I was following HN guidelines and trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation. However, try a I might, I can't come up with anything better than '

I was following HN guidelines and trying to come up with the most charitable interpretation. However, try a I might, I can't come up with anything better than 'sheer incompetence' Tariffs can work, but they need to be paired with sound industrial policy and careful, strategic implementation. At the best of times, it takes a decade plus for the results to start showing. Instead of that, so far we have seen * Tariffs imposed as executive orders under a dubious exercise of the National Emergencies Act. This alone pretty much guarantees that they will be rolled back by the next president * Zero participation from Congress and not even a pretense of attempting to build a bipartisan consensus * Haphazard implementation with rates and countries affected whiplashing wildly from day to day * Immediate capitulation at the first sign of trouble. At this point we have shown the world that * There is no real plan and probably never was a plan * Trump has no actual stomach for a fight. Big economies like China can just wait for Trump to fold completely * No one should be rushing to invest in the US given the shaky legal and political foundations of the tariffs We brought our economy to the brink of a financial crisis, alienated all of our long standing allies, destroyed confidence in the US Dollar and economy, eased off tariffs on China while China has done no such thing and our exports to them are still tariffed at over 100%. All of this for no real policy gains. It would be laughable if the consequences to us and future generations weren't so dire.