"A Psychopath's Trade War"

Economist Jeffrey Sachs sees the coming trade war with our allies as yet another sign of the gross unfitness of man baby moron Donald "Rump" Trump:

Trump's so-called policies are not really policies. Trade wars are on, off, on hold, on again, within the span of days. Summits are on, canceled, or maybe on. Foreign companies are sanctioned today and rescued the next. He says one day he would like to see overseas troops called home soon, and tells them to stay the next. Global agreements and rules are ripped to shreds. Trump's garbled syntax and disorganized thoughts are impossible to follow. 

The US has probably never before had a delusional President, one who speaks gibberish, insults those around him including his closest associates, and baffles the world. By instinct, we strive to make sense of Trump's nonsense, implicitly assuming some hidden strategy. There is none.  [snip]

Trump creates chaos for no reason other than his own flagrant inability to follow rules or respect the interests of others. His is a psychopath's trade war... 

The leader of one of our closest allies, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada, had this to say about Rump's tariff on steel and aluminum tariffs, which was premised on "national security" grounds:

“The idea that our soldiers, who have fought and died together on the beaches of World War II, on the mountains of Afghanistan, and have stood shoulder to shoulder in some of the most difficult places in the world, that are always there for each other, somehow … this is insulting to them. The idea that the Canadian steel that’s in military vehicles in the United States, the Canadian aluminum that makes your fighter jets, is somehow now a ‘threat’…” he said in an interview with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” 

“Next week, we’re hosting a summit of the G-7 of world leaders, and the airfield, the military base that Air Force One is going to land in was put there in World War II to protect an aluminum smelter that was providing to the military effort,” Trudeau added. “The idea that we are somehow a national security threat to the United States is quite frankly insulting and unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, Rump resists imposing and then implementing sanctions on Russia and works to save a Chinese telecomm company that sold U.S. made surveillance equipment to sanctioned countries and lied about it.  As always, Rump is operating at the intersection of incompetence, criminality, psychopathy and treason.

With these latest sets of actions, as the song goes, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.