To live in a world where Donald Trump is president of the United States is to be relentlessly bombarded by noise – by his pronouncements, his actions, his outrages, and the general maelstrom that surrounds him at all times.
The cacophony makes it almost impossible to work out what actually matters: of the dozen or so noisy issues on any given day, which will still matter in a week or a month’s time? In the last few days alone, Trump has threatened to strip comedian Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship, has ordered the arrest (or worse) of protestors opposing mass deportations, and embroiled himself in a row with his own supporters over Jeffrey Epstein.
Amid all these attention-draining rows it becomes all too easy to miss that on Saturday, Trump also announced a new round of tariffs with two of the USA’s most significant trading partners. In his new letters, Trump announced 30 per cent blanket tariffs on both the EU and on Mexico, which are due to take force on 1 August.
The EU is the largest trading bloc in the world, while Mexico, as the USA’s southern neighbour, is its single largest trading partner. Tariffs of 30 per cent would devastate global trade, hurt the US economy more than anyone else’s, and lead to a wave of job losses and business failures across the world that could threaten the global economy. Worse, for the USA at least, it would do all of that while raising prices (and so inflation) for American consumers.
The problem for Trump is that when it comes to tariffs, he’s the President who cried wolf. The first time the US president announces devastating trade tariffs, alarmed world leaders take note – they call emergency meetings, they brief the media, and the planet scrambles to respond.
But this isn’t the first time: Trump has announced and then delayed or altered tariffs so many times in recent months that everyone is almost fatigued. The latest developments prompted weary press statements from the EU and Mexico, but little more.
Trump announced tariffs on almost every country in the world from the White House Rose Garden in April. The President has a bizarre understanding of global trade in which he assumes that if the US buys more from another country than it sells back to it, then that country is doing something unfair.
That doesn’t make sense on a number of levels. The US is both a very large and a very rich country – most nations with which it trades are smaller and poorer. By Trump’s logic, if America buys coffee beans, bananas, or raw materials from a poor country, it should somehow be buying expensive manufacturing goods worth equal value from America – items it simply can’t afford.
Similarly, the US buys in a lot of the goods Americans consume, but it exports services – almost every global big tech company is American, and the profits flow back to America. Trump ignores all of this because it doesn’t show up in trade figures.
That means there is no real “injustice” for Trump to fix with tariffs, and so the rest of the world can’t give him what he wants. When Trump was first persuaded by his officials to delay his mad scheme, the White House promised “90 deals in 90 days” instead. With those 90 days over, the US signed just two deals – one of them with the UK – and a partial deal with China, so he’s apparently reverting to the initial catastrophic plan.
The trouble is people can only stay on red alert for so long. When Trump’s April tariffs were first announced, global markets took him seriously and the dollar plummeted, the cost of borrowing for the US government increased, and the stock market took a battering. But now he’s backed down and delayed so many times, those reactions no longer happen to the same degree.
Markets have even started referring to the new acronym “Taco” – Trump Always Chickens Out – to describe his approach on trade. People aren’t panicking as much this time because the last few times, disaster failed to materialise. Trump chickened out, after all.
The danger is that without all of those alarms and all of that panic, this time there’s nothing to steer the president off course. Trump is a volatile man and he is fixated on his bizarre trade policy, and the imagined injustices that rationalise it.
As it stands, Trump will devastate global trade on 1 August – a time when many world leaders and senior traders alike are usually away from their desks and on holiday, leaving their juniors in charge. Perhaps Trump will chicken out again. He’s done it enough times before, after all. But if he doesn’t, it could be a turbulent summer indeed.
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