'No talking him out of it': Analyst warns US stuck with Trump's tariff policy

Donald Trump is refusing to back down from his controversial tariff policy and cannot be convinced otherwise, according to a political analyst.

The tariff policy was deemed to have breached the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a 1977 law governing presidential emergency authority over economic matters. Heather Digby Parton, writing in Salon, suggested that Trump will not be talked out of using tariffs during his second administration, and nothing will talk him out of this economic plan.

Parton wrote, "His impulsive use of tariffs to punish anyone who looks at him sideways and to reward friends who, say, gift him with gold bars and expensive airplanes, became a game of expectations and market manipulations that continues to this day.

"People are openly trading on what can only be inside information about the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, and it appears that nothing will be done about it. The well connected are now making big bank on the TACO dynamic.

"The immediate consequence of the tariff regime [has] put the American economy into suspended animation."

This halt to the American economy, Parton suggests, is because Trump cannot be convinced that his plan is a poor one. Parton continued, "Trump’s understanding of trade deficits is poor; he equates them to the budget deficit, and he has never understood that you don’t trade equal amounts of the same things to each country.

"He believes that if a nation exports cars to the U.S., they should be obligated to import the same number of cars, or pay a huge tariff to make up for it. This is something he’s believed for over 40 years, and there’s no talking him out of it.

"The announcement immediately triggered a global stock market panic, resulting in the largest decline since 2020, when the stock market crashed during the Covid-19 pandemic.

"Over the next two days the Dow fell 9.48%, the S&P 500 dropped 10% and the Nasdaq declined 11%. Everything fell: oil prices, the dollar, even gold, because investors were shocked by how unsophisticated and draconian the policy was. Trump had only been in office a little over two months."