American Foreign Economic Policy Is Being Run By the Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive

The fuckwittery continues unabated.

Photo by Sonder Quest on Unsplash

Hey, remember last week, when I wrote, “in two short months, the second Trump administration’s abject incompetence has managed to make his bumbling first-term crew look like a paragon of professionalism”?¹

Well, things have gotten dumber since then. So much dumber.

I had already written earlier this week about the negative foreign policy externalities of president Trump’s tariffs to date. But that was before Trump decided to raise the stupidity ante by an order of magnitude with yet another across-the-board increase in tariffs. According to the Washington Post’s David Lynch and Jeff Stein:

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will impose a new 10 percent tariff on all imported goods along with higher import taxes tailored for each of about 60 countries that his advisers say maintain the largest barriers against U.S. products, in a sharp turn toward the kind of protectionism that the United States abandoned nearly a century ago.

To impose the new tariffs, the president declared a national emergency,² citing the annual merchandise trade deficit that the United States has run each year since 1975….

American importers, for example, will pay an additional 34 percent tariff on products from China, some of which already face 45 percent fees. Vietnam, which the administration says has become a transshipment point for Chinese companies seeking to dodge U.S. tariffs, will see its goods hit with a new 46 percent tariff. Cambodian goods, likewise, will be charged an additional 49 percent levy….

The early reaction from mainstream economists and business groups was grim, while industries that will enjoy new protection against foreign competition applauded. Although Trump’s announcement came after financial markets had closed, premarket trading pushed U.S. financial markets sharply down late Wednesday.

“In the short run, the effect is probably a recession. It’s going to raise the price of so many goods that can’t be made in the United States,” said economist Brad Setser of the Council on Foreign Relations. “In the long run, it’s a vision of the U.S. that is very isolated from the world.”

The tariffs that were announced did not contain any exceptions. Indeed, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception, which allowed foreign retailers to ship goods under $800 to U.S. consumers duty free. Little wonder that both forecasting sites and investment banks have ratcheted up their estimated probability of a recession occurring this year.

The Wall Street Journal’s Jason Douglas and Tom Fairless open their story on the tariffs by declaring: “President Trump’s biggest tariff blitz yet sends a clear message to U.S. and foreign companies alike: The era of globalization is over.” The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World disagrees with that assessment — it is far too sweeping. The era of globalization is over for the United States. The rest of the world will happily trade with each other at much lower tariff rates.

Paul Krugman watched Trump’s Rose Garden speech announcing the tariffs and declared, “he’s gone full-on crazy.” When it comes to tariffs and trade, however, Trump has always been like this. What has changed in his second term has been the near-absence of any dissenting voices within the Republican Party, the absence of any adult voices within his administration, and the abject incompetence of his staff.³

The result of this dipshittery was a series of stories from yesterday suggesting that the Trump administration has no idea what it is doing in foreign economic policy.

Consider first that the administration claimed that foreign countries had placed tariffs on the United States that bore little resemblance to reality — because they used their own BS formula to calculate the rate based on the bilateral trade deficit. A White House official confirmed this to the New York Post’s Steven Nelson, “The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers… based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating.” This is a dumb concept! Countries do not necessarily run trade deficits or surpluses simply because of their trade policies!

Even more stupid is the mechanical application of the tariffs by Trump’s staff. Consider that the administration applied 10% tariffs on the Heard and McDonald Islands — islands that are uninhabited by humans. The U.S. also tariffed Diego Garcia, which is uninhabited except for, um, U.S. and British soldiers. Israel had removed all tariffs on U.S. products yesterday in an effort to escape U.S. protectionism — and yet this administration slapped on 17% tariffs, shocking Israeli officials. And of course Russia avoided all tariffs.

Stepping back, the aggregate effects of these tariffs will be severe:

What is truly nuts, however, has been the statements by Trump officials in which they do not seem to realize that other countries might retaliate:

Trump’s first-term policymakers also seemed to labor under the delusion that other countries would not respond to Trump’s actions with retaliatory tariffs. Imagine their shock if other countries should choose to retaliate because that is what always happens in a trade war.

This is a counterproductive policy that will accomplish little other than impoverish Americans. In other words, it’s just another day in an administration run by the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet.

1. I was hardly the only one to highlight the administration’s rank incompetence. A few days later Politico noted about Signalgate: “There is no administration in the world — beyond this one — where a blunder of these proportions happens and nobody gets fired or resigns. Not in London. Not in Moscow. Not in Tokyo. Not in Pyongyang. Nowhere.”

2. The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World feels compelled to remind readers that if the U.S. economy was in a state of national emergency at the start of 2025 then I say let’s celebrate the emergency.

3. For example, Trump actually said this in the Rose Garden: “In 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government. Then in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with a Great Depression, and it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy.” Any self-respecting staffer would have corrected Trump on his incorrect, ass-backwards logic. Instead we get the likes of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent acting like he’s as surprised as everyone else.