Trump’s Tariffs and the Toddlers Throwing Temper Tantrums
Here’s your paper bag to breathe into. Now, sit down, shut up, and listen for a minute.
EVERYBODY is freaking out about tariffs. I’m not. Here’s why you shouldn’t, either.
Good afternoon. It’s April 7, 2025. You’re probably tired of being bombarded with news about Donald Trump, tariffs, trade wars, and all manner of bad news about everything everywhere. Am I right?
Here’s some solid, trustworthy advice from Mr. Calm himself: me.
First things first: BREATHE. Slow down. Calm down. Take a breath, in and out. Repeat. Do it five or six more times. Okay, now keep reading…
If you’ve looked at anything online, at all, for basically all of April, all you’ve seen is doomsday fear porn on all websites everywhere. It’s total, utter insanity out there.
How bad is it? Insert your favorite word here: massacre, crash, bloodbath, malaise, catastrophe, meltdown, etc. It’s Black Monday all over again; the sky is falling, it’s a stock market crash, and the recession is here, blah, blah, blah.
My goodness, people need to take more chill pills.
Here’s the thing: for all the worry about tariffs right now, ask yourself this question: do you even know what a tariff is? I’ll bet you don’t.
You probably haven’t even thought about tariffs since you read about them once in grade school 26 years ago. Or, perhaps in Econ 101, your professor mentioned the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act in passing, but that was a long time ago, and you don’t remember when it was enacted or what it even did; you just have a vague sense of: “Uhh, tariffs are bad, I think?”
Here’s the deal: whether you like them or not, tariffs are here to stay. Or are they? Who knows what’s going on in Trump’s head?
I don’t know.
You don’t know.
He might not even know what his own plan is.
I am personally very confused by the way he’s going about it (they’re on… they’re off… they’re back on… they’re back off…) and especially the countries he picked. (Why would the USA want to squeeze Australia, our best friend in the whole wide world?)
Part of the problem is that we can’t even agree on what tariffs are, who even pays them, when they do and don’t apply, which countries we levy tariffs against vs. which countries levy tariffs against us (hint: almost all of them), and what items are “carve outs” from tariffs (which is a shocking number of items, actually), and more.
MOST IMPORTANTLY, we’re not even clear on whether tariffs are considered a “tax” or not. Literally, half the people talking about tariffs are saying it’s very clearly a tax, while the other half says it very clearly isn’t. This is a crucial distinction, by the way, because taxes can only originate in the House. (That’s the House of Representatives, not the White House, but it seems we’re still not clear on any of this). This would mean only Congress can enact tariffs, and not The Donald, but that’s beside the point.
And don’t even get me started on who actually pays tariffs. Do you, as a consumer, pay tariffs? Well, yes, kinda sorta. But no, not literally. You don’t look at your receipt and see “tariff” listed as a line item next to your sales tax. You don’t file a “tariff return” at tax time. There’s no “Internal Tariff Service” being targeted for downsizing by DOGE right now.
So what gives? Well, we live in a bizarro-world right now. That’s one thing.
Today, it seems, Republicans are saying tariffs are good (which is odd since they usually argue that they’re bad) while Democrats are saying tariffs are bad (which is odd since they usually argue that they’re good).
Libertarians are throwing their normal hissy fits about how no government should ever exist, in any circumstance, with any leader in charge of anything, and, as always, they have nothing whatever constructive to say about real life since they live in a hypothetical fantasy world that doesn’t exist.
What to do?
I have one very simple solution to all of this.
Ignore everything you hear from everyone, and just keep living your life as best you can.
Here are a few non-partisan (well, I’ll try, anyway) thoughts about who to trust (and who not to trust) to guide you through this “unpresidented” time in American history.
#1: Don’t trust the news.
News organizations are literally financially incentivized to make sure you believe that all news is as bad as it can possibly be. Actually, it’s as bad as it has ever been, but wait! Somehow, some way, it’s going to get even worse. More at 9:00.
