President Trump recently bubbled on Truth Social that “tariffs are making our country ‘BOOM’.” According to the Financial Times, Trump has now “lock(ed) in high levies on almost 45% of all U.S. imports. That tariff wall threatens to trigger a reordering of global trade.” The current effective tariff level is estimated at 17.3% by the Yale University’s Budget Lab, which are the highest levels since before World War II. Bloomberg calculated that “the global fallout from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs is set to wipe out $2 trillion from the world’s economy by 2027 as a result of trade and investment disruptions,” according to RT.
But for sheer triumphalism, nothing matches the comments made to Newsmax by Sebastian Gorka, a British-born Hungarian-American close ally of Steve Bannon, and who is currently deputy assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism in the Trump administration.
“I’ll just be very blunt with you. And I said this on multiple occasions just today to my colleagues across the U.S. government, if you don’t understand that President Trump is engineering tectonic shifts in geopolitics that are of a global effect, that will change the world for the next 50 to 100 years, you are just an imbecile.… And today’s deal, even for somebody like me who has known the President for a decade now, it is hard to believe that the whole European Union bent at the knee of America First and said, ‘OK, we’re not going to be free riders anymore. We’re not going to exploit the global trade system. You got us, President Trump, and we are going to surrender to a 15% tariff.’”
