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Trump folds to Musk on tariffs; and the media is surprised? [1]
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Date: 2025-04-09
Two or three days ago, I made a prediction to my wife and sister-in-law, as they were talking on the phone: Trump was going to drop the tariffs, and he’d do so within 90 days. They made a “maybe yes, maybe no” response, but they weren’t sure of anything. I was.
So it is no surprise at all — to me at least — that Trump said today that he would pause his so-called “reciprocal tariffs” for the next 90 days. To me, this was inevitable.
Yet, many in the media (I’ve been watching CNBC on cable) were surprised. They understood that Trump was going to “negotiate” with various countries on individualized trade policy. But his actions, which amounted to a near reversal of the previous days’ announcements, should not have astonished anyone.
As I put it to the fam, “understand that, number 1, Trump is going to **** Elon Musk’s ***.” I further said that “number 2, Trump is going to **** the oligarch’s ***.” Trump, as the minion of the elite, could be counted on to the bidding of the upper echelon. It was inevitable.
What about the oligarchs? This is from Forbes:
President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs took effect Wednesday over the concerns of many of the nation’s billionaires, as even some longtime supporters of the president—including Elon Musk—have expressed concern about the tariffs and their impact on the economy. More than $10 billion. That’s how much Trump’s top 10 billionaire donors lost in the stock market on Thursday alone, as stocks plunged in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s Wednesday tariff announcement. That’s only a fraction of the $270 billion in total that was wiped off the net worths of the world’s billionaires on Thursday, Forbes calculated, with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos, Oracle founder Larry Ellison and Musk among those who were the hardest hit. Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk called Trump “the most high tax American President in generations” on Monday. “Through his tariff strategy, Trump has implemented a structural, permanent tax on the American consumer,” the Tesla shareholder said on X.
This and other reports made it clear: Musk and his fellow 0.5%-ers were not going to sit back and let Trump ruin their portfolio’s. It was not a matter of if Trump would do a reverse, it was a matter of when. And the when was going to be soon.
So, again, I’m not surprised. I am surprised that so many observers could not or did not predict that Trump would back down on his tariff policies. People still don’t get it: for all his bluster, Trump will always kneel and kiss the ring. And, he will always make it seem that he’s not doing just that. If you don’t get this, then you will never understand what makes Trump tick.
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