Donald Trump knows not a damn thing about trade, and he has surrounded himself by conservative functionaries like, sigh, Larry Kudlow who somehow manages to know even less. This is how we’ve gotten ourselves into a trade war with Canada, Europe, China, Mexico, and take-your-pick; some idiot convinced Trump he could impose punitive tariffs on America’s allies and competitors alike and none of those countries would bother to respond—a notion that is at odds with the entire history of modern trade. It turns out they were—surprise!—extremely wrong, yet again, and the now Trump and those nations are in a rapidly escalating tit-for-tat series of tariffs that are already threatening to put U.S. companies out of business, have caused iconic motorcycle company Harley-Davidson to announce they’re moving production to Europe, and are threatening to destabilize large swaths of the nation’s agricultural sector.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, in the midst of this, took to television Monday morning to say that it doesn’t matter what the economic repercussions were, the White House was prepared to light every last one of you on fire in order to make whatever point Donald thinks he’s making. Sucks to be you, everyone.
"There's no bright line level of the stock market that's going to change policy," Ross said on "Squawk Box." "The president is trying to fix long-term problems that should have been fixed a long time ago."
"There is obviously going to be some pulling and tugging as we try to deal with very serious problems," he said. "There will be some hiccups long the way."
This is obviously very bad news, because it means no matter how bad the signals from the stock market get, Larry, Curly and Moe here say they’re convinced that all the economic pain Trump’s trade war inflicts will be offset later by the magical pixies these incompetent bumbling morons expect will someday appear, after a whole heaping number of businesses and farms go under, Because Magic. In practice the predicted Magic Pixies have never once appeared, not after any tax cut, not after any budget-slashing, not ever, but as of yet being completely wrong for forty damn years has not had any measurable impact on the television or political careers of any of the people involved. Nice work if you can get it, apparently.
Given the staggering level of incompetence the conservative economic brigades exhibited just before the economic collapse of the Bush years—a collapse Larry Kudlow himself swore would never happen even as things went to hell around everybody else’s ears—things look grim. Trump’s team is willing to risk the entire economy on his latest episode of Look How Big My “Hands” Are, and there’s nobody in the building with the base competence needed to even suggest why that might not work out the way they super-duper think it will.