President Donald Trump is ‘ignoring’ every effort being made to rescue the United States from the ‘river of madness’ he is creating, according to MSNBC Opinion Editor James Downie.
“Over the four months that Trump has blundered ahead with sweeping tariffs, he has been offered chance after chance to change course— and rejected them all,” Downie said.
“The earliest warning to the president came from the markets,” the editor wrote. “They tumbled as he imposed and pulled back on tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico — and then things got worse.”
Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day,” where he imposed tariffs on almost every country in the world, caused markets to plunge, causing “the worst day [in the markets] since the beginning of the Covid pandemic.”
“At this point, the pattern is so predictable — stocks drop when Trump threatens tariffs and rise when he delays those threats — that traders have a new strategy: ‘TACO’ or ‘Trump Always Chickens Out,’" Downie said.
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Voters also told Trump he was headed the wrong direction with a drop in his approval numbers. His approval “stabilized only after he paused those tariffs,” Downie noted.
It’s not just voters and the markets attempting to rescue Trump from bad decision-making.
Downie also pointed to the courts offering another way out of the river of madness. “The Court of International Trade’s decision — and a similar ruling from a federal district court judge Thursday — provided Trump with the perfect excuse to make the tariff ‘pause’ permanent.”
“A sane administration, facing voters, markets, and courts throwing up their hands and shouting 'stop!' would heed those calls,” the Opinion editor said. “There is no reason to think court rulings will change his mind.”
“Other than the investors winning TACO trades, the country is hurting from the chaos,” Downie said.
“The markets, the voters, and two courts have all offered Trump a hand to rescue him from this river of madness. But he has rejected every entreaty.” Downie added, “As is so often the case with Trump, though, it’ll be others who drown.”