Trump Exposes Own Kindergarten-Level Understanding of Economics

President Donald Trump said that he hopes to erase the U.S. trade deficit with other countries—but anyone who understands economics knows that wouldn’t be a good thing. 

“I spoke to a lot of leaders—European, Asian—from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said, ‘We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,’” Trump told reporters on board Air Force One Sunday. “We’re not gonna do that, because to me a deficit is a loss. We’re gonna have surpluses or at worst we’re gonna be breaking even.”

A trade deficit isn’t a “loss,” regardless of what Trump thinks. A trade deficit simply means that one country spends more on goods from another country than that country spends on goods from them. 

Crucially, economists say that having a trade deficit is not an inherently bad thing at all, because the U.S. simply can’t and shouldn’t make everything. Trump’s insistence that the U.S. is being taken for a ride betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of economics that is built on a dislike of other countries and a desire to be the dealmaker responsible for a new world order. 

Trump warned that it would be the “worst” for China. In 2024, the United States had a $295.4 billion trade deficit with China. Trump said that China would need to “solve their surplus” before he would be willing to make a deal on tariffs. 

The president predicted that his “reciprocal tariffs” would raise $1 trillion in the next year and that “thousands” of companies would relocate manufacturing to the U.S.  

China announced Friday that it would impose 34 percent tariffs on imports from the U.S. in response to Trump’s new “reciprocal” 34 percent tariff, which was added on top of two rounds of 10 percent tariffs that had been announced last month.

Trump’s announcement of “reciprocal tariffs” last week sent the U.S. stock market plummeting to its worst day since 2020, and major financial institutions updated their recession projections for 2025. But Trump merely compared the financial chaos to a sick patient taking their “medicine.”

Trump was widely mocked for his ridiculous plan to eliminate the trade deficit. 

Tahra Jirari, director of economic analysis at the Chamber of Progress, wrote on X Sunday that “a trade deficit isn’t a ‘loss,’ it just means we import more than we export. Countries run trade deficits for all kinds of healthy reasons (like strong consumer demand). ‘Breaking even’ isn’t how global trade works.”

Zeteo News’s editor in chief Mehdi Hasan wrote on X Sunday that Trump was “an ignoramus the like of which we have not seen in our lifetimes. Wharton must be so embarrassed.”

Jonah Goldberg, editor in chief of The Dispatch, wrote in a post on X Monday that “Trumpers slavishly defend one man unilaterally screwing up the economy and the America-led global order because he’s some kind of genius. And it turns out—as was apparent for decades—he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The stock market is in such a dire state that an inaccurate report of a 90-day pause on Trump’s global tariffs gave investors real confidence, making the market shoot up before it crashed back down.

On Monday morning, Trump economic adviser Kevin Hassett went on Fox News and was asked if the administration would consider such a pause.

“The president is going to decide what the president is going to decide. There are more than 50 countries in negotiation with the president…. I would urge everyone, especially Bill [Ackman], to ease up the rhetoric a little bit,” Hassett replied vaguely. “Even if you think that there will be some negative effect from the trade side, that’s still a small share of the GDP. This idea that it’s gonna be a nuclear winter or something like that is completely irresponsible.”

Verified X user Walter Bloomberg mistook this quote for a resounding yes and reported that the administration was indeed considering a 90-day tariff pause “FOR ALL COUNTRIES EXCEPT CHINA.” The news was soon read on CNBC, causing the stock market to move positively for the first time in days, by 7 to 10 percent.

“INSANE market action right now. Market exploded higher on a headline attributed to Kevin Hassett,” said Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal. “And now nobody can figure out where it came from and the markets are diving again. An 8% surge and then a 3.5% plunge in a matter of seconds.”

The White House denied all claims of the pause and Bloomberg deleted his X post, falsely attributing the report to Reuters.

The Trump administration has basically no answer for why it imposed tariffs on a group of uninhabited islands off the coast of Australia.

In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper Sunday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins insisted that there was something very smart about placing a levy on the penguin-populated Heard and McDonald islands.

“Well, I mean, that, come on, Jake,” Rollins said. “Here’s the bottom line: We live under a tariff regime from other countries.”

“The McDonald islands is not imposing—” Tapper interjected.

“Whatever. Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic, the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. I did not come up with the formulas, I’m the ag secretary,” Rollins continued, listing how she had helped farmers acquire soil and fertilizer.

The White House admitted last week that the tariffs were cooked up with bad and arbitrary math. As economists and financial writers attempted to understand the logic behind how Donald Trump’s team had determined the percentage of tariffs imposed by other countries, they discovered something wildly unusual.

