"On Monday, U.S. and Chinese negotiators agreed to drastically reduce tariffs in an effort to end the destructive trade war President Donald Trump started earlier this year. Chinese tariffs on American goods will fall from 125 percent to 10 percent, while U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods will be reduced from 145 percent to 30 percent. The agreement has sent global stocks soaring, and MAGA is taking a victory lap.
This 'breakthrough' is an encapsulation of Trumponomics: First, create a crisis that leads to deep anxiety and global instability, then desperately try to defuse the crisis while publicly maintaining an attitude of belligerence and confidence. In the case of Trump’s eye-watering tariffs—which threatened to grind a significant share of global trade to a halt and which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent insisted were not “sustainable”—it wasn’t difficult to get China to agree to back out of economic mutually assured destruction. The final step in Trumponomics is to surrender a few concessions that are nowhere near justified by the scale of the original crisis Trump manufactured, like China’s pledge to cooperate on fentanyl ingredient trafficking—and declare victory." (our emphasis) -- Matt Johnson, writing in The Bulwark about the Trump tariff fiasco.
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