You’re very kind, thank you.

They will if the conservative media machine falls apart and they start actually seeing reality.

It’s possible…someday…maybe…

Yeah, the US has a lot of economic weight to swing around, but the world has also spend the decade (!) since Trump was first elected finding other business outlets and generally needing the US less, meaning that the relative weight of the US and the rest of the world has normalized significantly. The EU is stronger, China is stronger, Canada is stronger. The US withdrawing from the world economy would hurt everyone, but it would hurt the US a whole lot more than everyone else.

He failed to sell alcohol and beef to Americans

The only thing harder to do is to fail at selling sub-prime mortgages before the 2008 recession

which he also did

Ok. The bottom line is, either it “won’t do all that much”-- meaning it won’t affect prices, it won’t affect the economy, it’ll be basically useless–or it will be disastrously expensive for ordinary people. There is no other option. The “disastrously expensive for ordinary people” is the only thing that will cause any amount of the change Trump promises: it’s the mechanism by which the plan operates.

There is no option where companies just eat the tariff costs, or countries pay them. Maybe a few scattered companies and countries do, but by and large, not a chance.

Every country in the world needs all the other countries more than all of the other countries need it. There’s just no real leverage, because we’re all interconnected; you can snip one country out, and it’ll slightly hurt everyone, but it’ll wreck the country that was snipped out.

Orysia the Riveter

Ditto. If it’s not real right now, give it a week or so.