But don’t worry folks, these TruthSocial posts are trade deals and they’re real and we are totally not still negotiating an “adjustment” to tariff rates until August 1st.
If your head hurts, I don’t blame you. What do you think quoting the last two days of this guy’s illogic for an entire paragraph did to mine? Luckily, I am experienced in Trump brain damage and can interpret what is going on, which is that with this “letters and/or Deals” performance and new deadline, Trump has created something of an endgame for himself for the first stage of his trade war. August 1st is the last day for his threats to ever have a patina of credibility to them.
An entire lifetime of taking out ads in major newspapers to push debunked 19th century thought has led us to this critical economic moment. Trump really believes in this stupid bullshit, and the intractable part of this is his wrongheaded notion that buying food from the grocery store makes you a sucker. Zeroing out your trade deficit with the grocery store to serve Trump’s 19th century whims is just not possible without an entirely new global economy.
The pressure the market has placed on him in return has pushed him off this drastic course a few times, culminating in a botched goal of exactly one week ago when we were supposed to have 90 deals in 90 days. All the delays that mounted during those 90 days were then consolidated into a deadline of tomorrow to get the deals done, which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said to CNN on Sunday was pushed back to August 1st in another delay to Trump’s delay. Now Trump is trying to massage reality into looking like something other than an obvious series of caves and an inability to force 19th century economics on to the rest of the world.
But we may be approaching the danger zone I detailed in my quick explainer on the TACO Trump meme. Generally speaking, since April, when long-term bond yields approach or exceed 5 percent, the market gets jittery, and Trump pulls back from whatever nonsense he’s trying. This is proof that the Illuminati are real, and they hold US Treasuries, but also that Trump is a weak sissy who caves like a punk. Trump doesn’t like that, and he snapped at a reporter a couple months ago when he was asked about this TACO trade unfolding across Wall Street and dragging the stock market to new all-time highs.
So this is Trump saying that this week is his final cave and August 1st is his take it or leave it deadline, or else everyone is going back to the rates from April 2nd that also are the agreed upon rates in these totally real trade deals. Just like his previous delay was going to be his last trade war cave and that was his final offer when everyone was supposedly begging him to make a deal. The danger is at some point, Trump really isn’t going to fold because he serves his ego above all else and the TACO trade is clearly allllll the way under his skin. If conditions are set up for a stand on 19th century principle to be very damaging—like, say, a nonstop rise in bond yields towards 5 percent since the GOP passed its deficit exploding murder bill—his pigheaded obstinance really could snowball into an economic crisis.
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