United States | News & Politics

Well, well, well, look who’s capitulating on his 145 percent tariff on China and now says an “80% Tariff on China seems right”?

He Truthed, as if in a 1989 middle school classroom where there are six boys named Scott. Tariffing was Scott B.’s idea! Stop hitting yourself Scott B! Scott B. smelt it and musta dealt it! And Scott B. is still out here pretending not to know what a tariff does, and who pays for them.

Or maybe he DOES know, because he thinks all the little girls and their families will be grateful to have fewer dolls to play with, presumably on their breaks from working at the Elon Musk robot manufacturing concern.

Weird how they never talk about handsome little boys, ages 11 to 15, having to get just one XBox game for Christmas.

But look everybody, there is now one deal! With the UK, which is now getting 10 percent tariffs on steel and cars instead of 25 percent, in exchange for the UK buying some airplanes and cutting their tariffs on beef and ethanol. That’s still more than triple the average 2.2 percent it was! And now Rolls-Royce jet engines and parts (which are used in Boeing planes) will be imported tariff-free. “You better go out and buy stock now,” Trump declared after he signed. “Let me tell you, this country will be like a rocket ship that goes straight up.”

But sorry, Gromit, the UK is only our ninth-largest trading partner, below Vietnam, and a recession is not going to be prevented by a Jaguar being $70,000 instead of $87,500, though at least Boeing will now die a slower death.

Trump has been desperately trying to scare up cash to pay for letting millionaires and billionaires keep their tax cut that’s due to expire at the end of the year, which would raise the deficit by $4 trillion. And he wants the power of the purse, too, like a proper despot. The power to single-handedly declare YA TARIFFED, WORLD helps him with both!

And, he can use his tariff power to back-scratch for deals, such as for his friend Elon Musk, whose self-immolating cars nobody wants to buy any more. Now the administration is reportedly using the tariffs to pressure countries into doing him a favor though and buying a subscription to Elon Musk’s Starlink, including Lesotho, Somalia, India, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Mali, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam, and turning diplomats into salespeople tasked with forwarding along names of government people for Starlink to give sales pitches to, and “facilitate discussions.” Holy conflict of interest! Hey, it’s another 1989 flashback, to when you’d get calls every time you sat down to dinner asking if you want to switch your long-distance carrier to an MCI Friends & Family plan!

The pressure to use Starlink is not a blatant quid pro quo, according to an anonymous member of the Indian government who talked to the Washington Post. It’s more like a strong suggestion: “It’s not likely to be an explicit element of the trade negotiations with the U.S., but the Indian side sees this as an important lubricant that facilitates a deal.” And as yet none of the countries that went for it have gotten a tariff deal anyway.

Meanwhile, over here in the US, things are about to get real, as in shelves real empty, and Walmart shoppers real mad. The tariffs have not hurt China at all; their exports in April were up 8.1 percent, in spite of being down 21 percent to the US, on the strength of increased exports to Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. They’re getting soybeans from Brazil, and Trump can go tinkle up a rope for all they care.

So now, after a month of claiming he was negotiating with China, and claiming that tariffs were going to make everybody RICH RICH RICH, while also simultaneously unable to afford dolls and pencils, looks like he is backing down again, super mad that China did not come crawling to him with tears in their eyes. On Thursday his Easy-Bake Oven brain even declared war on the country of Mattel, where Barbieland is located. Or maybe a guy named Mr. Mattel. It’s unclear.

“Mattel, I don’t know, I’m not so sure. They also said, they’re the only country I’ve heard, they said, ‘Well we’re going to go counter. We’re going to try going someplace else.’ That’s okay. Let him go, and we’ll put a 100 percent tariff on his toys. And he won’t sell one toy in the United States, and that’s their biggest market.”

So, this weekend he’s sending dithering idiot and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and trade representative Jamieson Greer (who, incredibly, does have trade experience), to Geneva to try to make a deal with Chinese representatives, over the self-kick-in-the-dick trade war that Trump started. Eighty percent is still, of course, batshit insane, and driving us directly to a recessionary ditch.

But win-win for Trump personally! Now he’ll be able to blame all of those empty Barbie shelves on Scott B., and Mr. Mattel, who are just not as big brain at business.