"I am Tariff Man"

There will be cartoons.









A few days ago, he was telling us specific concessions he got from China as though it were all a done deal.

And he still hasn't been told that we aren't "taking in" money from other countries by levying tariffs, or maybe it's like the climate change report: he's been told, but he just doesn't believe it.

And, by the way, "I put on the best funerals."

In a series of tweets over the weekend, the president celebrated the modest compromise on trade he reached with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires on Saturday in which Trump agreed to temporarily hold off on increasing tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods in exchange for China purchasing a still-to-be-defined amount of American-made products.

Trump declared that China had agreed to reduce and remove tariffs on cars coming into China from the US, and he wrote that China intends to “start purchasing agricultural product immediately” from the US.

“Relations with China have taken a BIG leap forward!” he tweeted.

[...]

White House aides and China have told different stories than the one Trump is offering on what exactly was agreed to, and what’s going to happen and when.

“It doesn’t seem like anything was actually agreed to at the dinner and White House officials are contorting themselves into pretzels to reconcile Trump’s tweets (which seem if not completely fabricated then grossly exaggerated) with reality,” one JPMorgan analyst wrote in a note to clients reported by CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla.

[...]

[National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow] was pressed on the matter [...] with one reporter noting that Beijing’s tariff rate for car imports from the rest of the world is 15 percent.

“We don’t yet have a specific agreement on that, but I will just tell you, as an involved participant, we expect those tariffs to go to zero,” he said.

In an appearance on Fox & Friends on Tuesday, Kudlow again was hesitant to back up Trump’s tweet, telling interviewers “it’s coming” — he thinks.

“It hasn’t been signed and sealed and delivered yet,” he said.

As the Los Angeles Times points out, Chinese officials haven’t confirmed any car tariff agreement, either.

[...]

US farmers have already experienced a lot of collateral damage from Trump’s China trade war, and part of his post-agreement boasts have entailed promises of reprieve. But again, the details of exactly what China plans to buy and when are unclear.

On Monday, Kudlow said he couldn’t “specifically” answer a question from a reporter about how China’s agricultural product purchases would work but said that his “expectation” is that China will roll back tariffs on goods “quickly.”

  Vox

The check is in the mail.



...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:  And so it begins:





UPDATE: