Donald Trump’s crybaby style of negotiating with anyone and anything has proven to be terrible. Unfortunately for America, Trump is the president now, and he gets to apply his bullying style and utter lack of intelligence to important policies that affect hundreds of millions of people. A great example of his deficient intelligence has been his creation and handling of a trade war with everyone not named Russia. Harley-Davidson, a very American-branded company, seemed to be a great match for the MAGA crowd, and Trump had touted how he was going to make America and Harley-Davidson great again. Of course, as costs for some of the many parts that Harley-Davidson uses to manufacture its products began to skyrocket—a direct result of Trump’s trade war—the company began to do what companies do—it’s closed American plants and moved operations overseas, to cut costs.
Bloomberg Business reports that Harley-Davidson “barely broke even in the last quarter of a year in which the struggling American icon got caught up in President Donald Trump’s trade wars.” Here’s some art of the deal from Donald Trump earlier this year.
I guess offering up tweets with empty promises doesn’t make businesses run better. Who woulda thought?
One of Trump’s great campaign promises was that he would apply his business acumen to our country’s economy. If being the president of the United States is like being the country’s CEO, then Trump should be great at that, right? Of course, anyone who understood pretty much anything about anything could see that Donald Trump wasn’t very good at anything besides blowing smoke up his own ass.
Now this is not simply a problem that Donald Trump created by himself. Big businesses are only “nationalistic” in a whimsical way, hiding taxes overseas and using cheap foreign labor when it suits their bottom line. Of course, not only has Trump created a new set of circumstances that hurts American manufacturing and jobs, but he also has no interest in or plan for changing it—and he can’t help but make it worse.