The administration calculated the tariffs rate by only looking at goods provided, rather than the combined value of goods and services—something that “most economists seem to think is an odd way to calculate tariffs,” according to BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh.

But none of that has swayed Rollins—or, apparently, the president.

“But I have no doubt that I speak on behalf of President Trump that he would say he has the utmost confidence in the team and what they have built and what they have put together,” Rollins said.

“We are unleashing a new golden age, and we will see an economy that will benefit not just every corner of America but our farmers and our ranchers and the people that have been left behind far too long by Republicans and Democrats,” she added.

By Monday morning, the stock market was swinging wildly as investors rushed to understand the potential global impact of Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 756 points—or 2 percent—by 10:30 a.m. That followed a significant dive late last week, in which the market saw back-to-back 1,500-point losses “for the first time ever,” according to CNBC.

American businesses have, thus far, lost $9.6 trillion due to the instability, according to Forbes.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has argued that some foreign companies were attempting to circumvent levies by shipping through the McDonald and Heard islands before reaching the U.S.

“If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” Lutnick told CBS News on Sunday, calling it a “ridiculous loophole.”

And ridiculous it is—especially since practically a minuscule amount of trade goes through the islands.

“According to export data from the World Bank, the islands have, over the past few years, usually exported a small amount of products to the U.S.,” reported the BBC, noting that “in 2022 the U.S. imported $1.4m from the territory, nearly all of it unnamed ‘machinery and electrical’ products.”

The Heard and McDonald islands tariff was very obviously made in error, at least through the eyes of foreign officials. Australian Trade Minister Don Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Network that the tariff was “clearly a mistake” and indicated a “rushed process.” Farrell extended a free trade agreement with the European Union last week, stating that “the world has changed” in the wake of Trump’s announcement.

Donald Trump may finally get his long-desired military parade through the streets of Washington. 

The Washington City Paper, citing an unnamed D.C. source, reports that the president has chosen June 14, 2025—the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army,  Flag Day, and coincidentally also his own 79th birthday—as the big day. If it goes ahead, the four-mile procession would go from the Pentagon in Arlington to the White House.

Seven years ago, Trump made his desire for a grand military parade well known after he saw a French parade in 2017, telling people at the time, “We’re going to have to try and top it.” But the idea got a lot of pushback from military leaders as well the D.C. government, who estimated that it would cost the military $92 million and the district over $21 million in public safety costs. 

Trump angrily abandoned the idea, accusing D.C. politicians of wanting “a number so ridiculously high that I canceled it. Never let someone hold you up!” At the time, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser shot down the idea on Twitter, saying she “finally got thru to the reality star in the White House with the realities ($21.6M) of parades/events/demonstrations in Trump America (sad).”

This time, though, Trump has overhauled military leadership, firing four-star Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as leaders in the Navy and Air Force,  including the top lawyers of those two branches and the Army. The legal firings presumably give Trump loyalists who would defend his parade if it is challenged in the courts. 

As far as D.C. leadership, Bowser and the rest of the D.C. government appear to be cowed by the administration out of fear that Trump will follow through on threats to take over the local government. Bowser chose to remove a Black Lives Matter memorial to appease administration officials and has stepped up the removal of graffiti and homeless encampments following Trump’s complaints. 

Trump has also set up a federal task force on D.C. crime fighting that does not include a single local official, indicating that he plans to keep interfering with how the city runs. That will now include a massively wasteful parade for his own ego, spending millions of dollars from both local and federal coffers despite claims that his administration is eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. Will anyone push back against it this time?

60 Minutes’ Cecelia Vega on Sunday confirmed what anyone who’s been paying attention already suspected: An overwhelming majority of the Venezuelan men that Trump deported to a Salvadoran megaprison have no criminal record whatsoever. Yet the president continues to call them Tren de Aragua gang members and terrorists to legitimize his invoking of the Alien Enemies Act.

60 Minutes was able to get access to government records of the Venezuelans and compare them to domestic and international arrest records and court filings. The news program reported that they “could not find criminal records for 75 percent of the Venezuelans—179 men—now sitting in prison.” Less than a quarter have an arrest record in the U.S., and they are mostly for nonviolent offenses. This proves that the Trump administration is carrying out its cruelty campaign indiscriminately—if you’re a South American immigrant with tattoos, you could find yourself in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s infamous megaprison with a shaved head and without a day in court. 

The Trump administration told 60 Minutes that it were wrong and that the 179 men truly are “actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more. They just don’t have a rap sheet in the U.S.”

“Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don’t?’ Vega asked Lindsay Toczylowski, the lawyer representing Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist and theatre troupe member who was deported to the megaprison.  

