Summary
Trump snapped at a reporter who asked how much economic pain he was willing to inflict amid plunging markets triggered by his new tariffs.
Speaking after a weekend at his Florida resort, Trump dismissed speculation he was trying to crash the market, claiming tariffs would bring in “$1 trillion” and spur U.S. manufacturing.
When asked about a pain threshold for Americans, he called the question “so stupid,” arguing economic “medicine” was necessary to reverse decades of “stupid leadership.”
He insisted the strategy would make the U.S. “solid and strong again.”
He is acting like there is basically perfectly inelastic demand for Americans to pay for imports and importers to pay the tariffs.
Elasticity is basically how demand changes in accordance with price.
Generally speaking, absolute necessities like food, water, housing… are less elastic than unneccesary luxuries.
… But… basically nothing is perfectly in elastic.
If anything was, the price could literally be either infinite, or totally free… and demand would not change.
Obviously that is nonsense. Even if you die without food, demand will drop if a meal costs a billion dollars.
Trump is acting like the US is so lucrative a market that… our volume of imports will be… the same… and … the importers just have infinite money to pay tariffs… and not do cost pass thru to consumers.
Even though every economist since the 1700s will tell you tariffs result in less imports, and higher prices for consumers.
He seems to genuinely think he is directly taxing other countries, when he is… just taxing American consumers and importers.
Its like when Elon got mad at advertisers leaving twitter and he threatened to sue them for… not buying his ad service.
These coddled corrupt criminal capitalists have gotten so used to just always getting their way… that they’ve broken fundamental underlying concepts of how the ‘free market’ works.
Their worldviews are internally inconsistent and do not make sense, they hold fundamentally contradictory ideas simultaneously, and when people point this out, they flail and bitch and moan and insult like the petulant spoiled brats they are, because facing the contradiction, resolving the cognitive dissonance would cause ego death… which is the same as suicide for a megalomaniacal narcissist.
For them, it is literally:
I can’t be wrong.
Ergo, everyone else is.