An offer you can’t accept

A good summary by Krugman about why Trump’s attempts to leverage countries have been a dismal failure:

The Canadian election, then, demonstrates why Trumpist trade policy, and foreign policy in general, is doomed to catastrophic failure. Trump isn’t trying to drive tough substantive bargains. Mainly, he seems to want to indulge in narcissism, demanding that other nations humiliate themselves so he can put on a display of dominance. And America doesn’t have remotely enough leverage, even against Canada, to make such demands. You could say that Trump is a reverse Godfather, making offers other countries can’t accept.

Consider the state of negotiations — or, actually, non-negotiations, since talks appear to have broken down — with Japan, another country Trump appears to have thought he could bully. Japan does sell a lot to the United States and might have been willing to offer something to preserve its access to our market.

But reports indicate that Japanese representatives sent to Washington left without accomplishing anything because they found Trump’s people impossible to deal with. The Americans insisted that the Japanese make offers without giving any indication of what our side wanted — in effect, they demanded that Japan make a show of obeisance without any reason to believe that it would get anything in return. The Japanese government wouldn’t, probably couldn’t do that. After all, it has to answer to its own voters. So there is no deal.

And then there are the Chinese, who — unlike the Canadians or even the Japanese — probably have more economic leverage over us than we have over them. They have no interest in helping Trump sustain his fantasies of dominance. Bear in mind that Trump’s trade war is working out very well for them…

[…]

Will Trump manage to make any trade deals? I guess it’s possible that Trump will announce trade deals with a few countries here and there. But his ability to get even fake deals is rapidly dwindling, for two reasons.

First, he’s plunging in the polls. True, he’s insisting that the polls are wrong and that pollsters should be investigated for election fraud. And the MAGA base may believe him. But this denial just makes him look even more pathetic to foreign governments, and they won’t be inclined to throw a drowning Trump a lifeline.

Second, Trump’s trade war is about to have a disastrous effect on the U.S. economy — more disastrous than even pessimistic economists, myself included, expected. Tariffs always raise prices. But the sheer size and suddenness of Trump’s tariffs, combined with the paralyzing effect of uncertainty about what comes next, are about to deliver a Covid-type supply shock to an economy already sliding into recession. This looming disaster, which will further weaken Trump, makes it even less likely that our main trading partners will help him pretend that he’s achieving anything.

Oh, and Amazon is planning to show the effects of tariffs on its prices — and the White House has gone berserk.

Admittedly, Bezos — who still doesn’t understand that appeasing Trump won’t work — caved pretty quickly. But as we’ve learned higher prices will hang on Trump no matter what.

One of the many problems with this trade war where leaders as opposed to his corporate lickspittles are involved is that Trump and his team can’t grasp that 1)other countries have politics too, and 2)telling Trump to eat shit is great politics. Which is bad for Trump, but also really bad for the United States.