No, Donald Trump Does Not Know What The Hell He Is Doing

WASHINGTON — “I know what the hell I’m doing!”

That boaster-in-chief Donald Trump would say something like this is not surprising in the least. With his taking the wheel of a healthy economy and driving it headlong toward a cliff, that a single American can still believe him — now that is a surprise.

At the core of the president’s trade agenda is his “gut” feeling that if a country sells the U.S. more goods than it imports, it is by definition “ripping us off.” He believes that a trade deficit with foreign countries increases the U.S. budget deficit. He thinks that by imposing tariffs, he forces exporting nations to send money to the United States Treasury.

Every single one of his beliefs is dead wrong.

Madagascar, for example, is a poor African island nation that exports vanilla to countries all over the world, including the United States. It imports very little in expensive American goods because, as mentioned, it is poor. American cooks get a useful ingredient in recipes, and farmers in Madagascar get useful foreign revenue. There is no “ripping off” going on.

Second, there is no relationship between a country’s balance of trade and its internal finances. It’s entirely possible to have almost no exports and have a budget surplus, which is a function of internal taxes and spending. The United States, had it not done large tax cuts in 2001 and 2017, would have dramatically lower budget deficits today ― irrespective of the overall trade deficit.

Finally, Trump continues to claim — falsely — that other countries and foreign exporters pay American tariffs. “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs and taxes from China in my first term,” he said, yet again, in the Oval Office on Wednesday. And, yet again, it is not remotely true. Tariffs are federal taxes, and just like excise taxes on alcohol and gasoline taxes on motor fuels, they are paid by Americans.

That Trump in 2016 was given the benefit of the doubt on the economy is unsurprising. Over the decades, Republicans have been assumed to be better on that issue than Democrats, historical evidence notwithstanding.

On top of that, Trump played a savvy, billionaire businessman on NBC’s reality TV show “The Apprentice” for 14 years heading into the 2016 campaign, and Americans have long conflated wealth, even inherited wealth, with intellect. To this day, his supporters and apologists cite that show, and the book that it sprang from, “The Art of the Deal,” as proof of his financial acumen.

“Many of you in the media clearly missed ‘The Art of the Deal’,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lectured reporters just after Trump had announced a 90-day delay in the implementation of his misleadingly named “reciprocal” tariffs.

Leavitt forgot to mention that just four years after that book, Trump filed the first of his six business bankruptcies for one of his casinos in Atlantic City. (Yes, he bankrupted casinos, which are essentially licenses to print money.)

In any event, now that Trump has tied the fate of both the American and global economy to the signing of individual trade agreements with dozens of other countries, success is now largely dependent onhow the rest of the world sees him.

It goes without saying, but it’s not just Americans who watch Trump ramble on incoherently about things he clearly does not understand. People in other countries are watching, as well.

So when he blends his false views on how tariffs work with an absurd theory about Canadian water somehow flowing uphill and across multiple watersheds to end up in California with an equally absurd and ahistorical analysis that the European Union was created solely to “screw” the United States — how is the rest of the world to process that?

Trump’s chorus of sycophants and enablers have long justified Trump’s unhinged statements as an intentional strategy, that his pretending to be a madman works to his advantage, and that he can win concessions from world leaders who fear his unpredictability.

Whether other leaders assess him as a madman or more of a toddler is a debate for another day, but what is historical fact is that even flattering Trump for his great leadership and insight — as the leaders of Canada and Mexico did during Trump’s first term, when he insisted on renaming the North American Free Trade Agreement as the United States Mexico Canada Agreement — does not guarantee stability. Trump bragged endlessly about how great his new trade deal was, but just five years later, he has unilaterally abrogated it with new tariffs against both other countries.

One of the most insightful articles about Trump and his myth was published by The New Yorker during his first term. It tracked down people who worked on “The Apprentice,” who revealed that Trump was so undisciplined, he sometimes “fired” the wrong contestant in the boardroom scene, leaving producers to sift through footage to revise the script and justify what he had done. “I find it strangely validating to hear that they’re doing the same thing in the White House,” show editor Jonathon Braun told the magazine, referring to the executive branch’s frequent attempts to reverse-engineer a policy to match Trump’s false statements.

Unfortunately for America, there is no sifting through unused video to make what Trump has done with his recreational trade war come out right. Trump has squandered the country’s leadership of the free-market democracies by picking a fight with all of them, based entirely on his zero-sum view of the world.

This is what the stock market and, more significantly, the bond market are telling us: that Donald Trump cannot be trusted not to wreck the economy. This message is already crossing over to the general public, as evidenced by the cratering of consumer confidence. And all this comes before substantial price hikes have started to hit your local Walmart and Target and grocery store.

Trump’s audience for his “I know what the hell I’m doing” boast last week was Republican members of Congress and their donors. But in the financial markets and in more and more surveys of average Americans, the response has been: No, you most certainly do not.