Our Weekend with Tariffs
By 
Some more thoughts on the Tariff Weekend:
In a year, we’ll have a better perspective on what’s going on with the Trump administration’s tariff policy.
We may eventually find out whether the most disconcerting story is true, that the administration has no firm understanding of where it is or where it is going and that Donald Trump does not understand foreign economic policy and does not understand why so many parts of his coalition have reacted negatively to the threat of tariffs.
His joy in the idea that foreign leaders are afraid of him may have overwhelmed any sense of how to maintain and preserve leverage. We may find that Trump’s advisors are so scared to explain reality to him, both because of the towering rage that the President regularly vomits forth on social media and because they know that bootlickers and, yes men will replace them if they contradict him too aggressively.
Cowardice and ignorance are a terrible combination in a leader-advisor relationship, but it may well have been a combination that the American voter has chosen.
It’s worth noting that this is the kind of foreign policy that Sam Moyn and Trita Parsi (the latter of the Quincy Institute, the MAGA Pick Me Girl of foreign policy think tank set) think is better than a rules-based order:
Trump is a keen advocate for his own interests. His first-term foreign policy was marked by a transactionalism that occasionally enabled him to transcend Washington’s typical moralizing in favor of advancing U.S. interests through engagement, such as negotiating the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban. This “what’s-in-it-for-me” approach to world affairs may enable Trump to jettison Washington’s mythmaking about its coalition-of-the-willing international order.
Hatred of liberalism is a powerful drug, and what junkie wouldn’t prefer foreign policy by the whim of a dementia-addled right wing billionaire?