goes. Yippee. Of course it’s now up 10% from the floor, so…
People still talk about ‘4D chess’. To me, it looks like obsessional cluelessness.
To be really Machiavellian, the manipulation could have been by those pulling his strings.
The whole thing is a mishmash of not-joined-up thinking – even in the same combed-over head.
Integrating all trade into a dollar value whose ideal is zero ignores
– differences between the ‘apples and oranges’ that are actually being traded.
– consumer demand for product x outside of price
– differentials in purchasing power between nations
– population differences
If it is about balancing trade, why impose tariffs on nations with whom you operate a surplus?
Likewise, the 10% floor. On that: what’s the off-ramp? How does a nation with a small deficit or a surplus ever get to a situation where tariffs are reduced?
If it’s about revenue raising, how does that survive the intended shift in demand?
If it’s about repatriating manufacturing, how is someone going to make that capital investment when policy changes by the week?
If you’re calculating a Δ, why does that become the flat rate with no account ot the current baseline?
All we actually get is endless grievance about ‘Crooked Joe’.
I’m doubtful – he seems to have had these obsessions for 30 years. I think he’s just convinced he’s a genius. No-one’s told him ‘no’ for most of his life.
I get the impression Trump lives in a bubble inside which he gets to see and hear an edited view of reality. I also get the impression that the only unity among those who get an opportunity to whisper in his ear is self interest. I suspect also whatever goes in comes out somewhat garbled. How to respond to the result? That is the question. I have no answer other than wait out the storm.
Oh sure. The Supreme Court had one job. That Trump got to promote his sycophants destroyed the last bastion.
Even the highest office in the land can’t escape Dunning-Kruger.
Though in fairness to Petrushka I should mention Biden’s shameful conduct regarding Anita Hill that led to Clarence Thomas still sitting on the Supreme Court (when not relaxing in his motor-home enjoying a fine wine). 😉
Edited to counteract senility
Incidentally, what tariff was imposed on Russia?
There was no mention of Russia. I guess that means zero tariff. Surely nothing to do with video’d performances in Moscow hotel rooms
No tariff on Russia, North Korea, Belarus. Which is frankly weird.
To someone not in the cult, it is a daily clown show. Now they are threatening allies who partner with China. So Australia (with whom they operate a surplus, so should get a subsidy…) has to choose between America (5% of exports) and China (30%). Tough call…
Probably, since Trump tweeted, hours before the postponement that it was a good time to buy. The administration had been telling people to buy for days.
Exactly how much trading do we do with them?
Are you still asserting he was competent during his presidency?
I don’t think I claimed to know whether he was or not at any point during his presidency, but the present incumbent is clearly demonstrating how the checks and balances are practically nonexistent.
He’s tariffed islands inhabited solely by penguins… 🤷♂️ but $3.5 billion in the case of Russia. The depth of your defence is quite astonishing. Is he truly infallible, to you?
You never said Biden’s problem was just a stutter? I apologies. Someone here did.
Checks and balances doesn’t mean your side always wins.
Congress has been offloading power to the president for most of my lifetime. I has said a number of times here that it is unwise to give power to government on the assumption that your preferred people will always win elections.
This is why you fear populists. Because your system places too much power in an individual.
But getting back to tariffs: this maneuvering has very little to do withhold the price of goods. It about something more substantial. China and Europe are hoping to replace the dollar as the world standard currency. Europe is hoping to replace dollar tied currency with EU digital currency, and China is hoping to do something equivalent. This is behind what’s going on with tariffs.
I am not smart enough to know how this is going to play out, or whether Trump is doing a clever thing, but I am at least smart enough to know that I don’t know. Which puts me ahead of some.
It’s very clear that Trump is surrounded by two groups of advisors, and tends to act on what the last person who talked to him said. One group are motivated by reverse Robin-Hood goals — take from the poor and give to the rich. They have been for 90 years hoping to eliminate Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and then go further and eliminate regulation of, basically, anything. So no checks on food or drugs safety, workplace safety, etc. And no environmental legislation. The current tactic is not to repeal those laws but to remove funding from their implementation.
The other group are fascists (and I normally have a great hesitancy to jump to that conclusion, but these are not normal times). They want to eliminate all opposition to them from Communists. By which they mean, not Marxists, but everyone from moderately conservative Republicans leftwards. In their view Joe Biden was a Communist. They want to place all blame on immigrants, minorities, LGBQT folks.
It is of course the same political threat that we see in almost every country; I do not exempt Israel or the Palestinians.
So at least part of the craziness is due to the last-advisor-who-talked-to-Trump effect. Unless he has a devious and clever grand plan. That he fired national-security officials after a totally lunatic conspiracy theorist talked to him kind of speaks against that!
It’s a hypothesis that fits the evidence.
petrushka,
If that’s the goal, Trump is aiding and abetting those aims nicely. Tanking the market, devaluing the dollar (thus adding exchange rate – self-inflicted currency manipulation – to the tariff costs), damaging bond yields. No-one trusts the US any more. It is no longer a safe pair of hands, and the dollar’s standing correspondingly weakened.
Ruled by a madman and his sycophants, bizarrely cheered on by voters who (as Joe says) think anyone left of Trump is a Communist, and could not bear to hold their nose and vote for any not-a-Republican. All his many ills thus forgiven and forgotten.
Bravo. {Also to Keith’s OP}
Joe Felsenstein,
Musk is in both camps….depending.
https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/
Apologies. I misspoke. Where I wrote “advisors” I should have written “vultures”.
False. “EU digital currency” and “China something equivalent” is not what is going on with tariffs, certainly not as motivating factors for Trump’s policy concepts.
False. You know literally nothing and you are not ahead of anybody here.
Not weird if you remember that as soon as Trump started bringing peace to Ukraine “in 24 hours” his first move was to abandon NATO and switch sides in favour of Putin. No tariffs on Russia (foreshadowing cancellation of sanctions), no tariffs even on Cuba, but then again Iran and Syria got tariffed, because coherence is for the weak.
petrushka,
Including Trump.
Trying a more constructive angle, I think you are definitely bright enough “to know how this is going to play out” (it’s not that hard, frankly). But for some reason you are blinding yourself to the amateurism, authoritarianism and downright malice that has been pouring from the administration of your country. Since you are a commenter that I have so far enjoyed and respected, I find that quite disturbing. I sincerely hope that the old petrushka returns and starts scrutinizing the Trump policies with a little more healthy suspicion.
Can I also mention how delightful it is to see all the old faces again: the only good thing to come from the Trump administration.