If news organizations ever said, “In the news today, people are being nice to each other. Cats are being rescued from trees. The weather is gorgeous. You don’t need to buy any more of the stupid shit we advertise,” we would simply turn off the TV, rendering them powerless.
But they can’t do that. Their entire reason for existing is to convince you that something awful is about to happen, and you can only protect yourself if you watch, read, or listen to their BREAKING NEWS.
All of the main media companies are fearmongers insisting that something terrible is happening all day, every day, everywhere, and you can’t look away, or you’ll regret it.
It’s a non-stop, 24/7 psychological thriller that’s so gripping we can’t not watch.
But you must.
You must not watch.
Don’t give them power over you.
#2: Don’t trust the “experts.”
There are no experts in these matters. All the people touted as experts on topics like taxes and tariffs are fools. Their guess is as good as yours. Some of the people who are still miraculously thought of as experts on economics are so laughably bad that if they were in any other field, they would be defrocked, stripped of their license, or jailed.
Paul “Pinocchio” Krugman, for example, is the wrongest man who’s ever been wrong in American history on financial matters. Do not ever listen to a word this fool says: he’s a glorified court jester worthy only of mockery and scorn.
When you think of Krugman, you should picture him as the marionette he is, with a gigantic wooden nose and held up by strings. His advice is only as solid as the wood he’s made from. Yet he doesn’t even yearn to be a real boy.
Really, his portrait should be hung on the wall of an “American Hall of Shame” next to people like Jefferson Davis, George McGovern, and Walter Mondale.
These dismal scientists are just as fallible as the rest of us, except they have fancier charts and graphs that make them look smart. They also have an astonishingly bad record at A) predicting problems in the market and B) coming up with solutions to fix them.
Do not listen to these clowns.
Seriously, they are guessing just as much as you are, only they have insulated themselves from the effects of their prognostications while you haven’t because you can’t.
(By the way, perhaps worst of all is Jim Cramer from “The Street” — a man who perceives himself an expert AND works for a news organization. He’s the worst of both worlds. His advice, ideas, and predictions are so bad that there’s literally something called the “Inverse Cramer Index.” I kid you not, the SJIM 0.00%↑ is a real thing. You can actually buy stocks that are the exact opposite of Cramer’s picks, and if you do, you will be much wealthier than if you really took his advice.)
#3: Don’t trust the historians.
I know this one sounds very counterintuitive, but it’s an important part of the equation. 1930 was 95 years ago. (That’s when Smoot-Hawley was enacted—I know you forgot, but I didn’t.)
In 1930, the Great Depression was on. Nazis were a growing threat (and I mean, real, actual Nazis, not just people you don’t like who drive Teslas, by the way).
There are so many ways that we simply cannot compare America then and now. Today is absolutely nothing like the 1930s. In 2025, we have:
The internet
Automated manufacturing
Circuit breakers in stock markets
Cryptocurrency
Globalization
Artificial intelligence
That last item alone is a total game-changer. Looking at Depression-era charts and saying, “Aha! See here: Last time somebody tried tariffs, just look what happened!” is absolutely silly. Very few of the old rules apply anymore.
#4: Don’t trust the politicians.
This should be very, very easy to understand: Politicians are lying dirtbags who will say almost anything to get elected into power and then hold onto power for as long as possible. Almost everything they say about everything should always be viewed through that lens. They are not here to help you, and they do not care about you.
Speaking of lying dirtbags holding on to power as long as possible, check out what Nancy Pelosi, one of the longest-serving U.S. Representatives EVER, said in the 1990s.
Pelosi in 1996: “How far does China have to go? How much more repression, how big a trade deficit and loss of jobs for the American worker, and how much more dangerous [a] proliferation has to exist… before members of this House of Representatives will say, ‘I will not endorse the status quo?’”
