The flippancy with which the president describes a policy that will affect the economic well-being and planning of every individual and private enterprise is shockingly impertinent.

Is there anything at all that the targets of Trump’s sweeping tariffs primarily targeting America’s North American allies could do to avert a trade war, the president was asked on Friday night. “No,” Trump replied. “Nothing.”

But what happened to all that stuff about tariffs merely being a “negotiating tool,” he was asked? Trump appeared perplexed, as though he had never encountered such alien logic. “No, it’s not,” he noted. “It’s a pure economic.” Between the introduction of fentanyl into America from China by way of Canada and Mexico and, of course, “big deficits,” the degree to which Americans “subsidize” their trading partners, and, of course, the revenue they’ll generate, tariffs speak for themselves. “Is there a concession you’re looking for, sir?” Trump’s interlocutor asked one more time. “No. We’re not looking for a concession,” the president explained.

The president has a remarkable talent for embarrassing his subordinates — or, rather, forcing them to embarrass themselves. It’s hard, however, to have any sympathy for their entrapment. No one puts a gun to their head and compels them to promulgate reasonable but illusory rationales for Trump’s peculiar fetishes. When it comes to tariffs, in particular, Trump talks about them with such fulsome affection — gushing over their ability to fully fund the government while bringing our enemies and allies alike to heel, all while incurring no real costs and imposing on us no trade-offs — that prudence alone would have prescribed caution. Instead, we were privy to an interminable effort to persuade the country that Trump knew tariffs were just another instrument in the geopolitical junk drawer with limited and specific applications.

Americans don’t like being lied to. Republicans shouldn’t need much coaxing to remember that. After all, they had only just emerged victoriously from a presidential campaign in which the opposing party’s coordinated mendacity featured prominently. And yet, even though Trump and company are abandoning their contrived efforts to make anxious Americans feel better about the trade war to which the president has consigned them, the administration is all but certain to deliver on one of the conflict’s promises: “pain.”

“WILL THERE BE SOME PAIN?” the president wrote in all caps. “YES, MAYBE (AND MAYBE NOT!).” Truly inspiring stuff. The flippancy with which the president describes a policy that will affect the economic well-being and planning of every individual and private enterprise is shockingly impertinent. He is right, however, to anticipate discomfort with his trade war. The 10 percent tariff on China covers all goods — even small purchases that were previously exempted from Trump and Joe Biden’s tariffs — which will boost the cost of consumer electronics. The 25 percent tariff on Canadian and Mexican imports covers all goods (except energy, the costs of imports going up only 10 percent, as if that’s a concession), many of which are direct-to-consumer products like food (which consumers will feel at the checkout line) or industrial inputs (which consumers will feel when purchasing U.S. manufactured goods).

All this will be great news for lobbying firms that will soon be flush with funds from the nations and interests that now understand their economic fortunes are dependant on the president’s mood, but everyone else is likely to suffer. Estimates indicate this attack on our treaty-bound neighbors could shave a point and a half off of U.S. GDP this year and over two points next year after the targets of these tariffs retaliate in deference to their own patriotism and nationalism (some already have).

But what is it that Trump is looking to get out of this conflict? What is the off-ramp that allows our adversaries to climb down the escalatory ladder and save face in the process, ensuring that trade hostilities remain dormant in the future? Trump’s apple polishers will be quick to cite the president’s fig leaves — fentanyl and border crossings, although both are on the wane with increased border policing.

If, however, we dispense with the fiction that anyone but Trump can speak to the goings on in the president’s head, we are privy to a different rationale: “Without this massive subsidy, Canada cease to exist as a viable Country,” Trump fulminated. “Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State.”

Is he joking? Is he marking the inauguration of a conflict that will impose “pain” on the rest of us with humor? Or are these mad musings reflective of some seductive notion that has captured the president’s imagination? Either way, this is no way to run a country.

Trump’s recent use of tariffs as a deterrent in an emerging confrontation with the Colombian government was useful insofar as it demonstrated the best way to think about a trade war — less like “trade” and more like “war.” Deterrence is the threat of force held in reserve unless certain conditions are met. War is what happens when deterrence fails. That is never the optimal outcome because war involves mutual pain, the only calculation being which party to the conflict can absorb more of it before capitulating. “When you set off a trade war, like any other war, you have no idea how that’s going to end,” the economist Thomas Sowell observed. “You’re going to be blindsided by all kinds of consequences.”

Trump doesn’t see tariffs as an instrument of geopolitical coercion. He has embarked on an open-ended conflict without any achievable strategic goal in mind because tariffs are not a means to an end but an end in themselves. And in pursuing this flight of fancy, Trump has backed off his foremost mandate — even beyond restoring sanity to America’s immigration regime: getting consumer prices down. He and his allies will regret it.