WASHINGTON ― With a world economy on edge since he declared a trade war with the rest of the planet last week, President Donald Trump offered no reassuring words Monday and instead provided yet more evidence that he understands little to nothing about international trade, but is nevertheless convinced that he does.

From claiming that the European Union was created specifically to “screw” the United States to conflating trade deficits with domestic budget deficits to, yet again, misstating how tariffs are applied and on whom, Trump made clear to anyone watching his Oval Office question-and-answer session that he has no intention of ending or even pausing the turmoil he has set off.

“We’re not looking at that,” he said when asked whether he is open to a pause in his trade war. “We have many, many countries that are coming to negotiate deals with us, and they’re going to be fair deals. And in certain cases, they’re going to be paying substantial tariffs.”

“Holy shit that’s dumb. And troubling,” University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers said of Trump’s latest statements. “The only way to interpret what’s going on is that trade policy is entirely at the whim of one man, and no one inside the White House is willing to stand up to him.”

Notwithstanding Trump’s falsehood, foreign countries and exporters do not pay American tariffs. American importers and consumers do. His “liberation day” tariff regime he announced last week will cost Americans more than $2 trillion more in import taxes over the next decade.

But Trump continues to push the same lie he used in his first term, when he claimed that tariffs he levied on Chinese goods from China had been paid by China.

Since last week, financial markets both in the United States and around the world have plummeted. The S&P 500, for example, has lost 11% of its value since Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement, and some indices in other countries have had even larger losses.

“The decline is so large that one is left to wonder what it is that markets are pricing in,” Wolfers said. “It’s this: It’s the fear that this is a White House run by a muddled old man, who hasn’t appointed any grownups in the room, and who won’t listen to outside advice. The way these tariffs were set up is absurd and reveals there’s no rhyme or reason to what he’s doing.”

Trump, though, said Monday that none of the financial market chaos is making him rethink his views. “No other president would be willing to do what I’m doing or to even go through it. Now I don’t mind going through it because I see a beautiful picture at the end,” he said.

Even attempts to mollify Trump by lowering tariffs on American imports have not worked. He said he didn’t care if the EU lowered its tariffs on American cars to zero, and falsely claimed the bloc had been created specifically to cheat the U.S. on trade.

“I always say it was formed to really do damage to the United States in trade. That’s the reason it was formed,” he said. “We were paying for NATO, so we’re paying them to guard them militarily and they’re screwing us on trade.”

At the core of Trump’s trade war is the view ― unsupported by any rational economic analysis ― that a trade deficit with another country means that the country is cheating you. His so-called “reciprocal” tariffs are merely calculations of those trade deficits compared to the total imports from those countries.

“We will eliminate the trade deficit with the United States. We intend to do it very quickly,” he said Monday.

“Trump believes that the only thing that causes trade deficits is other countries stealing from America. Nobody seems able to persuade him otherwise,” said Avik Roy, a former top policy adviser to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

Trump at times also confused trade deficits with the U.S. national debt: “You know we have $36 trillion of debt for a reason,” he has said, so it’s unclear what precisely he meant during his explanations. Indeed, much of the 45 minutes he spent sitting beside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu taking questions from reporters was going on long tangents on various topics.

“I said we’re going to try and get groceries down right? An old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term. Eggs,” he said at one point. “Because prices got so high people couldn’t live. I mean, the prices for groceries, the prices for standard, standard groceries, standard things were going through the roof. They couldn’t live. And now those prices are coming down, so call them groceries.”

Wolfers said he hopes someone in the White House can persuade Trump to get some actual economic advice before it is too late. “All I ask is that he have his advisers call any three economists from the phone book. Any three,” he said. “I guarantee that all three will advise him to reverse course straight away. There’s no debate about what he’s doing. It’s simply destructive.”