Member-only story
Trump Blinked and the Dumbest Trade War Is on Pause
This is what volatility as policy looks like: climate collapse, market chaos, and a fossil-fueled tariff tantrum
It started, as things often do these days, with a show. Standing in the Rose Garden, Donald Trump waved a big chart like a game show host unveiling a prize. “Reciprocal,” he declared, “that means they do it to us, and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get simpler than that.” Behind the grin was a tariff plan scrawled in oversized font and slapped together with a calculator and some political spite.
But what looked like economic patriotism was, in reality, something else: a blunt instrument, built on third-grade math, designed to mask a first-class con. Because, for each country, Trump’s team took the 2024 trade-in-goods deficit, divided it by total imports, then halved the result to look “reasonable.” That was the tariff. Yes, really. That was the method. And the White House appears to have confirmed it took a simplistic approach to making this judgment.
Take China. The formula goes like this:
- Trade deficit: $291.9 billion
- Imports: $438.9 billion
- Divide one by the other = 67%
- Cut in half = 34% tariff