What has changed since then? Well, China’s gotten much, much stronger, for one thing. The trade deficit is much, much bigger, the loss of jobs for the American workers has grown much, much more significant, and a much, much more dangerous proliferation exists.
So now, more than ever, Pelosi (and all Democrats) would be a big fan of taking a giant sledgehammer to China in the form of tariffs, right? Wrong.
Pelosi in 2025: “The Trump Administration's flagrant ineptitude is tanking our economy in a self-inflicted disaster that leaves hardworking American families bearing the brunt of the pain.”
Ummm… what? (By the way, the president that Pelosi was standing in defiance of in 1996 was a Democrat. Bill Clinton was a Democrat. Still is, as far as I know.)
People, this woman who has been in Congress almost as long as I’ve been alive doesn’t care about you or me, or America or China. She cares about her stock portfolio, which is loaded up with things that will be hurt by tariffs in 2025.
Note: To be clear, I am not saying she’s right for calling for tariffs back then or for standing against them now. I’m saying she’s a useless hypocrite whose opinion should be discarded.
#5: Don’t trust the protesters.
I’ve watched with a combination of shock and amusement as people have started protesting in various random places about random things. Something about a “hands off” protest happened over the weekend?
Hands? Whose hands? Hands off of what?
None of that makes sense. What are they protesting? Politicians? Billionaires? Taxes? Tariffs? DOGE? A combination of all the above?
I have no idea what to make of these folks: it looks like many of them are unemployed, most of them are unintelligent, and all of them are… just uninteresting.
What do they want? What do they want us to do? What can they force people to do?
Do they just want people to hear that they’re angry? Uhh, okay. Duly noted.
Now what?
These people are toddlers throwing temper tantrums.
Also, it’s very important to keep in mind that just because you see a bunch of people gathered on the lawn of a government building, screaming and holding signs, this doesn’t mean they’re doing it for a virtuous cause.
There is plenty of evidence to doubt their altruistic intentions: somebody is likely funding these protests. Right now, it seems, we don’t know who that is.
But I would be just as skeptical of a protester’s motivation as I would a politician. They have their reasons for taking time out of the day, during working hours, to hold cardboard signs with vague and unclear messaging like “hands off.”
(Note: If you yourself are one of those protesters, that's fine; more power to you. Go and protest all day, every day, if it makes you feel better. Just know that it won’t change a thing, and you certainly aren’t changing anyone’s mind other than building up resistance to your cause.)
#6: Don’t trust the stock market.
People sometimes look at the stock market’s “strength” as an indicator of financial wellness or success or power or… something like that.
It’s actually none of those things. The way the stock market is performing is mostly just a barometer of investor sentiment. The value of a company’s stock is not necessarily tied to performance.
Goodness gracious, just look at the history of any publicly-traded company in the history of ever to see this:
When companies do things investors don’t like, the price goes down.
When companies do things investors like, the price goes up.
That’s it. At a basic level, that’s really all it means.
A stock’s rise in price does not mean the company is doing well.
Plenty of companies have gone bankrupt or gone out of business with very little warning, even as their share prices were solid or climbing.
The same is true in reverse: a company’s stock going down in price just means buyers don’t want to buy it right now.
Today, NVIDIA NVDA 0.00%↑ stock is priced at $98.56. That’s MASSIVELY up from what it was 5 years ago, which was $6.93. But it’s also MASSIVELY down from what it was 5 months ago, which was $148.88.
So which is it: is NVIDIA Corp a horrible company or a great company? Is it a good buy or a bad buy? These questions are not so easy to answer. Overall, it looks fine and will be okay in the long run.
I think all of America will be okay in the long run.
Also, keep in mind that whatever the market is doing right now, DO NOT START PANIC SELLING.
I have compassion for people, especially small individual investors like me, who lose money. But if you’re the kind of person who sees red and says, “Ahh! Time to sell!” I think you deserve all the financial suffering that is coming to you (and it will come).
This is a horrible time to sell. Do not sell.
#7: Don’t trust the billionaires.
