Why Not Just ‘Disappear’ Diego Garcia?
A sad and twisted man is Donald Trump. And an idiot. President idiot, okay. Heir to his father’s real estate empire, the man surrounds himself with idiots and yes-men. Degreed, ass-kissing idiots. Connected idiots. Rich idiots. But idiots.
The pathologically insecure Trump has complained for decades that “they” are laughing at “us” (meaning him). They are ripping off the United States (meaning him), says the man convicted of falsifying business records, stripped of his fraudulent charity, and assessed $25 million in penalties for cheating students of his fraudulent university. The man has spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world and to himself that he is the smartest person in any room, not an idiot, and not laughable.
At a White House Rose Garden event on Wednesday, dubbed “Liberation Day,” Donald Trump again proved the opposite.
Seals and Penguins
Trump slapped tariffs on “virtually the entire world,” including Australia’s volcanic Heard and McDonald Islands inhabited by seals and penguins, and on other tiny islands with no exports. His list includes the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia, the island home of a highly restricted UK-US military base. (Trump likely thinks Diego Garcia belongs to Tren de Aragua (TdA) and should be disappeared to El Salvador.)
The president announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs against all those nations, friend and foe, who’ve “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” America. He extolled the virtues of a tariff regime for making America great again as it was in the Robber Baron era. The U.S. was once a tariff-backed nation, he declard, before it foolishly adopted an income tax over a hundred years ago.
Look, Trump argued. Look at how they are ripping off us. He displayed a chart of the tariffs lesser countries dare levy against the United States of America. (Trump takes that as a personal insult.)
Non-idiots may ask where those weird numbers came from. Indeed, the chart left experts scratching their heads and asking the same thing. The numbers seemed to be pulled from Trump’s copious ass. Pretty much.
Author James Surowiecki was among the first to unravel their provenance:
Just brilliant. Because Indonesia has a high tax on coffee imports, Trump’s going to put a 32% tax on coffee imports from Indonesia – even though the US exports no coffee to Indonesia (or most anywhere else). He literally does not understand the concept of comparative advantage.
And:
It’s also important to understand that the tariff rates that foreign countries are supposedly charging us are just made-up numbers. South Korea, with which we have a trade agreement, is not charging a 50% tariff on U.S. exports. Nor is the EU charging a 39% tariff.
An hour later, Surowiecki had an ‘aha’ moment:
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.
So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.
Rich idiots
“How in God’s name did [Secretary of the Treasury] Scott Bessent agree to sign off on this?” asks Surowiecki. Perhaps Bessent is deliberately sabotaging Trump. Or Bessent (worth at least $500 million) is another of those ass-kissing, rich idiots.
But it was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (worth between $2 and $4 billion) who presented Trump with the chart. Politico reported in advance of the rollout:
Lutnick spends a lot of time in the Oval Office, hyping the president on his tariff strategy and ‘giving him bad advice — pushing more aggressive tariffs,’ says one person familiar with the situation.
“By contrast, Bessent remains a ‘measured voice’ pushing for targeted tariffs. And while tariff-loving trade adviser Peter Navarro is a known quantity, Lutnick is ‘a new voice at the table pushing crazy shit,’ the person says. ‘I don’t know anyone that isn’t pissed off at him.’”
Axios was quick to note that one nation led by an ass Trump himself is kissing escaped the tariff list: Russia.
Just another aftershock
Of course, it will not be any of those nations and uninhabited islands filling the U.S. treasury. It will be you. Paul Krugman dismantled Trump’s tariff incoherence on Wednesday at his substack. Analyses are pointless, he writes, “because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”
World markets did not take the news well (New York Times):
Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the index outside normal trading hours, slumped more than 3 percent. Asian and European stock markets fell sharply, with benchmark indexes dropping more than 3 percent in Japan, and nearly 2 percent in Hong Kong, South Korea, Germany and France.
The value of the U.S. dollar against a basket of other major currencies dropped more than 1 percent.
[…]
“The numbers are shockingly high compared to what people were expecting and it is inexplicable in many ways,” said Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities. “I think it’s a disaster.”
No, November 5 was the disaster. Wednesday was just another aftershock.
I sat with my parents in early 2016 and declared Donald Trump mentally unbalanced. Yet nine years later, the press corps still attempts to report Trump 2.0 as serious policy. Trump’s well-heeled sycophant entourage in the Rose Garden sits politely smiling and nodding at his ignorant blather as if he is not raving about the purity of his essence.
I’ve long said that the proper rejoinder to a rich asshole’s asking, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is “If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?”
UPDATE: The Verge has more on Trump’s brain trust. Did they or didn’t they?
A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency. The Verge tested this with the phrasing used in those posts, as well as a question based more closely on the government’s language, asking chatbots for “an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.” All four platforms gave us the same fundamental suggestion.
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