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We finally have our answer. After years of vague slogans and red hats, Donald Trump has revealed exactly when he believes America was great: 1789. Yes, the year George Washington became president. The year the U.S. Constitution took effect. The year “we the people” meant wealthy white landowners, while women, Black people, Indigenous peoples, and the working class were denied basic rights, voices, or dignity. That’s the America he wants to bring back, not just in spirit, but in economic policy.
In what may go down as the most chaotic and economically incoherent press conference in modern history, Trump took to the White House Rose Garden to announce sweeping new tariffs that immediately sent markets into a tailspin. The plan? A blanket 10 percent baseline tariff on all countries, effective April 5, with even steeper “reciprocal” tariffs for specific countries based on whatever Trump perceives as “cheating.” What the market expected was a moderate, maybe even symbolic gesture. What it got was Trump doing economic cosplay with a magic marker and a flimsy chart, channeling the ghosts of mercantilism and the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act like they’re founding fathers.
Wall Street reacted like a cat thrown into a bathtub. Dow futures plummeted more than 1,000 points. The S&P 500 dropped 3.6 percent. The Nasdaq? Down 4.5 percent. This wasn’t a mild correction, it was an after-hours crash. Shares of major multinationals like Nike and Apple each fell around 7 percent. Retailers that rely on imports got obliterated: Five Below cratered 14 percent, Dollar Tree fell 11, and Gap dropped 8.5. Even tech giants weren’t spared, with Nvidia shedding 5 percent and Tesla down 7, ironic, considering Trump’s awkward love-hate tango with Musk.
The administration tried to clarify, but only made things worse. According to a White House follow-up, countries like China could now face an effective 54 percent tariff rate once you add Trump’s new “reciprocal” logic to existing penalties. Traders had hoped for a capped rate of 10 to 20 percent across the board. Instead, they got a fever dream of vengeance tariffs, delivered like a kindergarten show-and-tell, complete with oversized charts and half-formed math.
Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth Management, didn’t mince words. “What was delivered was as haphazard as anything this administration has done to date,” he told CNBC. “The level of complication on top of the ultimate level of new tariffs is worse than had been feared and not yet priced into the market.” Larry Tentarelli of the Blue Chip Trend Report echoed that if Trump had simply stuck to the 10 percent, markets might have gone up. But Trump can’t help himself. He had to go big, chaotic, and wildly unpredictable.
Then came the history lesson. Trump declared, with his usual smug certainty, that from 1789 to 1913, the United States was the wealthiest it’s ever been, purely because of tariffs. According to him, we were collecting so much money so fast that the government didn’t know what to do with it. Of course, he left out the part where most Americans lived in poverty, where wealth was concentrated in a few monopolists' hands, and where child labor and 14-hour workdays were the norm. The “wealth” he refers to was largely theoretical for the average citizen and absolutely real for the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, and other Robber Barons of the Gilded Age. Tariffs weren’t some magic goose laying golden eggs, they were regressive taxes that hit working people hardest, all while padding the profits of a corrupt elite. Sound familiar?
In the same breath, Trump launched a bizarre tirade against Canada, yes, Canada. Our closest ally, trading partner, and the only country that says “sorry” when we mess up. He claimed the U.S. subsidizes Canada to the tune of $200 billion a year, and that it’s time for them to fend for themselves. Canadian officials, not surprisingly, are now organizing boycotts of U.S. goods and tourism. That’s what you get when you treat allies like enemies and think you’re negotiating a Manhattan real estate deal instead of running global trade.
As Trump spun his globetrotting list of economic enemies, from Vietnam to Taiwan to the European Union, he declared this moment “Liberation Day.” Liberation Day!?! He actually said that years from now, we’ll all look back on this press conference as the day we got “so rich, so fast.” You know who else promises riches if you just believe hard enough? Cult leaders.
And while the markets reeled and global confidence in American leadership sank, Trump rambled about plastic Easter eggs. You read that right. Midway through the economic collapse, he paused to thank someone named Brooke for ensuring there’d be enough plastic eggs for Easter. He praised the term “groceries” as a beautiful, old-fashioned word. These are the thoughts swirling around in the mind of the man who just launched a global trade war.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more absurd, Trump forgot to sign the executive order he had spent the entire press conference hyping. An aide had to remind him. He ambled back, scribbled his name, then wandered off again, apparently satisfied that he’d just rescued the economy by detonating a stick of dynamite under it.
This is economic sabotage. Whether through malice or incompetence or, more likely, both Trump is isolating the United States on the world stage, tanking the markets, worsening inflation, and burdening working families with the cost of his 18th-century cosplay. These aren’t policies. They’re performance art. And the rest of us are footing the bill.
History won’t remember this as Liberation Day. It will remember it as the day America’s last shreds of economic sanity were tossed into a bonfire of delusion, lit by a man who thinks tariffs are magic beans and “groceries” is a fancy word for freedom.
#kakistocracy #TradeWar #tariffs #MAGACult
