I had to read way too far to get to the reason:
Trump has spoken about how he believes the US is being “ripped off” on global trade. He believes Trump genuinely wants to restructure global trade, which, however, has turned into a “revenge thing.”
“The problem with it is he really only has one metric, which is the bilateral trade deficit, and he really only has one tool, which is tariffs,”
I feel like Trump wants these countries to do something and he can’t control it, so he is using tariffs to apply pressure. Being who he is, he can’t back down until he gets what he wants despite anything else. Never show weakness. I worry that we’re all feeling the hurt from this narrow mindset.
He’s insane and dumb so it’s hard to guess what his motivations are. You can sort of see the goal but imho it doesn’t matter. If he doesn’t reach his goal, he’ll just lie and say he did. So, he thinks he can pressure corporations and countries to give him favorable deals. Even if that doesn’t happen, he can say that they did, back off the tariffs, and claim that he made the prices go down. What is harder for an embarrassing amount of US voters to understand is this is a short-sighted and narcissistic move even if it works (it won’t.)
