Hooked on a feeling
By 
Longtime sage of the LGM commentariat JEC has some very sobering observations:
The outcome of yesterday’s meeting between Trump and Netanyahu is probably the worst economic news so far.
1. Prior to the effective date of The Tariffs*, Israel offered the US across-the-board zero tariff rates. (Now, Israel’s average effective tariff rate on US exports is in the 1-2% range, but that’s neither here nor there.) Trump refused and imposed tariffs on Israel on schedule.
2. Immediately after the imposition of The Tariffs, Netanyahu requested an immediate personal meeting with Donald Trump. His request was granted. Now, this is the stuff Trump loves. A world leader “begging” for a meeting! A chance to have a “negotiation!” Face-to-face! Two men in a room! The White House scheduled a press conference following the meeting, presumably expecting to have something Very Beautiful to announce.
3. The meeting happened.
4. The White House cancelled the press conference, opting instead for a brief joint appearance from the Oval.
5. The only “agreement” announced was Netanyahu “agreeing” to do something about Israel’s trade surplus with the United States. The tariffs remain in place. (Also, Iran bad.)
My — speculative — interpretation of this sequence of events is that (a) Netanyahu did everything right — i.e., did everything he possibly could to flatter and mollify Trump, and (b) it wasn’t enough, because Trump is serious about this trade deficit crap.
The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t find a way to get Trump to budge on this seems, to me, to be incontrovertible evidence that Trump is all-in on his insane trade war. It’s not a con; it’s a genuine obsession. Which is disastrous news.
* I suspect that we’re going to wind up capitalizing The Tariffs, a bit like The Troubles.
Everything to this point is running against the “Donald Trump is merely using tariffs to extort companies and nations for his own person enrichment” theory. Of course he’ll try to use them to do that because he uses literally everything possible to try to do that, but as JEC suggests, he really does believe in his own transparently absurd stated views on this subject.
In other words, the answer to the question of whether Donald Trump is actually stupid enough to believe that trade imbalances are inherently wrong and unfair, and therefore that the US should strive to have a trade surplus with everyone, is yes, Donald Trump is actually stupid enough to believe this, and does believe it, to the extent he remains capable of forming and maintaining beliefs.
Relatedly, this is from Bob Woodward’s 2018 book Fear:
Of course the United States manufactured things, but the reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America – locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines. [Gary] Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories . . .
Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president.
“See, the biggest leavers of jobs – people leaving voluntarily – was from manufacturing.”
“I don’t get it,” Trump said.
Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”
Cohn added, “people don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”
Trump wasn’t buying it.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “why do you have these views?”
“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.” “That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”
Cohn is obviously the source for this, and while I don’t doubt he’s trying to spin this story to his advantage, I also don’t doubt that it’s substantially accurate, given everything else that’s happened in the interim, and especially in the last two months. (As for Cohn’s analogy, he should have remembered that Trump, who was probably the worst player on a terrible high school baseball team, confabulated a wild lie about trying out for the San Francisco Giants at the same time as future Hall of Famer Willie McCovey).
I’ll be nibbling on sponge cake for the rest of the evening.