I HAVE many reactions to President Donald Trump’s largely caving on his harebrained plan to tariff the world, but overall, one reaction just keeps coming back to me: If you hire clowns, you should expect a circus. And my fellow Americans, we have hired a group of clowns.
Think of what Trump; his chief knucklehead, Howard Lutnick (the commerce secretary); his assistant chief knucklehead, Scott Bessent (the Treasury secretary); and his deputy assistant chief knucklehead, Peter Navarro (the top trade adviser), have told us repeatedly for the past weeks: Trump won’t back off on these tariffs because – take your choice – he needs them to keep fentanyl from killing our kids, he needs them to raise revenue to pay for future tax cuts, and he needs them to pressure the world to buy more stuff from us. And he couldn’t care less what his rich pals on Wall Street say about their stock market losses.
