The economic destruction of Donald Trump’s terrible tariffs was limited as he waited until after trading hours on Wednesday to announce them. Consider that a tiny, saving grace. On Thursday, the markets got clobbered with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling 1,679 points, or 4%. Friday was even worse, with a plummet of 2,231 points, which is 5.50%.
Trump got a temporary reprieve when the markets closed Friday at 4 p.m., but expect the massacre to resume this morning at 9:30 when the opening bell rings at the New York Stock Exchange.
Unlike previous economic calamities, like COVID (which had similar stock routs five years ago during Trump’s first term) or the 2008 financial crisis, this disaster is being caused by a single man. Trump did this all by himself. And he can stop it by canceling his insane tariffs, which have no logic or reason other than the fact they are something that he can do unilaterally with no need for Congress or anyone else to be involved.
America has had trade wars before, but never with the whole world all at the same time. The tariffs apply to even countries with which we enjoy a trade surplus, the taxes on their goods were smacked with a 10% levy, the minimum.
Beside sanctioned countries like North Korea, Cuba and Russia and those previous tariffed, like Canada and Mexico, only missing from Trump’s tariff charts for reasons no one knows were four independent countries, three in Africa, Burkina Faso, Seychelles and Somalia, as well as an island in the Pacific, Palau.
Trump did include most of the overseas dependent territories of the British, French, Dutch and New Zealanders. But we checked the world map and found some places not slapped by Trump. He missed five islands in the Caribbean: the Dutch possessions of Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba and the French islands of St. Martin and St. Barts, but he did get the Dutch half of St. Martin, called Sint Maarten.
In the Pacific, Trump missed two French possessions, New Caledonia and Wallis and Futuna, New Zealand’s Niue and the Brits’ Pitcairn Island, the least populated place on Earth, with less than 50 people, which is mostly known for being the refugee of the sailors from the mutiny on the Bounty in 1790.
Those are interesting fun facts about world geography, but in the real world, the Trump tariffs are deadly serious and so are the responses from our global trading partners, from China to Europe to our closest neighbors.
Leading up to it, Trump said several times that he picked April 2 to drop his “Liberation Day” tariff bombs because he didn’t want anyone to think it a joke on April 1. On that he’s right, it’s not funny.
Once a president said this: “High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.”
That was Ronald Reagan in April 1987. Compare that to Donald Trump in April 2025.
