Heng Seng Index in Hong Kong on April 3, 2025. Peter Parks | Afp | Getty Images
While Fox News bends itself into a pretzel trying to put lipstick on our dipshit president’s “Liberation Day” pig, it’s become obvious that Trump used ChatGPT to generate his simpleton’s “world tariff chart.”
Under Trump’s new global tariffs, American consumers will pay an additional $6 trillion in taxes-- tariffs imposed on imported goods they buy every day like shoes and avocados-- over a ten year period. This amount, along with alleged savings from DOGE’s chainsaw excision of the federal government, will be used to pay for Trump’s second round of $4.5 trillion tax cuts for the rich.
It is a massive redistribution of wealth, taking from the poor to line the pockets of wealthy donors who put Trump back in office for that express purpose.
Trump used his idiot sharpie and drew himself a tariff chart
Trump has been teasing tariffs for months. After imposing, then withdrawing, then imposing, then withdrawing tariffs on our best friends and neighbors last month, he almost kind of had the start of a concept of a tariff policy last week. To launch it in true reality TV fashion, Trump set the announcement to great fanfare, calling a press conference to unveil his shiny new plan. He branded the whole event, and spent more time marketing “Liberation Day” than developing any underlying substance.
It shows. The simplistic tariff chart prop he foisted on the media looked like an after thought. I started getting text messages from colleagues when the clownshow started. “He generated that table with ChatBot!”one texted. “Good one,” I reponded. “No, I’m serious,” he said. “NFW,” I wrote. Then other colleagues started texting the same thing.
The theory flying around the internet, supported by convincing evidence, is that Trump threw his simplistic chart together using basic online AI from ChatGPT. When commanded to “make easy tariff policy,” 03 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, and Grok all produced the same answers spit out on Trump’s tariff chart.
Policy writer Steve Bonnell said on X, “I think they asked ChatGPT to calculate the tariffs from othercountries, which is why the tariffs make absolutely no f—cking sense. They're simply dividing the trade deficit we have with a country with our imports from that country, or using 10 percent, whichever is greater.” In other words, it’s nonsense, based on a dangerously simplistic view of global trade economics.
Trump officials claim they calculated complexities they obviously didn’t
Trump officials repeatedly lied about the method used to calculate Trump’s tariff rates, claiming that for every targeted economy, “tariff and non tariff barriers” and policies were analyzed, assessed and quantified individually. What BS. As ChatGPT results prove, market and currency nuances were not quantified; nothing was considered other than macro-simplistic dollar amounts.
Decidedly NOT considered in Trump’s tariffs: currency variables, labor variables, VAT taxes, reciprocal licensing, subsidies, pre-existing and negotiated product-specific tariffs, geopolitical sanctions, transportation costs, etc., etc. Also excluded from consideration? The entire service sector, where American firms enjoy a huge surplus, now in jeopardy. Google AI reports that in 2023, the U.S. exported $1.02 trillion in services, delivering a surplus Trump didn’t recognize.
There’s no strategy here folks, it’s an across the board, moronic attack on the world economy executed by sharpie.
Fox News has to figure out how to praise the falling stock market
Global markets expressed their outrage by delivering an immediate crash that eliminated over $3 trillion in market value. World leaders continue to express their shock over Trump’s economic suicide, sounding the alarm over tarrifs so stupid they look like intentional sabotage:
China, imposing ia retaliatory 34% tariff on the US: “There are no winners in trade wars, and there is no way out for protectionism.”
EU’s commissioner :“Uncertainty will spiral… consequences will be dire for millions of people around the globe.”
Germany's Chancellor: “Trump’s tariffs are fundamentally wrong and an attack on a trade system that has created prosperity all round the world.”
Australia’s Prime Minister: Trump’s tariffs were “not the act of a friend.”
The penguins: WTF did we ever do to deserve this?
Fox viewers, now over half the country, won’t hear, read, or see any of that. Friday, as world markets crashed, the folks over at Fox News focused on what’s in everyone else’s underpants. Their lead story was how strong Trump, the “New Sheriff in town” looked as he “warned” governors who “defy his orders.”
Not covering the actual news, Fox delivered its customary disinformation gems on Trump’s tariffs, leading with, “Secretary of State Rubio stands up to European leaders, says Trump is absolutely right.”
Enough with the gaslighting
Fox propaganda aside, JP Morgan is now predicting a 60 percent chance of a recession by year’s end, reporting that “This year's 22-percentage tariff increase amounts to the largest tax hike since 1968.” The Wall Street Journal predicts that Thursday’s loss of more than $3 trillion in market value will likely continue to worsen.
Financial markets, predictably, have the jitters. Despite Trump’s messaging that “tariffs are tax cuts,” everyone else knows tariffs are a tax, and a regressive one at that, paid by working-class consumers.
By all indicators, Trump can’t master the complexities needed to develop a strategic trade package, and says he “couldn’t care less” about the price of cars.
Like a tyrant toddler with a singular focus on his playmate’s toy, Trump has been so fixated on 19th century tariffs he has silenced rational economic discussion. What we’re left with is a child’s tariff policy Alexa could have spit out, leaving markets and our own economy in freefall.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
Thank you, Sabrina, for your incisive analysis of what the madman in Washington is doing to the world markets. Trump is making enemies of what I call functional wealthy people who engage in business and provide peripheral economic benefits for ordinary people. This process is relied upon for financial survival in an increasingly interdependent world. Trump is only concerned with enabling the greed of the oligarchic class. The madness Trump is engaged in is catering to the oligarchs by stealing funds allotted for the poor. The poor, for the most part, are voiceless, but the functional wealthy are not. They are calling foul at Trump’s economic decisions, although they are happy to take advantage of tax breaks. Their hypocrisy flows over. My concern is for America’s and the world’s most vulnerable, whose lives are already under stress due to climate change and famine. Global economic instability will not help. What we are witnessing is the beginning of a Trumpdemic, with no cure in sight because Trump “couldn’t care less.” Mental health professionals have opined that Trump is functioning with a demented mind, which explains a lot. That concern begs the question: Where are the nuclear codes? The GOP leadership better think closely about what they are allowing to happen. As for Fox, I hope they choke on a rock.
It is a case of killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Except he also intends to wring out all of the money he can from big extraction and big pharma first. We can say we will fight back, but exactly how is unclear to me. He is the executive, and he has the other two branches in his pocket. Sure, that can and likely will change, but not for two years. Bill McKibben famously said, "we are between a played-out rock and a hot place." That was 12 years ago. It has gotten much worse since January 2025 with stress fractures in the Paris Agreement and NATO alliance starting to show. It looks like we are screwed for the foreseeable future, wealthy along with middle class and poor. It will just take longer for the effects of his policies to reach the wealthy. It is like Michael Caine's character said in the movie Interstellar, "the last people to starve will be the first to suffocate." There will be no safe haven in the world he is creating, and in Hobbes' words life will be "nasty, brutish, and short." Forget "efficient" government. “Efficiency” offers the hope of effectiveness often without the monitoring and feedback mechanisms to ensure it occurs. Often the purveyors of “efficiency” in government are gone—moved on or not reelected—before anyone can assess the real effects of their “efficiency” measures. The next two years will be a long, hard row to hoe and most of us will not like the outcome. I hope I am wrong about all this but...