The King of Tariffwood

The Impotent Theatrics of Trump's Tariff Cave-In.

There’s a great Eagles song from the 1979 album The Long Run called “The King of Hollywood.” It’s about the song-as-old-as-time power imbalance between eager young starlets and Hollywood players promising them glamour and fame…for a little favor.

Come sit down here beside me, honey.
Let's have a little heart to heart.
Now look at me and tell me, darlin’,
how badly do you want this part?
Are you willing to sacrifice?
And are you willing to be real nice?
All your talent and my good taste,
I'd hate to see it go to waste."

I think about Trump when I hear this song, because it captures his essential sleaziness and corruption, but it’s also a perfect exemplar of his power to convince the gullible and the greedy of his ability to deliver something magical—some object of intense desire they believe will transform their lives.

But every Trump promise is a lie wrapped in a deception with a rotten nougat center, sold to the credulous with the confidence of a Hollywood predator whispering to a starlet that this one little audition will change her life.

And just like the casting couch mythos of power and exploitation, Trump’s tariff war was always a con, a tale as old as time, shouted by a fool to an audience of cattle, signifying nothing. All his swaggering nonsense about “easy wins” and “trillions in revenue” from tariffs was economic alchemy at its worst—star charts, crystal balls, and trade-war séances masquerading as policy.

The MAGA faithful bought it wholesale. “He’s a businessman!” they cried, as if he were Carnegie and not a six-time bankrupt steak-and-casino grifter. But what did Trump do? He cracked open America's core economic strength—our credibility, our stability, our currency—and torched it for the cheap dopamine hit of a cable-news chyron reading TRUMP SLAMS CHINA AGAIN.

Let’s run the tape.

Trump swore tariffs would reset the American economy, bring back jobs, and make foreign nations beg for trade deals. “We’ll be so rich, we won’t know what to do with it,” he said, echoing his 2016 snake-oil mantra. Instead, what did we get?

Chaos. Market volatility. Higher prices. Collateral damage.

The big, beautiful tariffs he slapped on our allies and enemies alike didn’t bring the world to heel. China didn’t buckle—they retaliated, and with devastating precision.

This week, Trump capitulated, bending the knee to the Middle Kingdom. China targeted American agriculture, technology, and manufacturing, hammering the very people Trump claimed to champion. Americans like their stuff, and the stuff factory cut off the flow.

More importantly, they began a slow but deadly decoupling from the American bond market, which is the real reason Trump caved. All that tough talk, and he was utterly impotent when reality came knocking.

The “forgotten men and women” he promised to resurrect? What comes next for them—even with the mild walkback of tariffs on China—is ugly: bankrupted small businesses, family farms sold at auction, and companies crushed under the weight of raw material costs they couldn’t pass on.

Companies like Ford, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and Caterpillar—emblems of American industrial pride—were sideswiped by foreign retaliation and rising input costs. They’re laying off workers, cutting production, and raising prices.

That’ll show those commies in Beijing.

Trump didn’t cause this problem, but his promise to fix it was a lie from start to finish.

Here’s the bad news: manufacturing isn’t coming back.

It moved—to China, to Vietnam, to Mexico, to anywhere else but the American Rust Belt, not because perfidious foreigners plotted our downfall, but because McKinsey consultants and corporate boards told them to cut costs and chase quarterly profits over all else. Republicans didn’t fix it because they didn’t care. Democrats promised job retraining (“We’ll retain to install solar panels” doesn’t quite hit with the guy who had a good union job for a couple decades) and new industries to replace the old wrench-turning line jobs—and never delivered.

As for Trump’s delusions of industrial rebirth—reopening shuttered factories and “bringing back jobs”? Laughable. First, no one is going to break ground on a factory in America based on Donald Trump’s wildly variable mood swings. (His promises of “dozens of auto factories” under construction is a whopper, even for him.)

The factories of today don’t need thousands of workers with wrenches. They need a few dozen technicians and a hell of a lot of robots. Trump’s economic nostalgia fetish left out the part where modern manufacturing doesn’t give a damn about Pennsylvania swing counties if automation can replace messy, needy, human employees.

Joe Biden tried to bring it back with the CHIPS act and the infrastructure bill, but both roundly mocked by the GOP, largely ignored by press and now under assault by MAGA and DOGE budget-arsonists.

His trade war was a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the heart of the global supply chain, and somehow he was surprised when the fire spread. The cost of everything—washing machines, cars, farm equipment, electronics— will inevitably shoot through the roof or disappear from shelves. This is Econ 101.

And Wall Street?

Addicted to the myth of some secret Trumpian gift for negotiation, it sacrificed stability for the easy coke bump of watching Trump’s every tweet juice the markets one day and collapse them the next when his cyclothymic moods swung back to arson mode. Investors don’t love drama; they love predictability. Trump gave them a madman at the wheel of the global economy, yanking the steering wheel every time Peter Navarro whispered in his ear. Even after the latest mini-market bump when Trump caved to China, we’re still down $10 trillion in market value.

But it’s worse than just short term costs.

Trump’s bungled trade war handed geopolitical power to China on a platinum platter. While he screamed about “winning,” Beijing is now playing the long game—buying influence across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia with favorable trade deals, cheap infrastructure, and by replacing USAID programs with sacks of food and medicine labeled in Mandarin.

Trump, too busy collecting free planes from Gulf satrapies to understand that Xi is now the leader of the global economic order, and that Trump’s mistakes put him there.

His tariffs punished our allies, not just our adversaries. Canada, the EU, Japan—treated like enemies—were slapped with steel and aluminum tariffs under the laughable pretense of “national security.” He weaponized trade policy and turned America into a rogue economic actor, abandoning decades of carefully constructed alliances.

We’ve never been more isolated, more distrusted, more ridiculed. Our only friends are the worst of the worst.

And let’s not forget the downstream effects no one wants to talk about: American ports, once clogged with containers as companies scrambled to front-load imports before new tariffs hit, are now ghost towns. The import vacuum is cascading across transportation networks, raising costs for shippers, retailers, and consumers. Trucking miles are collapsing. Logistics for American manufacturers is now a knife fight in a phone booth.

He sold people a dream with no grounding in reality. He told them the world could be rewound to 1962—minus unions and pensions—and they believed him. And that’s the true cruelty: he knew it was a lie.

They didn’t. They never do.

This isn’t policy. This isn’t leadership. This is malignant narcissism dressed up as economic populism.

Trump’s tariffs didn’t just fail. They actively harmed the United States. They hurt consumers. They crushed exporters. They soured alliances. They boosted our rivals. They strained infrastructure. They inflamed inflation. And worst of all, they revealed that America, under Trump, was a paper tiger roaring at shadows.

There was never going to be a good ending. No happy resolution. No big beautiful deal. Just Trump, alone with his delusions, raging into the void, as the cost of his folly is paid by the very people he conned.

“The King of Hollywood” ends in the same kind of impotence and failure Trump displays on the world stage: the hollow promises of a braggart and a fool, unable to deliver on either his lavish claims or his immediate desires.

After a while nothin’ was pretty.
After a while everything got lost.
Still, his Jacuzzi runneth over.
Still he just couldn’t get off.
He’s just another power junkie.
Just another silk scarf monkey.
You’d know it if you saw his stuff.
The man just isn’t big enough.