I was shocked last week when somebody told me that Mark Cuban has somehow tried to recast himself as some sort of “friendly billionaire who’s here to help the common man.”
Mark Cuban?
This is such a staggeringly stupid idea; I can’t even believe he’s bold enough to try this.
Whatever you do, don’t listen to Mark Cuban. The man is an idiot.
First of all, he was an ardent and vocal supporter of Kamala Harris. So, nothing he says can possibly be trusted as, “Ahh, shucks, I’m just a neutral observer sharing my own unbiased opinion as a favor.” Nope. Not even close.
Second of all, if he’s all of a sudden claiming that he is somehow against taxes or tariffs, he should get one of those “Liar Liar Pants on Fire” ratings from Snopes.
The man loves taxes.
HE LOVES TAXES.
He thinks taxes are absolutely wonderful and that people should pay more taxes. He has ALWAYS said this. Look: here he is, literally telling people in a recent video that he and other successful people should pay more taxes. It’s “patriotic” to pay taxes!
Of course, people like him are ALWAYS welcome to give more to the government voluntarily if they want to—everyone can. But people like him never mean this; they always mean they want the government to forcibly increase tax rates.
(This comes from a very weird place of self-loathing: some super-rich people—like Cuban, apparently—feel guilty about how “little” they pay in taxes. Perhaps because they didn’t work hard for it?)
If tariffs are indeed taxes, and they’re growing, Cuban should be thrilled at the opportunity to show America his ever-increasing patriotism.
It’s his patriotic “duty” (heh).
The truth is that taxes are bad. Taxes are stupid. The only reason we pay taxes is because the government forces us to. If we don’t, men with guns wearing three-letter agency badges will come to our houses at night, arrest us, and put us in jail.
I’m a business owner. It’s very simple. Taxes are the single biggest barrier to my success. Taxes do more to hurt me, insult me, steal from me, keep me down, and prevent me from achieving success than anything else on earth.
Taxes make it harder for me to become wealthy like Cuban. He knows this.
Okay, I know Cuban is an easy target: he was (clearly) a popular party animal frat-boy who founded a tech company and had the most extraordinary timing in the world, getting lucky by selling it to a dumb buyer with more cash than sense in a horrendously bad deal.
(By the way, he even agrees with me about this. In the same video shown above, he says, “In order to become a billionaire, the one thing you have to have is luck. Any billionaire who tells you they could just do it again: no. You have to be lucky.”)
I used to think Cuban was interesting on Shark Tank, but while he’s fun to watch on TV, it turns out he wasn’t even good at that.
But here’s the weirdest part: Isn’t it strange that the same “hands off” people who are (literally) ranting and screaming about billionaires ruining this country are also running into the arms of… a billionaire?
That’s crazy. The only reason Cuban is getting any airtime at all right now is that leftists see him as the “Anti-Musk” billionaire. If Elon Musk says something that makes them angry, the thought process goes, they just need to find another billionaire who disagrees with him.
Enter Mark Cuban.
That’s it. He’s a useful idiot and doesn’t even know it. People are only paying attention to him right now so they can say, “My billionaire is smarter than your billionaire.”
Stop it.
Seriously. Billionaires have NO BETTER IDEA of what’s going on right now. What’s worse is that many (or most) of them are secretly extremely biased. They have massive financial investments and conflicts of interest that they’re not telling you about because they don’t have to.
I like picking on Cuban because he’s just awful. But it’s not just him.
Bill Ackman, for example, hedge fund extraordinaire and super-smart guy I normally listen to, was just on TV talking about tariffs and said there will be an “economic nuclear war” if we don’t reverse course soon.
Dude. Come on: we’re all smarter than this. Please.
ACKMAN STANDS TO MAKE A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT OF MONEY RIGHT NOW.
Whether the tariffs come or go, he’s going to make more money than you’ve ever seen in your life. He has a staggering interest in tariffs being removed for the sake of his own personal wealth. But he ALSO has ways to use this “crisis” to his advantage even if nothing happens.