“I don’t think that that is possible,” Toczylowski replied. “But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.” 

But the Trump administration is fighting tooth and nail to avoid doing that, even invoking the State Secrets Act to keep proof of its illegal disappearings in the shadows. There is no timeline for freedom for the many innocent Venezuelan men sitting in one of the world’s most brutal prisons.

Donald Trump loves the idea of deporting American citizens to El Salvador—no, seriously he said that.

A reporter asked Trump Sunday whether he was considering an offer from El Savador President Nayib Bukele to “take American citizens in the federal prison population.”

“Well, I love that,” Trump replied.

“If we could take some of our twenty-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head, and purposefully run people over in cars, uh if he would take them, I would be honored to give them,” Trump continued.

“I don’t know what the law says on that, but I can’t imagine the law would say anything different,” Trump said, claiming that it could likely save the U.S. money to house their prisoners in El Salvador. In fact, the law does say something different: It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens.

“I would only do according to the law,” Trump said. “But I have suggested that, you know, ‘Why should it stop just at people who cross the border illegally?’”

There are significant legal barriers to the deportation of U.S. citizens, even if they are incarcerated in the federal prison system. One legal expert told ABC News that removal to El Salvador could violate the Eighth Amendment protection from “cruel and unusual punishment,” which prevents the U.S. government from inflicting humiliating or torturous punishments for federal crimes.

U.S. Code 3621 requires an incarcerated person in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be able to be transported back to court—which obviously would be impossible if the prisoner is removed from U.S. custody to El Salvador, where the U.S. government is already claiming that it cannot remove a man wrongfully deported there. It also requires certain standards for prisons, which cannot be met in a foreign prison such as El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses.

U.S. Code 4100, which established the Prisoner Transfer Program, says that an incarcerated person can only be transferred out of the U.S. to the country where they are a citizen or national, and can only be removed from the U.S. with their consent. A U.S. citizen can only be transferred to the United States.

The U.S. also has a law prohibiting the government “from expelling, extraditing, or otherwise effecting the involuntary return of a person to a country in which there are reasonable grounds for believing the person would be in danger of subjection to torture,” which one federal judge has already argued could apply to all removals to the notorious prison in El Salvador where Trump has sent deportees.

In February, when Bukele first offered to take U.S. citizens as part of a deal to take the alleged gang members the U.S. government has designated terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said it was a “very generous” offer but that there were “obviously legalities involved,” like that pesky U.S. Constitution.

Meanwhile, Trump was initially enthusiastic about the idea.

“These are sick people. If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take him. They could,” Trump said at the time.

At the time, Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, rebuked Bukele’s offer in a post on X: “Bukele is undoubtedly trolling, but to emphasize again: this is so incredibly illegal that there’s not even a hint of possible way to do it under any circumstances whatsoever. It violates international law and the U.S. constitution. Period. End of story.”

But the Trump administration hasn’t seemed particularly interested in following the letter of the law, as it invoked a wartime law to suspend due process and carry out the mass deportation of over 100 Venezuelan nationals in likely violation of a court order. The government claimed that the deportees were members of violent gangs, but it seems that several of them just had innocuous tattoos.

This story has been updated.

Elon Musk spent the weekend pushing for a “zero-tariff situation,” while his favorite president causes widespread economic uncertainty and dread doing the exact opposite.

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” Musk said on a video call on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Musk also posted a clip of conservative economist Milton Friedman explaining the many steps that go into making a simple pencil—wood, graphite, steel—describing the global import and export market as a “magic of the price system.”

“That is why the operation of the free market is so essential,” Friedman continued in the clip. “Not only to promote productive efficiency but, even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.”

“Free-trade zones” and economic peace and harmony are perhaps the lowest current priority for the Trump administration. His unprecedented trade war has caused the stock market to plummet, will surely cause prices on goods everywhere to skyrocket, and has made the United States a common economic enemy of the world, uniting countries with centuries of beef against us. This is not what the world’s richest man signed up for, and Musk’s subtweets suggest that there is disharmony between himself and the president. Combine this with the fact that Musk has lost $52 billion just this year and the rumors of him stepping away—which the administration vehemently denies—and it becomes plain to see that all is not right between Musk and Trump. The honeymoon is officially over.

On Monday morning, Donald Trump seemed to be celebrating even as the global stock market continued to plunge. 

The president boasted on his Truth Social page of low oil prices, lower food prices, and of “Billions of Dollars a week from the abusing countries on Tariffs,” despite the tide of bad news from Dow futures, the S&P 500, and indexes across Europe and Asia resulting in a $9.5 trillion wipeout in global equity value.

