I noted my belief yesterday that President Trump’s unscripted, offhand remark about tariffs was a negotiating ploy, in a blog my colleague Rick Moran authored.  When I asked him to note it, he snarked an instant message back at me, “yes trump the genius I forgot.” This is a pithier version of the critique that Trump fans believe he is playing three-dimensional (at least) chess all the time.

For the record, I think President Trump is very intelligent, but I must cover that topic another day. To me, the remarkable phenomenon is how many IQ-advantaged people still don’t see the pattern that President Trump uses again and again. He doesn’t need to plan three moves ahead on three dimensions because he has a set of tools that he regularly uses to good effect. He gets away with this because other people dismiss him as bizarre, vulgar, and deplorable, and can’t fathom that they are being softened up by someone with a much smaller daily vocabulary than they employ.  

But President Trump’s base understands him. In Saleno Zito’s famous 2016 campaign epigram, they take him seriously but not literally, while the media took him literally but not seriously.

So it is with his latest tariff gambit. John Hinderaker of Powerline wrote a witty and informative piece seeking to calm the hysteria, He concludes:

 I suspect that, like President Reagan, Trump is using trade policy to set the stage for addressing inappropriate conduct by other nations. Let’s see what Trump can get out of his tariffs before we begin to tote up the balance sheet.

The entire piece is well worth a read, for there is interesting information on the presidents who have slapped tariffs down, despite a media posture that seems to imply that Trump’s talk is somehow unprecedented. Far from it.

John sensibly advises:

So let’s see what happens. Let’s see what order President Trump signs next week, and how other nations respond. Let’s see what negotiations Trump enters into with, for example, China. I think it likely that Trump is rattling sabres over tariffs in order to set the stage for improved trade deals or other concessions–in order, for example, to pressure China to start respecting our intellectual property, a huge issue on which the Obama administration was shamefully supine.

But best of all, there is the quip of the day, or maybe the week:

If Trump came out for a big increase in the minimum wage, the Washington Post would suddenly realize that it would increase unemployment among minority youths.