Toomey meant exactly what he was saying when he claimed to understand Trump’s trade logic through years of debate.

Yesterday was “liberation day” (or as I suggested we all call it, “Mission Accomplished” Day). Somehow, it has managed to go worse than nearly anyone expected it to. (I hope you were short in the market, friends.)

I will admit it: I did not predict the full extent of these tariffs. The market certainly did not predict how aggressive these tariffs would be. It is becoming clear that people foolishly talked themselves into believing that Trump (regardless of bluster) was not so mad as to seek to destroy the American economy and his own ability to govern simultaneously in pursuit of childhood economic fantasies. But do you know who did predict these tariffs? Former Senator Pat Toomey, who spoke just last month at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit in Maryland, on a panel hosted by our own Dominic Pino. I was there in the room and inwardly noted at the time how fascinating Toomey’s insight into Trump was — at multiple points he stipulated that his understanding came from years of personally arguing with him over trade — and nothing stuck in my mind quite so much as this moment, when he discussed Trump’s impending tariff deadline:

This, I’m afraid, is going to take us down a bad path, Dominic. I think that we’re going to experience more aggressive tariffs than a lot of people think, because the president really believes that — what he really wants to go after is the trade deficits. What he really objects to, and from all of my arguments with him, I’m convinced that he believes — and if you listen to his language — he believes that if you have a trade deficit with another country, that is the measure of the amount that country steals from you. And that of course disregards that we get something when we purchase products from other countries, but this is the way he views it. He thinks that the Canadians are ripping us off, because we buy some more goods from them than they buy from us (by the way, the difference is fully explained by oil imports that are quite useful and important to us). But this is where we are. We’re going to have relearn this lesson. I do think the markets are going to respond very poorly, if I’m right and on April 2 we discover we’re having a more aggressive round of tariffs than we expect.

Click the link and listen. I have multiple times now myself, because what Toomey said (which I’d already privately marked down as noteworthy) has just been proven out over the last day with such eerie accuracy that I’m inclined to ask him to take my tarot next. But no supernatural explanation is required at all: The truth is that Toomey meant exactly what he was saying when he claimed to understand Trump’s trade logic through years of debate, and that he was an accurate judge of character — in a way others, clinging to their delusions of rationality, were not.

Suffice it to say, it’s a safe guess that Toomey was indeed quoting some of Trump’s own exact language from past conversations: My ears perked up back then to hear Toomey describe Trump’s understanding of a “trade deficit” as “the measure of the amount that country steals from you” — “Is he really that dumb?” approximated my reaction — and so it was quite the confirmation to see an “anonymous Trump spokesman” use that exact same language last night to justify a tariff policy based not on other countries’ actual tariffs, but rather their trade deficit:

The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers . . . based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating,” a White House official said, calling it “the most fair thing in the world.

What a striking parallelism in language, so much so that one wonders whether the  “anonymous Trump spokesman” quoted by the Post used to go by the alias “John Barron” back in the 1980s. In any event, the moral of this story is that Trump is not bluffing this time. His understanding of international trade reduces to half-articulated neo-mercantilist thought crystallized in his head well over 40 years ago, and he will not be coming to any new realizations over the next three. He will likely only be defeated and destroyed in his ambitions (along with the American economy) not dissuaded from such follies — for he has believed them for decades, and with nothing left to lose, is determined to put them into practice come wrack or ruin.