World leaders are just trying to endure the second Donald Trump presidency in a way that reminds a columnist of a particularly painful medical condition.
The world is uniting against Trump's tariffs regime, according to The Daily Beast's David Rothkopf, who said the policy makes no sense and hurts everyone involved.
"They are anti-policy, the opposite of policy," the columnist wrote. "They are born of no ideas, of a complete misunderstanding of history, economics and international affairs. They achieve nothing. They benefit no one. They cause only damage. They are the work of a mad king surrounded by mad courtiers who seem committed to finding out what happens when ignorance, arrogance and incompetence are the only ingredients in an economic recipe."
The so-called "deals" the president likes to announce aren't even deals, said Rothkopf, a former U.S. trade official himself, because they don't even address details of the trade arrangements under discussion.
"Many of the headline 'achievements' they offer are what is known in the lingua franca of trade officials and economists worldwide as, well, bulls--t," Rothkopf wrote. "They are commitments to do things that cannot be committed to. In the announcement of the U.S.-E.U. agreement, for example, U.S. officials touted the commitment of the European Union to buy $600 billion of U.S. goods and services."
"But, you see, the E.U. does not have the power to make such a promise or to compel such purchases," he added. "It will never happen. A deal with Japan contained the same empty promises, as did the big deal with China that Trump made during his first term."
However, other countries and their leaders pretend to reach those agreements to placate the U.S. president and avoid irrationally high tariffs that could wreck their economies, and they sit awkwardly beside him as he spouts conspiracy theories and makes bold pronouncements at news conferences in the White House and at his resort properties.
"Among both our allies and many of our rivals, we are in fact, seeing a common approach to managing relations with the president emerging," Rothkopf wrote. "They are choosing to humor him to the extent that they can stomach it, and hoping that he will sic transit gloria himself out of the picture soonish."
"In other words, the leaders of the world are treating Donald Trump like a kidney stone with which they are all afflicted," he added. "They will do what they can to dull the pain and hope that it passes soon. In this, I suspect, they have a lot in common with the people of the United States, which could be yet another way these tariffs are knitting the world closer together — and, with some luck, providing the impetus for undoing the damage Trump has done just as soon as he shuffles off his presidential coil."