You can try more Appeals to Authority variants if you like but the simple fact of the matter is they don't really know what they're doing in some cases.

There were similar issues with the tariff plan announced by the Trump Administration on "Liberation Day," where the highest single reciprocal tariff in response to other countries engaging in unfair trade practices against the U.S. was levied against....Lesotho.

You see, Lesotho had one of the biggest trade imbalances with the U.S. (in percentage terms), because they're an incredibly desperately poor country...but they do have diamonds. All they can buy from us is a little bit of food - they're too poor to really buy any of our manufactured goods. But we like diamonds, so we buy their diamonds. It was dumb economic policy to impose a massive tax to keep us from buying their diamonds (again, we want to buy them, and there's no way to increase our exports to them).

That was one of the clues that outside observers used to figure out that virtually no thought had gone into establishing these tariffs. They were done purely by a mechanical formula based on the amount/percentage of trade surplus/deficit. Not any formal assessment of existing unfair trade practices or an analyses of what tariff rates might get us better access to markets. Just numbers on a spreadsheet.

IOW, that whoever put together the Liberation Day tariffs - one of the signal economic policies of the early Trump Administration - didn't "really know what they were doing," in your formulation.

In truth, however, a massive tariff package can be a very complicated endeavor and it's entirely expected that there will be some things that get included (or excluded) by inadvertence. Especially when you have to put it together on the fly, as a reactive measure against a punitive tariff that you weren't expecting the U.S. to allow to take effect. You don't have time to do months of information gathering internally or among your business community - you're putting stuff together in a few days and mostly looking at 30,000 foot numbers, not doing a deep dive. It's hardly surprising that one or more industries was included (or excluded) that shouldn't have been, that you inadvertently hurt yourself more than the other side.

Again, we had plenty of those examples during the Liberation Day tariffs, where we imposed tariffs on things we couldn't reshore. Coffee sticks in my memory - we had huge coffee tariffs, until the Administration figured out we couldn't really grow coffee in the U.S. and we were just pissing off consumers to no effect. Those tariffs got rolled back soon enough.

Yeah, Canada is handling this pretty well. They know they need us to buy their oil, and they know that Trump has kneecapped our ability to refuse to buy their oil with his Iran adventure. They know that our economy is much larger than theirs, but they also know that our electorate is really dissatisfied with prices and is in no mood to endure any more economic discomfort just because Trump wants to indulge his mercantilist passions. And they know that Trump will rip up any agreement he signs if the mood takes him. He's not going to stick with it just because he agreed to it. Which means there's massive benefit to walking away from the table and letting him have a few unhappy news cycles - maybe that might lead him to honor whatever agreement they end up reaching for practical reasons, since merely honoring one's commitments doesn't hold much weight with him.