After months of talking about replacing income tax with tariffs, and his revered External Revenue Service replacing the IRS with trillions in tariff income per year, and just this morning saying that he'll never change his mind on this so manufacturers need to rush back (I guess Americans yearn for the $4 a day jobs making t-shirts or something), rapidly Trump and his sycophants are, in the face of market obliteration and literally everyone with a brain saying how dumb this all is, claiming it's a grand negotiating strategy. By mid-day various Trump supplicants like his sprog and Ackman were pretending there was a mad rush to negotiate the best terms first.

Vietnam, for instance, supposedly is on the phone "negotiating". But what is Vietnam going to negotiate? It has negligible trade barriers or tariffs -- we all realize the reciprocal thing is a ridiculous lie -- and an income per capita of like $2,500. Vietnam cannot fix the fact that they're cheap labour that quite literally benefits the US lifestyle.

In other words, after this profoundly stupid, catastrophically economically ignorant debacle, they're trying to back out yet again.

It is simply staggering how much of an idiocracy the US has become. In any normal government this clown would have people stopping him from this insanity. Instead he has slobbering bootlickers like Howard Lutnick trying to rationalize every bit of insanity.

And things will not return back to normal. Hundreds of billions of dollars of damage have already been done to the US, and this time they aren't going to fixed by another backtrack.