Trump will be chief negotiator, Navarro says

I think I like it better when we get presidents who come from professions that aren’t really amenable to them trying to self-validate their skillsets at the expense of the country by trying to personally square off against the best the rest of the world can dig up.

Some of the biggest fuckups countries have engaged in is where they have a national leader with some degree of background in an area and who are determined to personally demonstrate their brilliance at high stakes relative to the best out there, like Hitler sticking his nose into technical military matters.

I guess the positive side here is that if he’s off trying to obtain trade deals, that does argue that the high global tariff stuff is indeed just a negotiating tactic, not a desired end goal. Regardless of whatever agreements he produces for the next four years, I suspect that they’ll be better for the US than simply throwing up high barriers to trade, which there was some speculation about him having as an end goal.

With NAFTA->USMCA, he made very few changes to the original state of affairs, and just aimed to use political theater to give voters in favor of protectionism the impression that he’d made much more drastic changes than was the case. That now seems like a plausible aim for him in Trump Term 2 as well.