Even without trade deals, Trump is winning his tariff war
The American president has only one thing on his mind: building the highest possible tariff barriers. Countries trying to fend off the tariff offensive, whether allies or adversaries, should be wary. He doesn't care about agreements, observes this Wall Street Journal reporter.
Donald Trump announced that tariffs would increase sharply for major trading partners starting August 1 if no agreements are reached.
Both markets and foreign negotiators shrugged. After all, Trump had already paused most of his new tariffs in early April, and his team had promised to conclude no fewer than 90 agreements in 90 days.
That 90-day deadline has been over a week, and there has been only one formal agreement, with the United Kingdom , and semblance agreements with Vietnam and Indonesia.
This meager harvest fuels the “TACO” narrative for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” a trade policy where “Trump always chickens out,” acts the fool, but achieves nothing with his trade war.
This misunderstands Trump's objectives, overestimates the true importance of the agreements, and underestimates his desire to increase trade barriers.
Since the beginning of his second term, many in Trump's inner circle have taken pleasure in presenting the tariff threat as a negotiating tool to push other countries to lower their own customs duties and buy more American products.
Trump himself never subscribed to this vision.
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The Wall Street Journal (New York)It's the bible of the business world. But it must be handled with caution: on the one hand, high-quality investigations and reports, with a concern for neutrality. On the other, highly partisan editorial pages. The columnists and the editorial board defend, often virulently, conservative points of view, even if the publication has always maintained a certain distance from Donald Trump.
Winner of 39 Pulitzer Prizes, The WSJ is best known for its financial market analysis and its coverage of management and business trends. Since its acquisition in July 2007 by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the daily has evolved into a more general format to rival The New York Times. A luxury lifestyle supplement, called WSJ Magazine, was launched in September 2008.
Based in New York's financial district since its founding in 1889, the newsroom moved from Wall Street in 2008 to News Corp., a little further north, to Midtown. It has a total of 1,800 journalists in nearly fifty countries.
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