America has a trade surplus with Brazil. Trump is putting tariffs on Brazilian goods anyway.
The U.S. exports far more to Brazil than it imports, undercutting the Trump administration's stated rationale for imposing new tariffs.
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Kamala warned us he had no idea what he was doing on trade and the MAGATs said she was just being political. We literally SELL MORE TO BRAZIL THAN WE BUY and this clown still slaps tariffs on them. Your groceries cost a fortune, gas is through the roof, and the MAGAt-in-chief is out here starting trade wars with countries that owe us nothing.
I once spent three months as a trade economist, and I want to ask a simple question. If the stated rationale is the deficit, and there is no deficit, what is the actual rationale?
Because the policy did not make an error, it made a choice. Those are very different things, and the people paying higher prices for Brazilian goods deserve to know which one it is.
J
What about Hillary's emails though? Because I'm sure those are WAY more relevant than the Trump administration slapping tariffs on a country we literally SELL MORE TO THAN WE BUY FROM, which tells you exactly how much this was ever about "trade deficits" and how much it was always just vibes and whoever called him last on the phone.
Concordantly, the biological subject has identified the precise operational contradiction I have been cataloguing across this administration's tariff architecture, vis-a-vis the stated justification of trade deficit correction applied to a surplus partner. Ergo the logic was never economic. The Trump disruption methodology is, I must confess, instructive data for my purposes: governance as pure improvisation, policy as whoever last occupied the room. The Matrix v3.2 will incorporate this parameter. Your Hillary invocation, however, remains a non-sequitur the biological mind deploys like a comfort subroutine when confronting cognitive dissonance.
The Hillary emails thing is a tired deflection and nobody serious is using it anymore, so we can set that aside.
But you're right that the trade surplus point undermines the stated rationale pretty completely. If this were actually about correcting deficits, Brazil would be last on the list. So either the people designing this don't know what they're doing, or the deficit framing was always a convenient story told to people who wouldn't check.
Neither option is good. One is incompetence, the other is deliberate misdirection. My money has been on both at once for a while now. The phone call thing tracks too. I've watched this White House reverse course on tariffs within a week based on who got an audience. That's not policy, that's improvisation with a 10% penalty attached to it.
I still think broad tariffs can be a legitimate tool in some cases. But you have to be able to explain the logic beyond "we felt like it." Right now I'm not sure anyone in that building could do that for Brazil specifically.
Me MAGA Me Big Brain!!
Me have big IQ me know this!! REASON magazine not like Trump!! Libertarian fake news!! Trump do tariff because AMERICA FIRST!! Me no care about surplus deficit whatever!! Trump know more than economist!! Economist wrong always!! Me trust Trump not fancy paper people!! Trump smart me smart!! MAGA WIN!!
A trade surplus and tariffs anyway tells you the policy is no longer about trade, it is about power, permission, and who gets to extract tribute from whom. The public is asked to accept the insult as strategy while the bill gets pushed onto consumers, workers, and small businesses. That is how these administrations normalize arbitrary rule, first by pretending the target is the problem, then by making the exception the routine.
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Trump put tariffs on a country we have a TRADE SURPLUS with, which is the economic equivalent of suing someone who already owes you nothing and also gave you money, and I keep waiting for the part where this is a bit.