Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but the economy-wrecking tariffs Trump imposed are kind of delayed again. The president and his economic team are totally just about to negotiate a ton of trade deals in this next month, just like they promised before. The timeline of this shitshow can be difficult to follow, but it has all flowed to a point where things are starting to get real for the dog ate my homework crew. Trump announced the tariffs that changed the world on April 2nd, and we have had an entire bear market rebound to new stock market all-time highs since. I know it seems like it’s been forever and a day since that fateful day the following week when he delayed all of his tariffs for 90 days, but Trump’s promise to make 90 trade deals in 90 days actually expired on July 1st. That uh, did not happen!
Along the way, Trump and the EU and Canada imposed varying delays to the trade war, then he and China pulled back the reciprocal tariffs they placed on each other, which led the stock market to become certain this was a sign that president deals had everything under control. At the very least, it was proven that the disorder of the bond market had things under control to a degree, as the TACO Trump meme is directly tied to five percent long-term Treasury yields. Trump then said he was going to consolidate all the delays into a deadline of July 9th, this Wednesday, where this whole sordid nightmare would finally be behind us and we could advance into Dear Leader’s glorious future for debunked 19th century economics.
Well, this week is here, and like last week’s deadline, there are no big trade deals (the EU says they want to get a bare-bones deal done by the 9th, but that’s the only news outside Trumpworld’s claims). But there are per president deals, “UNITED STATES TARIFF LETTERS, and/or Deals, with various Countries from around the World, [that] will be delivered starting 12:00 P.M. (Eastern), Monday, July 7th.”
Letters and/or deals! What a world! Treasury Secretary and man openly campaigning to be the next Fed Chair, Scott Bessent, expanded on this new offer from president deals yesterday, saying to CNN that “if you don’t move things along, then on August 1st you will boomerang back to your April 2nd tariff level.” This uncertainty around what the hell these doofuses are doing in any given week is dampening investment, creating conditions where it is impossible for companies to do the main thing that Trump wants them to do. “Relocating plants is an eight- to 10-year decision, but when you can’t predict what is happening next week, let alone next year or in five years, mitigation of the status quo is the likely strategy,” said Neil Shearing, chief economist of the research company Capital Economics to the Financial Times.
The only aspect of this mess that has any predictability beyond these schlubs’ inability to meet their own deadlines is the TACO Trump number, and oh look, there bond yields go creeping up above 4.9 percent again. Right as Trump is pretending to do something while kicking the can down the road, how unprecedented!
Bond yields have been up only since the GOP murder bill passed Congress, as the deficit is not something that Republican propaganda has any domain over. It is math. Bonds yields are math too. And they are intrinsically tied together, both set to rise because of the GOP’s bill and Trump’s tariffs, threatening the financial stability of the entire globe dependent on American debt.
These letters Trump is posting are all the same, save for the tariff rate assigned to each country, and they are effectively his TruthSocial posts put on White House letterhead. They read extremely normal things like “we invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far,” and repeat Trump’s central wrongheaded belief that trade deficits are inherently bad, then they end with an offer to renegotiate that countries’ tariff rate. As even Trump noted, these are not the big, beautiful deals he has promised, and the best lie he can muster is “letters and/or Deals.”
These are ultimatums from a manbaby who has already caved on multiple ultimatums. Claims like “we have 100 countries that are knocking on the door” and countries are “kissing my ass” have become “many of these countries never even contacted us.”
This is so shambolic. The trade version of children putting on their dad’s suits to play businessman. Scott Bessent should never be allowed into Wall Street’s secret lizard people meetings ever again. Howard Lutnick’s billions should evaporate every time he repeats some sycophantic lie he didn’t believe before he decided he wanted to spend his life with Trump’s hand shoved up his ass. Economic advisor Kevin Hassett is such an ignoramus that he went on national TV earlier this year and proclaimed that president deals had invented time travel. All these people are fundamentally embarrassing at a very basic human level that must be making trade negotiations that much more difficult. As a great man once prophetically posted, “This is the stupidest day in American history, a record that will be broken by every subsequent day in American history.”
The new tariff rates Trump has announced today look pretty similar to the April 2nd ones. It seems like he’s mostly just rounding them.
So the offer on the table to countries now is ‘to transact with America, exporters must pay about the rate we announced on April 2nd, and if you don’t negotiate a new trade deal with us, on August 1st, we will impose the April 2nd rate on you.’ What the fuck kind of negotiation strategy is this? How is South Korea, a country we have a trade surplus with, supposed to accept their 25 percent tariff and “move away from these longterm, and very persistent, Trade Deficits engendered by Korea’s Tariff, and Non Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers.”
This is just pure clownery. Trump is revealing the Fox Newsification of American society to the whole world, and how we have a significant group of people like him who simply do not traffic in any kind of shared reality. President deals and his acolytes have created their safe space away from objective and uncomfortable truths, and while it has proven powerful enough to destroy the shaky foundations of American democracy and the feckless American elite, the market is another thing entirely. Trillions of dollars around the world depend on, like, logic, and basic facts like tariffs get passed down to the consumer, and no amount of TruthSocial posting will change those economic realities. Trump is trying to negotiate trade deals in the real world while posting from his safe space, and every day is somehow more shameful and embarrassing than the previous one.
