Everyone knew that President Trump was going to pull the trigger on his big tariff policy on Wednesday, but he actually dropped a nuclear bomb. He put a 10% tariff on nearly every country in the world and added even more on a number of them based upon a goofy formula that reflected false assumptions at best or Trump's personal whims at worst. It sent shock waves across the globe, with the markets taking a massive tumble and economic forecasters scrambling to revise upwards their predictions for a recession. Let's just say it was not well received.
Everyone knew something was coming, but no one expected his plan to be so random and incoherent. The fact that it included tariffs on uninhabited islands and territories that are essentially U.S. military bases just proved that it was sloppily put together, likely by AI, and hadn't been vetted by anyone who knew what they were talking about. It is a radical reordering of the global trading system by a president who is clueless about how any of this works.
