President Donald Trump was finishing up his Monday morning—this was, of course, after he’d pistol-whipped a panda to death and drank the rancid blood of an owl—and was ready to call it a day when he asked to borrow Jared Kushner’s phone to send a few tweets.
Those tweets have basically amounted to the president calling for Americans not to buy American products from American companies that manufacture in China because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.
The president’s aides have tried to limit his actual work to playing with adult coloring books, watching YouTube videos on how to manage 4YT hair and allowing him to tell the same jokes over and over again while they laugh as if they’ve never heard them before.
His favorites are:
Who did cats vote for in November?
Hillary Kitten.
And...
Why did Hillary Clinton run for president?
Because it’s easier than running from law enforcement.
But Trump got Kushner’s phone and locked himself in the presidential bathroom and, alas, because Trump doesn’t know his ass from his “Make America Great Again” hat, he’s literally encouraging Americans not to buy American products to hurt China.
From Think Progress:
The way tariffs work is that American businesses pay the fees for bringing in goods manufactured in China, which they then pass on to consumers. The president reasons, however, that Americans can easily avoid these increased costs.
Trump said there is “no reason” for U.S. consumers to pay the tariffs, before claiming that companies inside China would soon move to other countries. In the meantime, Trump said people should just buy products from inside the United States.
Tariffs can still have an impact on the cost of a product, even if you buy it from inside the United States.
And avoiding products manufactured in China could be a lot more challenging than Trump realizes. Countless American companies have factories in China that will be impacted by the broad list of targeted products. A variety of Trump-branded products are even manufactured in China and could be impacted.
Trump, who tries desperately to paint himself as a Midwestern president who supports farmers, may have just ruined that relationship. As NBC News’ Jonathan Allen pointed out on Monday, the call for an American company boycott would hurt American agriculture companies like Deere, Ford and Caterpillar. Think Progress notes it would also make things more difficult for American farmers, who already face the possibility of more tariffs from China on U.S. agricultural products like soy.
Trump’s so dumb...
How dumb is he?
His tariffs could actually impede his own plans to build his dumb-ass Southern border wall that no one wants. Think Progress notes that Trump has insisted “that the wall should be built exclusively with equipment manufactured by Caterpillar and John Deere.”
Trump’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow admitted in an interview Sunday that these tariffs will only amount to higher prices on goods that will just be passed on to the consumer.
Kudlow promised there would be additional bailouts for the farmers who are ravaged by the trade war, but there is currently no relief in sight. The Trump administration announced an original $12 billion bailout for farmers last year, but it’s unclear that the funding has actually reached them. It’s likewise unclear whether more bailouts would compensate for the additional burdens they might now face purchasing the equipment they require to run their farms.
China, which had promised to retaliate against the tariffs, announced on Monday that it would impose tariffs on $60 billion in U.S. goods beginning June 1.
All of this proves a couple of things that we already know:
1. The president shouldn’t be allowed near electronic devices that allow him to log into his social media account.
2. Presidential aides should always have baby goats at the ready for the president’s feeding time to keep him busy until his nap.
3. The president doesn’t understand tariffs but he likes to create enemies and he may have just done so by burning American companies.
And now we wait for the follow up tweet in which the president explains that he didn’t mean any of the shit he just sent out.