Failing to understand cause and effect

Is it a lack of imagination, a lack of real planning, or is it simply I-know-best wilful blindness?

Or worse — does he not understand cause and effect at all?

U.S. President Donald Trump launched his second term with the claim that the United States would get rich by levying tariffs on virtually every nation in the world, and that those other nations would pay the tariffs. But that’s not how tariffs work: the fact is that the cost of tariffs would simply be added onto the prices that Americans pay for goods.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the tariffs, the American companies that actually paid the tariffs (and passed them on to their customers) sued to regain the close to US$200 billion in tariffs that had been collected. They will get their money back, plus interest.

Trump doubled down and levied a new round of tariffs under a different piece of U.S. legislation. It will almost certainly fail again.

Trump was told the tariffs would push countries to make new trade deals outside the U.S. — his usual answer to that has been that he doesn’t care, because foreign countries don’t make anything that Americans want anyway. (Hilariously, virtually all of Trump’s MAGA merchandise, which he sells for profit, is made in foreign countries.) Many countries, including Canada, have done exactly that.

Trump wonders why there’s a spreading disdain for American products and services — all the while badmouthing trading partners.

He’s called allies out as not doing their share militarily, and made threats about taking over Greenland and turning Canada into the 51st state — and then complains because those allies aren’t keen to step up and back the U.S. in its latest military foray.

And that latest foray … after successfully attacking Venezuela and capturing its president, President Trump was apparently convinced that attacking Iran would be just as simple. After all, he’d bombed that country’s nuclear program in June. What could go wrong?

Well, lots. Lots of things he was no doubt been warned about by America’s military planners, and lots that he no doubt ignored, because — if you follow Trump closely — he is, in his own estimation, the best at everything.

It’s bad enough when Trump’s follies hurt his own constituents. But he’s exported his damage virtually worldwide, and if all the chickens come home to roost as a result of the war in Iran, we are all going to be facing a very different world economy. Oil prices are continuing to rise as a result of Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and consumer products like gas and diesel are already climbing in cost.

Stock markets are continuing to slide, erasing the retirement savings of ordinary citizens, and employment is sliding, as well.

And none of that would be unexpected with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is transited by something like 20 per cent of the world’s oil shipments.

All of that information would have been hard-baked into any thorough military scenario being considered before an attack on Iran.

But no — Donald Trump, according to his own press secretary, had “a feeling” that there could be danger to the U.S. from a nuclear program that hadn’t built a bomb or a way to deliver it.

What exactly did he think would happen? Heck, he didn’t even have to think. He employs rafts of military planners who could have simply laid it out in front of him. But Trump doesn’t like facts or research. Or expertise. He likes flash and show.

The sad part about this is the sheer stupidity of it all.

Don’t let someone take off as the pilot of a plane if they don’t understand either how to fly or how to land the aircraft safely.