In a town that never really liked Donald Trump much anyway, it’s getting harder to find anyone who has a good word to say about him, even grudgingly.
And then came the tariffs, which damaged America’s export markets and hammered the stock markets.
“The consequences are still unfurling, but the stakes are high,” the NYT columnist Jeff Sommer said of the dangerous volatility the tariffs unleashed. “They include the possibility of a global recession and geopolitical shifts that may not be in the interests of the United States – all occurring because of the swiftly shifting decisions by the president.”
While analysts fulminated, comedians riffed, and cynics shook their heads in told-you-so sobriety, the whipsawing stock market simultaneously destroyed the value of savings and pensions for tens of millions of Americans, while making Trump’s coterie of billionaire buddies even richer on what many now suspect may amount to market manipulation by those with insider access.
Footage circulated of Trump meeting besuited men in the Oval Office on April 9, sharing a laugh about how much money they made from the stock market ups and downs resulting from his pronouncements. The whiplash meant those with early knowledge could sell high, buy low – a pattern that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
“This is Charles Schwab,” Trump says in the footage, pointing toward the man who founded the eponymous brokerage firm. “He made two and a half billion today.” He points to another. “And he made 900 million there. That’s not bad.”
“He is helping his friends get richer. They’re all billionaires, they have no clue or care what happens to ordinary people,” said a Columbia University economics student over tea in her campus apartment.
“Buy low, sell high. Only the rich can win in such a sophisticated market as this one,” she said, even before the Oval Office footage went viral.
As Trump and his ilk laugh all the way to the bank, American farmers, who largely voted for him, are watching their biggest markets in China, Canada and Mexico evaporate.
American consumers are learning fast about how much of what they buy is “Made in China” and how much those goods might cost if manufacturing is brought back to the United States, which Trump says is his aim.
The comedian Dave Chappelle riffed during Trump’s first presidency about his purported plan to move factory jobs home. “For what? So iPhone’s can be $9,000? Leave that job in China where it belongs. None of us want to work that hard,” he said in a 2017 stand-up routine now recirculating online.
In what was perhaps an “oops” moment late on April 11, Trump exempted smartphones, as well as some computers and laptops from the 125 percent levy on Chinese imports.
Comedian Steve Hofstetter said: “If I dangle you over the edge of a building and then pull you back to safety, I didn’t save you, I almost killed you. That is what Trump just did to the economy.”
“Oh look! Even the Wall Street Journal now concedes the markets are in turmoil,” said a lecturer at City University NY’s graduate school of journalism as she surveyed a table covered in newspapers. Bloomberg TV flickered silently in the background, trying to keep track of plummeting equity values.
Contempt for Trump’s supporters – widely referred to as Magas – was on open display among liberal New Yorkers, one of whom called them “abused children”.
“WTF, who’s in charge?” Steve Horsford, a Democratic Congressman from Nevada and member of the House Ways and Means Committee, yelled at Trump’s trade representative Jamieson Greer, who was testifying live when news of the tariffs pause broke.
“It looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you and paused the tariffs, the taxes on the American people. There’s no strategy. You just found out three seconds ago,” Horsford shouted at Greer. “If it was always the plan, how is this not market manipulation?”
In this atmosphere of policy whiplash, America’s trading partners are recalibrating, multinational firms are pulling back, and domestic industries face renewed uncertainty. What began as a populist power play may yet come to define a new era of geopolitical and economic unpredictability, one shaped less by strategy than by spectacle.
The fallout, of course, has extended far beyond America’s borders. In Brussels, EU officials have warned that the new tariff regime risks sparking a wider trade conflagration, with European exports, especially automobiles, aerospace parts, and farm products, now facing uncertain access to US markets.
Beijing’s swift retaliation, while escalating tensions, has signalled China’s readiness to decouple from US-dominated supply chains, accelerating moves to deepen economic ties with Europe.
For America’s allies and rivals alike, the message is loud and clear: Trump’s impulsive trade measures are not just domestic posturing but are redrawing the map of global commerce, and not to America’s benefit.
