Tariffs are not all they’ve been made out to be. So, Trump is making them out to be something else. From David Haggith at thedailydoom.com:
Suddenly the Battle Hymn of the Republic is sounding a lot less MAGA because the Trump just won a great victory that will allow all of us to pay more forever for less of everything! Winning bigly!
(I’m going to cover a story I didn’t have time to on Wednesday for medical reasons when the news came out along with several other stories that sang the same tune on Thursday about how Trump is changing his tune A LOT … on a lot of things. And I’m going to do it on Friday when I don’t usually publish because I couldn’t get it out on Thursday either. So this, roughly catches us back up.)
The biggest change in Trump’s tariff tune
Wednesday’s story, which I’ve added back into the headlines today, was about how Trump is sounding off a lot differently about the impacts his tariffs will have on the economy. While the whole Trump Team originally repeated in perfect harmony that tariffs would not cause inflation and then admitted there would be “a little” suffering that had to be endured short term for the greater good, Trump, himself, is now admitting there will be inflation, and it sounds like the pain will be quite a bit greater than his team first let on. Or maybe a lot greater (which they still are not letting on). Everything they sang to us from the start was Looney Tunes.
I’ve referred to Trump’s new change of tune on inflation already as his “Then let them eat dolls” version of Marie Antoinette’s infamous statement when told that the peasants could no longer afford bread, “Then let them eat cake!” Trump showed himself to be equally tone deaf this week.
“This feels tone-deaf to me. This is, ‘You’re too materialistic. You don’t need as many dollars as you think.’ And he’s a very strange messenger for that message, and I don’t think it’s going to sell,” Holtz-Eakin said.
His actual statement went like this:
Trump was asked Sunday by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he would acknowledge that his tariff plan will result in higher prices….
He suggested that American children, for example, do not need as many toys and that Americans do not need to spend as much money on “junk we don’t need.”
“I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five,” Trump said, acknowledging the prices of such items could also go up.
