Trump Says His Favorite Idea Is “Not Sustainable” But “It Could Stand”

By Jacob Weindling | October 17, 2025 | 3:21pm

Screenshot via Fox Business

Economy Trade War

Trump Says His Favorite Idea Is “Not Sustainable” But “It Could Stand”

The markets have not been pleased with president deals lately, with the crypto market particularly taking it on the chin, hilariously due to just one after-hours post from Trump calling for new 100 percent tariffs on China to take effect next month. This was not the first time Trump has threatened what his own Treasury Secretary has called an “embargo” in the past. He has one move in his trade war to try to create leverage and it’s slapping tariffs on China that are “not sustainable.” Merely threatening them caused crypto’s largest debt-driven wipeout ever last Friday because it came out of nowhere and no one was positioned for it, and countless annoying crypto bros have deactivated their MechaHitler accounts to become the meme they made fun of the last year and filled out a McDonald’s application this week. Not everything is bad, some parts of nature are actually healing amidst all this hell.

And Trump’s precious stock market is threatening to follow crypto’s path to the McDonald’s employment line and end the good times. Talk of a bubble abounds with comparisons to the dot com bust, and everyone and their mother knows the stock market obsessed with and propped up by AI is shambolically over-valued relative to earnings—yet everyone and their mother keeps buying stocks—except for much of smart money, as money market funds are currently seeing an all-time high of $7.6 trillion in cash sitting in them. All that said, there is one thing Trump has proven he can do to please his masters in the stock market who have anointed him as their ZIRP god: TACO.

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“It’s not sustainable,” said Trump today about his additional 100 percent tariff, bringing the total Chinese rate to 157 percent. “But, uh, that’s what the number is. It’s probably not—you know—it could stand. But…uhhh…they forced me to do that.” I transcribed the whole quote as it unfolded on Fox Business, because the short Trump quotes I discovered across most of financial media today make this sound more certain than it seemed it did watching him hem and haw through admitting that China is squeezing him. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that “China is trying to strengthen its leverage over Trump—whom it sees as eager to strike a deal—in a bid to extract concessions on tariffs and tech controls,” utilizing tools like restrictions on rare-earth minerals needed for the AI arms race.

The stock market, ever the crytpo-style perpetual enthusiasts, stopped reading this headline at “not sustainable” to go buy more Tesla shares (up 2.46 percent on a day the Nasdaq was up 0.65 percent). Unfortunately for the moonbois populating the stock market, he kept talking, agreeing that his idea that the market thinks could tank the market “could stand.” In fact, back in April, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the exact same thing, that the tariffs on China are “not sustainable.” Yet here we are as the leaves are falling, doing the same dance from months ago. Everything is so unfathomably stupid all the time.

“We’re doing very well with China. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I can’t tell you,” said the man who promised 90 deals in 90 days 192 days ago. “We’re gonna meet in a couple of weeks. We’re gonna meet in South Korea actually with President Xi and other people too. We’re gonna meet—we have separate meetings set up.”

Meetings! Of course! That’s why we don’t have a China trade deal yet. All we need to do is set some of those up—separate ones too—and then we’ll surely get the Chinese to stop bankrupting American farmers with an assist from the American president through his handout to Argentina.

In one of Trump’s more vulnerable moments in this short clip from a longer interview that Maria Bartoromo will release on Sunday, Trump exasperatingly said, “They’re always looking for an edge,” surely referencing moves like China sanctioning key U.S. shipbuilders in South Korea or how they have taken over $12 billion in soybean purchases last year down to $0 or the aforementioned rare-earth mineral restrictions. Trump is getting squeezed and he knows it.

“I think we’re gonna be fine with China but it’s gotta be fair—it’s gotta be a fair deal,” said Trump for what I can only estimate is the millionth time this year. I should note that everything quoted above which was released to ensure the weekly S&P500 candle closed in the green comes from a two and a half minute out of context snippet on Fox Business. But if it was enough for the stock market to talk itself into buying more Tesla, it’s enough for me to do some armchair psychoanalysis and suggest that the exasperation of fighting this war of Trump’s choosing is becoming more obvious every time he talks about his biggest frenemy in President Xi.

“I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line, they were getting yippy, because we have a big job to do,” boasted Trump when he created the genesis of the TACO trade back in April. He didn’t even bother to acknowledge the wreckage the market suggested was en route should he continue this policy he announced on liberation day, and he actually downplayed the market crash he created as “yippy.” Now he’s willing to admit that his favorite move with China is “not sustainable” while lamenting that they are the reason he is being pushed into these corners he constructed for himself and the rest of our economy back in April.

Trump loves to jawbone the market, and this is another instance of it, but we have reached a stage in this trade war where for the economy’s sake, the rubber must meet the road. We are not in stagflation, but stagflationary dynamics are rising and the Fed is openly stating they are worried about inflation the Trump tariffs are embedding in the economy. He is right on one thing, this is “not sustainable,” and it is entirely up to him how long he wants to wage this war of his choosing in a bid to implement debunked 19th century economic thought around the world.

The problem for the rest of us is that we do live in a society after all, and it is one that is incredibly dependent on the American stock market to generate wealth effects and spur consumer spending among the wealthiest people who have propped up most post-2020 economic growth. Gita Gopinath, the former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund, recently penned a harrowing column in The Economist where she detailed what can only be described as deep recession-scale math.

“To put the potential impact in perspective, I calculate that a market correction of the same magnitude as the dotcom crash could wipe out over $20 trillion in wealth for American households, equivalent to roughly 70 percent of American GDP in 2024,” wrote Gopinath. “This is several times larger than the losses incurred during the crash of the early 2000s. The implications for consumption would be grave. Consumption growth is already weaker than it was preceding the dotcom crash. A shock of this magnitude could cut it by 3.5 percentage points, translating into a two-percentage-point hit to overall GDP growth, even before accounting for declines in investment.”

To provide some scale for her calculations, the 2008-2009 Great Recession saw U.S. GDP fall 4.3 percent, so this isn’t some Great Depression-level event she calculated, but it is in line with deep recessions of the past like the Eisenhower Recession of 1957-58 or the 1973-75 stagflationary spell that Trump so desperately wants to make great again (fun fact: every single recession going back to the Eisenhower Recession, save for 1980, began with a Republican in office).

If the former chief economist of the IMF is writing this stuff in public, you can bet your bottom dollar (currently being sold at a discount!) that someone in Trump’s orbit has conveyed to him the scale of destruction he has at his fingertips. And sometimes, you can even see it on his face when Maria Bartiromo asks him about it.