A newspaper owned by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch has yet again ripped into Donald “TACO” Trump for what it describes as reneging on his commitments and driving up the cost of living for the American people.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial takes on the president’s agreement with the European Union to effectively mitigate the president’s trade war against the bloc.
Trump—whose reversals are now so frequent they have gotten a viral nickname, TACO, short for Trump Always Chickens Out—had threatened tariffs as high as 30 percent on EU goods. Member states warned they would introduce retaliatory levies on the American aerospace, automotive, poultry, and steel industries, among others.
The president has now instead committed to imposing levies of 15 percent on imports across the board, with a 50 percent border tax still in place on EU steel and aluminum exports from the continent.
The Journal’s editorial board laments that “alas, the deal doesn’t appear to address America’s biggest commercial grievances with Europe, such as digital taxes, punitive regulation against U.S. tech firms, and such faux food-safety rules as GMO restrictions and bans on hormone-treated U.S. beef.”
In particular, the paper notes that the arrangement doesn’t “require Europeans to pay more for drugs,” one of Trump’s long-running bugbears, while the tariffs will result in higher drug costs for Americans by imposing effective tax increases on “pharmaceutical imports and ingredients.”
“Making Americans pay more for drugs via the tariff is an odd way to punish Europe for its price controls that let it free ride on American drug innovation,” the editorial states.
The newspaper goes on to say that Trump’s supporters are currently “pulling what amounts to a rhetorical and political bait and switch” over his economic vision. “Because there hasn’t been a recession or a global tariff spiral, they say his trade policy is a great success,” its editorial board writes. “No Great Depression II, the critics must have been wrong.”
But the paper argues Trump appearing “to have abandoned [his] goals” in the recent EU deal represents a retreat “from his North American and reciprocal trade assaults, and the damage in lost trust in the U.S. and new economic costs is still real.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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