Trump’s Tariff Tantrum and the Fake “Deal” With China

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Tariffs and trade deals, maybe, possibly. I don’t know. I don’t know. Again, the news came out this week. my God, look, it looked like we got a deal with China. I’m like, what? There’s no deal. Let me go back to June. And we had a trade deal in June, supposedly, where China was paying 55 % and we were gonna pay 10%. It was gone. That deal’s gone. Again, the whole rare earth minerals.

bit. If you actually read the release, as of right now, China’s holding off for a year and we are pulling the 100 % tariff deal. I don’t know what this means going forward. Again, supposedly Trump and Xi are supposed to meet up on Thursday. We shall see. We shall see. Scott Bessent took to the

Took to the airwaves this weekend. And again, he was asked about inflation here and he’s like, you’re cherry picking, egg prices are down and gasoline is down. Okay, Scott, whatever. I knew you were prepared for that question, but come on, All right, stop. Okay, cut it out. Okay, you just had a 3 % inflation print, man.

And everyone’s high five in one another at 3%. The feds old target was two for crying out loud and they’re high fiving each other at three. Yeah, price has really fallen off a cliff, man. Anyway, and he talked about soybeans and soybean farmers and they’re upset. And again, Scott like said, well, just so you know, I’m a soybean farmer. Because.

You own farmland that you lease to a soybean farmer doesn’t make you a farmer, okay? I own Apple stock, Scott, and that doesn’t make me a coder for crying out loud. Come on, man. For crying out he knows that if you’re wealthy, there’s a million different types of tax deductions and things you can do when it comes to owning farmland. For crying out loud.

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I mean, I had three acres on Long Island. All I needed to do was to get some chickens and I would have gotten a massive tax break for crying out loud. There’s a lot of ways of gaming the system that wealthy people do and farmland is one of them. I’ve talked about the amount of farm checks that go to Park Avenue addresses. Okay, Scott, you live in what? Charleston? Yeah, I think that’s where he lives. Anyway, so his farm check is going there. He’s not out in North Dakota pulling weeds or running a tractor. Farmer Scott, give me a break.

Anyway, I think they they’re starting to see the writing on the wall when it comes to what may happen with the Supreme Court and tariffs. And I don’t think Trump helped himself last week. We talked about it on the podcast briefly talked to me on how he threw a tantrum based upon the advertisement that was run by Ontario.

And again, I didn’t think it was smart for Ontario to do that either. but they did. And you know, Trump basically coming out and saying that Reagan was pro-tariff. No, he wasn’t. Just stop saying crap. That’s not true. It bothers the hell out of me. Okay. Stop.

I had nothing. If you disagree with Ray, say you disagree with his policies. Okay, that’s fine. But don’t say that he was pro Trump terror policies because he wasn’t. And again, you can go and you can watch the video. No, it wasn’t taken out of context and no, there was no AI. Okay. Yeah. It was chopped up in different pieces. It wasn’t the whole thing, but go watch the entire radio address or listen to it. You can. Okay. Reagan was not pro-tariff. Now.

What Trump did by imposing this additional tariff on Canada because he was upset about the commercial. Do you understand it doesn’t help his case in front of the Supreme Court? You get it? This is supposed to be for an emergency. What? The emergency you raised tariffs on Canada because you didn’t like a commercial they ran? I don’t see how that’s

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going to help them. Okay. I know. Anyway, we’ll talk about this. The journal wrote about this today. We’ll talk about the

Well, it was actually had to do when he did when Ronald Reagan put tariffs on semiconductors coming out of Japan. was a basically his what he did at that point in time. had Democrats in Congress, which were led at the time by Dick Gephardt, and they were threatening tariffs.

And Reagan in his speech wanted to basically warn everybody about the protectionist damage from the past. And he talked about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and how it contributed to the Great Depression. Can’t have some bit in Ferris Bueller’s day off for crying out loud with Ben Stein. Anyway, Reagan’s semiconductor tariffs, how’d that work out? Intel lobbied for the tariffs. Basically the

The U.S. at computer chip industrial policy focused around the Semitech consortium. That was, it didn’t work out. Okay. If you remember Cypress Semiconductor, okay. It didn’t work out. Now, again, I understand when you’re talking about certain aspects, China, industrial policy. I’ve talked about this before. This was a lot of America’s companies, basically.

giving away their intellectual property to China for period of time because they just wanted to have access to that market. Shouldn’t have done that. Shouldn’t have done that. And yeah, many of the trade policies we have were in work. And I understand we need to correct that. But the entire globe, I like the deals that he’s doing and I’m gonna give credit where credit is due like he had with Australia when it came to rare earth minerals. Deal with your friends. You wanna push back against China and their policies?

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Why would you go after your friends? Wouldn’t it be better to cut much better deals with them and have a vibrant trade relationship with them? That I think works. And hopefully that’s what we’re going to see happen. Don’t know how the Supreme Court’s gonna come down on these things. The costs are working their way down into the public just like we said it was going to do. Okay, that’s just the reality. How it ends up, we don’t know. Okay, but as far as any trade deal with China, there’s been no deal.

as of yet. I can hope so. I can hope so. Because again, we’d like business to be conducted. Right now, traffic on ships between China and the United States is hitting lows. We’re talking, you know, going back some time. Not as much business is being done. Now, I’m a big believer that you want to do business. We don’t have to have

this awful adversarial relationship with China. Okay, I know there’s a lot of big push out there. Yeah, and a lot of the neocons jumping on this as well that China wants to dominate the entire world. Again, I don’t see it.

I don’t see it. I don’t. Sorry. Okay. Do I think that they’ve got major issues? Are they very, very different than we are as far as their belief system? I? I’m not a fan. Okay. Jimmy Lai, all these things. Yeah. I understand all that. Okay. I get all that. And seems to me, Xi Jinping is definitely a change from Hu Jintao and Deng Xiaoping.

But I’m sorry, I don’t believe that he’s gonna be there for us.

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Okay. yeah, he kind of made himself, you know, again, you take a look at the economy in China and how the people are doing. Okay. And there is going to be pushback for all intensive purposes. They are in a massive recession. You’ve got deflation going on there because people are not spending anything. They need to kick their economy into gear and they need to do business with the rest of the world.

they can’t close themselves off. Again, they would collapse. So again, use this as an opportunity. Like I said, God willing, cooler heads prevail. We get some sort of decent trade deal and we can put a lot of these crazy tariffs to bed. Watchdogonwallstreet.com.