After Trump’s baseline 10 percent tariff went into effect on Saturday, a market sell-off quickly ensued. When asked about it on Sunday, the president said, “Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” claiming that such measures were needed to address the trade deficit with China. 

“We have to solve our trade deficit with China,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One. “We have a trillion-dollar trade deficit with China; hundreds of billions of dollars a year we lose with China. And unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal.”

Meanwhile, the dollar is sliding while the euro is gaining value and stocks from construction equipment giant Caterpillar to Elon Musk’s Tesla are struggling. Trump’s tariffs have even soured his relationship with close ally Musk, who spent the weekend attacking administration officials including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and adviser Peter Navarro. 

It seems that the president is ignoring all of the indications of an insanely bad policy, even lashing out at a reporter who asked if there’s “pain in the market at some point you’re unwilling to tolerate,” calling her question “stupid.” The real question is how much pain the American people, as well as Trump’s Republican allies and supporters, are willing to tolerate. 

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to return an Salvadoran man who was deported to El Salvador back to the United States by midnight Monday.

Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error,” but White House officials insist that he has ties to the MS-13 gang and have even made the brazen claim that there’s nothing that any court can do to order Abrego Garcia back because he is no longer in U.S. custody. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ruled otherwise.

“This was an illegal act,” Xinis told an attorney for the Justice Department. “Congress said you can’t do it, and you did it anyway.” Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt have both accused Abrego Garcia of being an MS-13 gang member with no evidence of a criminal conviction, a fact Xinis stressed in her ruling.

“That’s just chatter, in my view. I haven’t been given any evidence,” Xinis said. “In a court of law, when someone is accused of membership in such a violent and predatory organization, it comes in the form of an indictment, a complaint, a criminal proceeding that has robust process so we can assess the facts.”

Abrego Garcia was found to face a legitimate fear of prosecution in his home country by a U.S. immigration judge in 2019, and was thus barred from being deported back to El Salvador. Immigration officials still rushed him onto a plane to El Salvador anyway, and now he’s being held in Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison notorious for human rights abuses.

Surprisingly, the Justice Department lawyer representing the government in this case said that even he wasn’t provided evidence.

“I am also frustrated that I have no answer for you on a lot of these questions,” said Erez Reuveni, an assistant director in the Justice Department’s Office of Immigration Litigation. “The government made a choice here to produce no evidence.”

At one point, Xinis asked to see a 2019 immigration warrant for Abrego Garcia, to which Reuveni replied, “I do not have that order. It is not in the record.”

Reuveni said he has also asked his government clients why they couldn’t return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.

“When this case landed on my desk, I asked my clients that very question. I have not received to date an answer that I find satisfactory,” Reuveni said, and even asked Xinis before her ruling whether he could have 24 hours to persuade administration officials to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. without a further court ruling.

“I would ask the court to give us, the defendants, one more chance to do this,” Reuveni said. “That’s my recommendation to my client, but so far that hasn’t happened.” Ultimately, the judge ruled against the Trump administration, which is not likely to go over well considering that the U.S. has a $6 million deal with El Salvador to accept prisoners, brokered by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But at the very least, there’s hope that Abrego Garcia, a married father of a child with autism, can receive justice and return home.

A federal judge ruled Friday that the president violated a court order to stop freezing federal funds by withholding Federal Emergency Management Agency relief to at least 19 states. The judge said that the Trump administration seemed to be making a “covert” effort to punish states whose immigration practices differed from the White House.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued an injunction in March on behalf of 23 states that sued the federal government after the White House moved to pause aid to states, ruling that the move ​​“fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.”

On Friday, McConnell found that the Trump administration disregarded the court order, with at least 19 states, all of whom with Democratic attorneys general, presenting “undisputed evidence” that they were not receiving FEMA funds already appropriated by Congress.

Oregon, for example, still hasn’t received $120 million in funds meant for winter storms, flooding, landslides, wildfires, and flood mitigation. Hawaii said FEMA has yet to deliver $6 million to rebuild after wildfires devastated Maui in 2023.

For its part, the Trump administration claimed that it was creating a new review process for allocated funding. The states, however, said that they weren’t being given their funds since early February, which McConnell ruled was a clear violation of the order. The judge noted that this appeared to be in accordance with Trump’s executive order barring “sanctuary” states from receiving aid.

This isn’t the first court order that the Trump administration has violated, and it probably won’t be the last. But with a weak Congress, the judiciary is the only check on the president’s power right now, and in this case, millions of Americans struggling to recover from natural disasters are the ones who are suffering. Will there be accountability?