We know this for sure: he did the same kind of thing five years ago during COVID-19. See for yourself. Go down the rabbit hole. It’s all there for you to see. Anyway, let’s move on from the billionaires.
#8: Don’t trust the upper-middle-income folks.
You know the type: mid-50s, usually white, moderately liberal people who work for Fortune 500 companies. Often, they’re married couples with two incomes and two kids who are almost ready to fly the coop.
They have a nice home, but it’s not extravagant. They live near a golf course and play tennis regularly. They walk their dogs in the morning while wearing sun visors and smiling and waving at the neighbors who drive by in golf carts.
They go to the beach a few times a year in their cars, which are pretty nice but not super luxurious, like a Lexus SUV. Their parents paid for their college, and they’re paying for their kids’ college. They’re on the boards of local nonprofit arts organizations and think “we should be doing more to help the environment.”
These people are often the worst at knowing what markets do. They watch CNBC and listen to airheads like Jim Cramer, and don’t know a ton about money but feel like they know enough.
And by “know enough,” I mean they have a Northwestern Mutual guy who helps them with their decent-but-not-huge retirement fund, and they talk to him once or twice a year to make sure they’re still “on the right track for retirement.”
Their managed portfolios are loaded with defense contractors’ shares. They like everything to be stable. All day, every day, they just want to see stable, consistent growth.
They voted against Trump because he was a “chaos candidate,” and they don’t want chaos—they want stability. When they pull out their iPhones at the country club bar, they just want to see glowing green lines on the iOS stocks app.
That’s what they vote for. That’s what they know. That’s what they support.
They don’t know or care at all about the actual war in Ukraine that seems to be going on forever with no end in sight, and, actually, they don’t mind because if Boeing and Lockheed’s stock goes up consistently, it won’t bother them at all at tee time this Saturday.
They don’t care about the actual struggle of people living on one income (like me) or who have five kids (like me) or who are self-employed (like me) and who can barely afford to get by each week (like me) and have no retirement or benefits (like me) and who can’t possibly hope to buy a house ever in the future (like me) because they were priced out of the market a decade ago.
I don’t hate these people, but please, don’t listen to them.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with them per se; my point is that they don’t actually understand what’s going on in terms of global trade or geopolitics, and they don’t actually care what’s going on. They just care that their retirement is safe.
Red lines: bad. Green lines: good. It’s that simple.
#9: Don’t trust the people who created the coronavirus lockdown.
I find it absolutely fascinating that the people in power right now who are shouting loudly against tariffs are also the same people who crashed the stock market, destroyed the global economy, and forced lockdowns on us against our will in 2020.
These bad actors who (often illegally) placed us under house arrest must think the American people have very short memories. And maybe Americans do.
Because it is the same group of power-hungry maniacs who forced us to shutter our businesses, locked us in our houses, and told us we couldn’t go shopping or visit houses of worship who are now crying about how bad tariffs are.
That. Is. Objectively. Insane.
There was, indeed, a man-made crisis in the stock market where the people in power forced a mass panic and selloff and created total, utter catastrophe unnecessarily.
But that was not last week in April of 2025; that was back in 2020 when insane, unconstitutional, un-American, and unscientific hysteria caused everything in our world to come to a screeching halt.
And they did it all while saying it was “the right thing to do” and that they were doing it “for our own good.”
So, no, I don’t care what those same liars who told us they just needed “fifteen days to slow the spread” for three years in a row think today.
So here we are now… what do we do? Only one thing.
#10: Trust your own eyes and ears.
Seriously, this is a very, very simple solution. Ask yourself the following questions:
Can I pay my rent?
Can I put gas in my car?
Do I have a job to drive to?
Can I afford groceries?
Are my clients (or is my employer) still paying me?
If the answer is “yes,” that’s a good sign. If it’s “no,” that’s a bad sign.
