In the Washington Post, behind a paywall:
Several of President Trump’s senior economic advisers believe he plans to push forward with 25 percent tariffs on close to $200 billion in foreign-made automobiles later this year, three people briefed on internal discussions said.
Trump wants to move forward despite numerous warnings from GOP leaders and business executives who have argued that such a move could damage the economy and lead to political mutiny.
Our trading partners are already targeting Traitor-Trump voters in their retaliatory actions, and not even his farmer bailout will save them from the harmful effects of his irrational actions (while leading trade-war victims in the seafood, energy, spirits, and other industries fuming about the lack of their own bailouts). Now, Trump is doing what he always does when under fire—he’s doubling down to show those people just who’s boss.
Thing is, Republicans are already openly in revolt over the $12 billion bailout, and conservative leaders aren’t particularly rallying around the tariffs to begin with. Further tariffs would simply spur stronger GOP legislative action to block the president’s power to unilaterally impose tariffs. Democrats are watching with glee as the GOP coalition splinters over the issue, with zero incentive to help out the loser in the White House.
So if you’re a trading partner, why bother negotiating with the Trump regime? You see Democrats building electoral steam, Republicans in utter disarray over the issue, and a public that already loathes Trump. Indeed, Trump’s tariffs are political poison, one of the few issues to move the needle of public opinion.
Look at how the independents have reacted to the tariffs slashing crop prices:
So it makes sense to wait things out, let Trump flounder, and patiently run out of the clock until more sane leadership emerges in Congress. Democrats will use the issue to further damage Trump politically, and to try and make gains in rural, white America.
Yet Trump, being his usual traitorous idiotic self, is walking around making enemies of our friends, and making enemies of everyone else not named Putin (treason has its requirements), ensuring that he has no backup or allies when making demands. He’s isolated and alienated internationally, and on this issue, isolated politically inside the United States. The entire world is arrayed against him.
So yes, why negotiate with him at all? Whatever merits his cause may have had, he’s made it impossible to rectify via negotiations. He’s already lost the battle, even as he digs himself an ever-deeper hole.