Trump lackeys have no idea why they’re about to impose the largest regressive tax increase in modern American history

A large across-the-board tariff is about to be imposed because the president is a total crackpot who loved McKinley-era tariffs even before he went senile because he legitimately cannot grasp the concept of a positive-sum exchange. This has left administration officials to come up with some mutually incompatible retroactive justifications for the policy:

President Trump has said that the global tariffs he plans to announce this week will correct decades of unfair relationships and stop other countries from ripping off the United States. But whether the president’s so-called reciprocal tariffs will result in higher levies on other nations or lower ones remains unclear.

The president has described his global tariffs as a negotiating tool that could force other countries to drop their trade barriers to American products and result in more goods flowing across borders.

But the president has also talked about the tariffs as a way to raise revenue for the government and shift supply chains back to the United States. For those goals to be accomplished, relatively high tariffs would have to be imposed, and not dropped.

Those conflicting goals will come to a head this week, when Mr. Trump is expected to reveal the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Mr. Trump has taken to calling April 2 “liberation day,” saying it will represent the country breaking free of past trade relationships that he says have hurt the United States.

There’s another contradiction here — people like Peter Navarro insist that this will generate huge amounts of revenue, but if this is true it’s because people are still buying large amounts of imports and they’re not really working as protectionist measures.

But trying to find any rationality here is a fool’s errand — he’s just going to crash the economy based on crude initiations that are completely irrational.