Trump detrumps own trumped up tariffs after iPhone price outrages

In a stunning about-face over crippling trade tariffs against Chinese imports, US President Donald Trump managed to shoot his tough-guy-act in the foot as he kept iPhones from skyrocketing in cost.

Such unpredictability in Trump is not unprecedented, as many have all experienced first-hand in the last maddening few months. This month’s shock tariffs wiped $5tn off US stock markets in the first two days alone, including $1tn from the so-called Magnificent Seven.

After a whirlwind week of this tariff madness, Trump suddenly announced he would pause these tariffs for 90 days but added more against China.

The world’s second largest economy faced a total of 125% in duties, which is imposed in return on the world’s largest economy.

Then, as Americans faced economic shocks and the potential of more inflation, the ultimate economic barrier was reached: how much would an iPhone really cost?

Double, yelled the early alarmists, while one estimate warned Americans might pay as high as $3,500. It was a little tricky to follow the mathematics that arrived at that outlandish price, but given how bad the math was that Trump’s team used to calculate the trade imbalance, it’s a non-starter.

That was seemingly the line that Americans would not cross. And Trump knows it.

So, in an about-face that only Trump is able to achieve (and with a straight face), the White House quietly announced it was exempting smartphones and other high-tech gadgets from the ban.

How much, exactly? Nearly 25% of everything imported from China is now exempt (albeit temporarily) from the crippling (and confusing) tariffs. (But we aren’t certain – and certainly not from trying to understand the impact on our lives and businesses.)

Just 20 product categories account for a quarter of what China exports to the US. Stop for a moment and think about those numbers.

These include smartphones, computers, semiconductors, modems, routers, and other electronics like USB sticks and flash drives. It’s almost as if no one in the Trump Administration stopped and thought: how will we get data between our air-gapped laptops without a flash drive, which we don’t manufacture in the US?

Or thought through any of the other ramifications that Trump’s mathematically illogical and irrational trade war has done to the world. It started on 9 April, but it seems like it’s been the worst – and longest – April Fool’s Joke ever.