Beautiful, just beautiful … and subversive. 
The tariffs are a shakedown. For example, the Trump administration has told the UK that if it wants to reduce tariffs it will have to lower its food standards and accept chlorinated chicken and beef imports. Can’t see that happening as it’s a very unpopular idea in the UK.
These are more like sanctions than tariffs.
Disagree with the premise and advice. But I guess it’s off topic for this thread.
Also, Reagan consciously began the process of delegitimizing government in the eyes of the public. His quote, “ I think you all know that I’ve always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help,” was laying the groundwork for Trump. Do-gooders are suckers and public servants are evil.
Reagan started what Trump has finished.
You’re right. I’ve been out of that biz for a while. Thanks for the correction.
Something that I saw on another forum just now, and it totally makes sense in the context of this US administration:
People have wondered why islands like Spitsbergen and Jan Mayern, Heard and McDonald Islands, as well as small territories like Gibraltar got an entry in Trump’s tariff list.
Answer: The list of countries to be individually assigned tariffs was compiled not from a list of countries, but from a list of Internet country top level domains.
.hm = Heard and McDonald Islands
.sj = Svalbard and Jan Mayen
The poster in that other forum also guessed that a LLM did the heavy lifting in fabricating the tariff list.
A Not-Large-Enough Language Model?
A very capable Artificial Stupidity model.
To think that there must be scores of tariff nerds in the US Department of the Treasury who could have supplied the Trump administration with a list of countries that have separate tariff rates within minutes… - it seems the Trump Administration refuses to tap any and all subject matter expertise existing in the US civil service.
AKA the Deep State, which cannot be trusted to tell Trump what he wants to hear.
Yes, if they worked for the US govt prior to January 20, by definition they are not trustworthy.
For those more in tune with the law, given that Trump is declaring an “Economic Emergency” as his pretext for these tariffs (or rather, blatant mafioso tactics), how does the fact that so many of the mentioned nations have trade that’s a rounding error or less (such as Heard Island) work against his claims.
I mean, retaliation for what, other than, obviously retaliation for not bending the knee to Trump of course. I suspect of course, that some mindless functionary is going to get thrown under the bus and that may be enough for many if not most courts. And the minimal pushback from Congress is of course, deeply depressing.
I’ve seen credible speculation based on which tiny countries got on the list and which did not that Trump got his list from chatGPT which used internet top level domains (a country code like ascension island is .ac) to give a list of countries. Didn’t check it myself, though. But that’d be even more pathetic because he could ask one of the government accounting people to come up with a list, but instead he probably got Big Balls to ask chatgpt because you just can’t ask the experts for anything, they’ll think they know something.
In his Rose Garden announcement of sweeping new “reciprocal tariffs,” President Donald Trump held aloft a misleading chart that claimed to give a breakdown of the tariffs other countries charge the U.S. and the corresponding tariff that the U.S. will now impose against those countries.
That account is hilarious! Thanks for sharing. Good to laugh at something right now.
The tariff war plan of this administration explained, in one meme:
Noted above was the Canadian milk brouhaha where our northern friends said, okay, send us your milk without it being tariffed to death, but no one bought it, still preferring Canadian milk, and the US brand quietly abandoned the market after a few months. I suppose that could happen with US beef and chicken in the UK too; get the tariffs rolled back but not see much if any of the degraded products affecting the domestic markets.
This column does a great job of explaining why Trump’s plan is wildly incoherent (gift link).
I’m thinking other countries are planning to negotiate with Trump the same way a parent negotiates with a toddler holding its breath.
Yes, I don’t think these products would be very popular in the UK, assuming they are labelled as chlorinated chicken. It’s ironic that the chemical sound of this is probably what would put consumers off, when it’s not actually the chlorination that’s the issue but what is implied about the rest of the preparation process.
In the abstract though, the UK needs to be a bit careful, because access to EU markets can be affected if we drop EU standards to be able to import US products.
I’d just like to note that, even though I read Trump’s target to be permanent tariffs, I would not be surprised if he reduced them by some amount (calculating that people will confuse “reduce” and “undo”). I’d also expect him to give targeted exceptions as favors for those who really did him a good personal service.
But, in general, the goal is to have tariffs and make significant tax revenue from them on the long term, reducing military spending to try and rein in government spending.