Maybe Trump Is Intentionally Creating a Mini-Recession

Key audience isn’t Canada, Mexico, or China, but Jay Powell

A “made in China” Costco beach umbrella on a Massachusetts beach. Photo: The Editors.

What is President Trump thinking? Or is he thinking at all? Every time he talks about imposing tariffs, the stock market tanks. Even so, Trump keeps going out and talking about imposing tariffs. So far he’s destroyed more than $5 trillion in market value.

Bret Stephens interprets it as “dumbness,” proof that Trump is “ignorant” and “incompetent” and “heedless.” The “heedless” part suggests an almost pathological refusal by Trump to accept the reality around him, which is a dangerous trait in an American president, who, after all, has not only power to shape the economy but also controls a nuclear arsenal.

A lot of people agree with the “dumb” or “crazy” explanations of Trump, which aren’t mutually exclusive.

Yet, at least on the tariff persistence issue, there’s an alternative possible explanation for Trump’s behavior that had not occurred to me until a sophisticated paying subscriber to The Editors (a redundancy, because there are no unsophisticated paying subscribers to The Editors) floated it to me earlier this week. I share it here not because I’m entirely convinced it is correct, but because it’s clever, it’s not something I’d seen elsewhere, and the possibility that it could be correct cheered me up.