No. of Recommendations: 16
Some of you may remember, back in the first years of the fool, a poster by the name of Mike Shedlock. He went by the screen name “Mishedlo”. He’s an old style libertarian, got in trouble at the fool for his strident posts over the Iraq war, and was banned from the fool about 20 years ago.
But no worries for Mike. He went on to significant success as a financial blogger with his “Mish Talk” blog. I still read him occasionally and today, he reposted a letter that I swear could have been written by Dope or one of his twins, voicing disgust at how this tariff debacle is playing out. The perspective is “conservative” and may explain the thinking of many reluctant supporters of Trump who now consider the tariff rollout a disaster:
The frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly. I’ve said it publicly. I’ve written about it in this very feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table — picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic workforce would adapt.
Eventually, that had to stop. It was unsustainable — financially, politically, and morally. We couldn’t keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero-interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation. That would’ve been leadership.
But that’s not what this is.
What you’ve rolled out isn’t detox — it’s whiplash. This isn’t strategic decoupling. It’s scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There’s no roadmap. No operational playbook. No clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It’s not an attempt to responsibly unwind America’s role as the global shock absorber — it’s a brute-force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place.
You can’t replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience. You can’t build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination — especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn’t have the labor force, permitting structure, or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed. And now — after years of deportation policies and underinvestment in vocational training — you’ve made the labor gap even wider.
Capital isn’t going to rush to fill that void just because you raised tariffs. It’s going to wait. It’s going to sit on the sidelines and preserve optionality. Because right now, no CEO can confidently model a five-year capex plan. No board can greenlight supply chain onshoring when they don’t know whether a tariff rate will double next quarter based on your Twitter account or some arbitrary trade deficit formula.
That’s the issue. This wasn’t rolled out as part of a comprehensive American renewal strategy. It wasn’t coordinated with the Fed. It wasn’t communicated clearly to Treasury. It wasn’t backed by a labor reskilling program or any form of public-private manufacturing incentive beyond empty slogans. It was dropped like a bomb — seemingly designed more to shock than to build.
Trump is now making enemies among a group that was formerly on board with his nonsense.
I note that Dope hasn’t posted here in a couple of days. Neither has Mike.
We may think “good!”
But I think their absence, whether it continues or not, is a sign of a major crack developing in the Trump coalition.
Now…… for a bit of humor.
I saw a hand made protest sign held by a woman, that simply read:
Six weeks into this administration, and I’m already using “fuck” like a comma
