Trump’s Tariff Plan of ‘Big Numbers’ Makes No Economic Sense

The sweeping tariffs Donald Trump announced on Wednesday don’t make a ton of sense — outside of Trump’s compulsion to flex his presidential powers, and his mysterious hatred of trade deficits. The package of steep taxes on all foreign imports predictably caused markets to crater, and is expected to make everyday goods significantly more expensive for Americans. The administration’s plan to upend the global economic order seems to have been thrown together without any real consideration for its impact, with the White House using what appears to be an arbitrary formula to calculate how much each nation’s imports will be taxed.

The plan seems haphazard because it was.

Trump advisers were working on some of the details of the destructive salvo almost up until the moment of the White House event unveiling it, administration officials and other sources familiar with the matter say. Two Trump officials note that the exact formula that produced the tariff numbers for each affected country wasn’t the president’s ultimate concern. For years, the two officials say, Trump had felt he had been too restrained by senior aides and Cabinet members during his first White House stint, and never had the chance to launch the kind of tariff blitz, including against close allies, that he craved.

In the months leading up to the start of his second term, Trump was clear. “He wanted the numbers to be huge,” says one of the officials, who spoke to Trump about his tariff plan both before and after he was inaugurated. “The president isn’t a number-crunching guy, per se, but President Trump strongly demanded big numbers that would make other countries treat us fairly. And I think you can see today that those numbers are huge.”

Several Trump advisers, including some of his closest ones, had been convinced that Trump would back off some of his more extreme plans for tariff warfare — policies that GOP policymakers quietly fear could rock the U.S. economy — if the markets got too spooked, according to three sources familiar with the matter. But in recent weeks, it has become obvious to some of them, in private conversations with the president, that Trump feels that any economic suffering is going to be worth it, and that a stock market plunge caused by his tariff onslaught won’t be “so bad,” per one source who heard the president predict this last month.

Some of the titans of American industry and Republican megadonors who bet big on Trump in 2024, and were convinced he was in part bluffing about tariffs, are today far less confident that their wager will pay off. “I really thought tariffs were just his negotiating tool, and maybe they still are to some extent, but I feel kind of stupid now,” one big Trump donor and longtime GOP moneyman tells Rolling Stone. “Maybe Larry Kudlow is right and this all works out for the best. I don’t know.”

Larry Kudlow, the Trump-loving Fox Business host, is in the minority of economic minds appraising the impact of the tariff plan. Economists have long warned that sweeping tariffs could lead to financial disaster, and that overhauling the global economy isn’t as simple as Trump seems to think it is. Trump and his advisers have publicly acknowledged that the tariffs could cause financial hardship for working Americans, while trying to reassure the MAGA faithful that if they just have faith in the president, they’ll ultimately become rich. “You gotta trust Donald Trump and the White House,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on Thursday. “Let him fix it.”

It’s unclear, however, how choking trade with America’s economic partners is going to pay dividends, and the fear of sparking a global trade war is part of what is leading to the market plunge. “The hallmark feature of the Trump economic agenda so far has been uncertainty, and uncertainty is poison for the economy,” Lindsay Owens, an economist who leads the progressive Groundwork Collaborative, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s why we’re seeing businesses reeling and Wall Street analysts reeling.”

Owens says tariffs are not inherently harmful — as long as they are wielded like “a scalpel” — but she warns the “careless and reckless” way the Trump administration is implementing them is extremely dangerous. “It’s using tariffs as an unbelievably blunt instrument, and the effects are going to be ruinous,” she says. “I think the market reaction, the consumer reaction, and the small business reaction all suggest that this is untenable for a healthy economy, and that we’re probably headed towards a downturn.”

Financial analysts — outside of those appearing on Fox News or Fox Business — have been similarly dumbfounded as the Nasdaq and S&P 500 took their biggest hits in years the morning after Trump’s announcement. CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla described the tariff plan on Thursday as “burning down the house to cook a steak.”

Republicans are starting to feel the heat. Voters are already upset about Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) gutting the federal government, and a price hike on everyday goods isn’t going to help ease the economic concerns Trump built his 2024 campaign around solving.

“It’s hard to imagine designing a worse set of policies if [the economy] is the top concern for American families. It would be hard to do worse, even if you were trying to,” Owens says. “The polling all bears this out now, which is that Trump is no longer seen as a strong manager of the economy. The percentage of Americans who think they will be better off in six months, as opposed to worse off in six months, those percentages have completely flipped … Trump’s approval rating is down. His handling of the economy is down. So there’s not much left. Americans are giving him and the Republicans’ conservative agenda incredibly low marks.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), one of the top Republicans in the Senate, introduced legislation on Thursday to scale back the president’s power to implement tariffs. “Congress has a constitutional role through the Commerce Clause on trade matters, and we should re-assume that role,” he told reporters this week. But when asked Thursday whether he supports Trump’s new tariff regime, Grassley responded: “Why don’t you ask me in two months?I think it’s a wait-and-see proposition.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) didn’t exactly seem thrilled with the tariffs, either. “I will give him the benefit of the doubt,” he told reporters on Thursday when asked if he supports Trump’s economic plan.

How long Republicans and their constituents will continue to give Trump “the benefit of the doubt” as the government services they rely on are cut by DOGE and the prices of goods they buy every day skyrocket because of Trump’s tariffs remains to be seen.

Trump, for his part, didn’t seem concerned on Thursday when asked about the tumbling stock market. “I think it’s going very well,” he said, before heading to Florida for a golf tournament.