Donald Trump Trying To Explain His Tariff Logic Is Complete And Utter Nonsense

Or maybe this whole thing isn’t about rebuilding domestic manufacturing capacity or raising revenue, but instead to force countries to make deals to get Trump to waive the tariffs.

“The tariffs give us great power to negotiate,” Trump said after imposing his “Liberation Day” tariffs. “They always have.”

“If you take it to zero, we’ll take it to zero,” Bessent said in February.

Deals, deals, deals. That’s what Trump is known for, so this rationale seems like common sense. But if you make deals with every country in the world to remove tariffs, you also undermine the other two rationales: less protection to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity and less revenue from tariffs.

And there is a larger (theoretical) plan here, which Trump and his advisers do not talk about much publicly: to lower the value of the U.S. dollar. 

That plan, known as the Mar-a-Lago Accord, is to smash the global economic system with massive tariffs in order to force countries to negotiate currency deals that lower the value of the dollar, which would help restore American manufacturing by making domestic products cheaper to export. Countries would then want to buy up American goods, like military equipment, cars and so on. This is all outlined in a paper by Miran.

But this plan doesn’t fully account for the alienation that Trump is creating from these would-be markets for U.S. goods. The tariffs combined with the U.S.’ foreign policy pivot to Russia have succeeded in getting the Europeans to actually invest in their economies and militaries, as evidenced by Germany’s recent constitutional change. But these countries are not looking for American goods. They are rather spurning the U.S. because of Trump’s belligerence.

Miran dismissed public speculation that Trump is pursuing his plan during a speech at the Hudson Institute on Monday.

“It’s not important,” Miran said about his paper outlining the plan to devalue the dollar. “It does not reflect administration policy.”

The end result of all of this is a muddled mess. The public has been fed at least three conflicting policy rationales while Trump insiders appear to pursue a broader, less-publicized plan to crater the dollar’s value by alienating the rest of the world.

Of course, Trump has harped on the importance of tariffs and protectionist policies as far back as the late-1980s. This is one of the few policies that he has a strong attachment to. There’s also the possibility these tariffs come not from a fully realized policy plan, but his own personal impulses. Impulses are rarely coherent. 

If we’re to take these varying rationales literally, all signs point to impulse rather than serious policy. But that’s going to have serious long-term consequences for the entire world.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.