If you’re struggling, don’t forget that the financial pain we’re having did not start last week in April 2025. It started years ago and has only gotten worse with the profoundly stupid and unnecessary spending on COVID insanity, fake stimulus programs, and unwinnable wars.
The current tariff escalation or trade war hasn’t even hit yet. Watch it carefully. Look at your daily life. If you can answer “yes” to the questions above today, then you’re probably doing okay. If that later changes to “no,” THEN it’s time to re-think things and re-strategize.
My advice for the White House
If anybody from Washington were to ask little ol’ me my thoughts on all of this (though that would never happen), there is one thing I’ll stand firm on: the uncertainty about tariffs is far worse than actual tariffs (or a lack thereof).
I run a small business that serves other small businesses. Small businesses are incredible at shifting and pivoting to fill their customers’ needs.
But do you know what happens to small businesses when the market looks uncertain?
They hit the pause button. They stop investing. Not necessarily in stocks, which I don’t care about, but they stop investing in their own companies.
They stop growing.
They stop expanding.
They stop hiring.
Uncertainty in the market is the deadliest force I know of in my world.
That small plumbing company that was about to get a big SBA loan, buy a new fleet of five vehicles, and hire fourteen new employees to expand into a new market? Those plans are canceled now. New hires are not happening after all, and layoffs of existing staff might be coming next.
That would-be restaurant owner who was going to close on the building and start a tenant finish construction project to remodel it into a nice Pizza kitchen? After three years of planning, she just decided to walk away and shred that now-terrifying 20-year building lease she was about to sign.
That couple that owns a small business who were about to retire and build their dream home has canceled their contract with their builder because they’re not sure if they can retire now, so they’re just going to “wait and see what happens.” And the small-town home builder who was going to build the home they’ve been planning for the past nine months is going to go bankrupt if he hears one just more client tell him “We need to put this on hold.”
Nobody who owns a small business makes investments in their companies if they aren’t certain (or certain enough, anyway) to know that they will profit from it.
This snip-snap-will-he-won’t-he approach to trade is making people lose trust, and quickly. It’s even spooking me, and like I said in the beginning, I’m Mr. Calm.
So, what do we do?
In the end, I don’t know the answer about tariffs. I never said I did. What I have tried to say, with nearly 5,000 words, is this: nobody else knows what’s going on either.
Anyone who says they do is either selling you something or lying (likely both).
Just live your life the best you can.
Turn off the TV.
Don’t listen to the experts.
Don’t listen to the billionaires.
Don’t listen to your neighbors.
I do not know what tariffs will do to world markets. Neither do you. Neither do the people implementing them. Neither do the people paying them.
I do know about my own employment situation and my own financial situation. That’s really all that matters, and that’s all I have control over (and even that is saying too much; I have very little control over that at times!).
Final thoughts (plus a temperature check)
Here’s a great indicator of finding out how we’re doing: I took my son over the weekend to go see “A Minecraft Movie.” You know what I saw?
Lots of parents and lots of children. Kids were everywhere. People were laughing, hanging out with their friends, buying popcorn and candy, and watching movies.
Nobody was panicking. People were smiling and shelling out cash for fun stuff on a weekend. It was a lighthearted scene of calm people doing calm, normal things.
When I start to see movie theaters standing empty and devoid of life and laughter, then I’ll start to get concerned.
Right now, I’m just popping chill pills, and I suggest you do the same.
Finally, if indeed this is the start of a recession, I have a plan for that too, baby.
I’ve been there; done that. I got a whole batch of these bumper stickers made when I got laid off back in 2009 during “The Great Recession.” Everybody was having a total meltdown about the meltdown. But not Mr. Calm.
I do not want a recession. But if a recession is here, I will refuse to participate in this one just like the last one.
Want one? They’re for sale. Get ‘em quick, though, before the tariffs hit, and I have to raise the prices. I guess I am selling something after all… but at least I’m not lying.