Donald Trump Tells Americans Bracing for Economic Collapse: “You Have to Take Medicine”

Donald Trump was on his way back to Washington Sunday evening from a golf weekend in Florida when a reporter on Air Force One asked if there was any level of market pain that could lead him to back off his beloved tariffs.

“I think your question is so stupid,” the president replied. “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes, you have to take medicine to fix something.”

Trump, according to his own account, had just won the Men’s Member-Guest Golf Tournament at his Palm Beach club and seemed not to otherwise have a care in the world: “You heard I won, right?” he asked his press gaggle. But down on land, markets in Asia were melting down, with the index plunging so much that a circuit-breaker was activated on South Korea’s main board. That seemed to preview the bloodbath awaiting the US markets: Futures continued their fall Sunday, and traders were bracing not only for potential circuit-breaker activation in New York but the prospect of a sell-off worse than the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 pandemic panic. Sure enough, on Monday, the S&P 500 entered bear market territory.

All this, of course, is a crisis entirely of Trump’s making—a direct result of the steep, sweeping tariffs Trump signed last week, which have thrown the global economy and Americans’ financial security into disarray. His defenders, including Stephen Miller and Howard Lutnick, have continued to make noise about deficits and promises that this will suddenly bring manufacturing jobs back to Americans (or at least American-made robots?). But even some of his closest allies and most fervent supporters seemed to be recoiling: Elon Musk, the tech billionaire Trump has authorized to shred the federal government, posted a video on his social media platform of Milton Friedman espousing the virtues of free trade. And his fellow billionaire, the pro-Trump investor Bill Ackman, warned that “we are heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter”: “This is not what we voted for,” he wrote in a post. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who had previously told people they should get over it” about Trump’s tariffs, wrote in his annual letter to shareholders Monday that the tariffs would likely increase inflation and are causing many to consider a greater probability of a recession. “America First is fine, as long as it doesn’t end up being America alone,” he wrote.

While Wall Street is starting to turn on the president, none of this should be that surprising. Trump called himself “Tariff Man” in his first term and couldn’t have been more clear about his intentions as he ran for a second: “Tariffs,” he insisted, “are the greatest thing ever invented.” What did these people think would happen when they handed the keys to the most powerful office in the land to a man so singularly unqualified to occupy it? Through hubris, foolishness, and a desire for chaos he can exploit, Trump is single-handedly pushing the global economy toward catastrophe. On Monday, he posted, “Don’t be Weak! Don’t be Stupid!” attempting to defend his disastrous trade war. “Don’t be a PANICAN (A new party based on Weak and Stupid people!).” If the pain he’s inflicting while he golfs and meets baseball players is medicine, as he insists, we may be about to overdose on it.