They are not reciprocal: he has even imposed them on uninhabited islands

Trump’s nonsense and traps with tariffs: he punishes Ukraine but not Russia

@ElentirENG Esp4·03·2025 · 6:58

For years, I’ve been criticizing the ridiculous economic notions of socialists and communists. Today, that club has a new member.

Trump and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a predictable failure to which he contributed
Trump’s shameful attitude towards Zelensky: rudeness to the victim and praise to the aggressor

Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands based on false information

Yesterday, Trump signed an executive orderimposing tariffs on a multitude of countries onwhat he has called “liberation day”. The full list of countries and territories with the corresponding tariffs imposed by the US was published at 10:32 p.m. CET by the White House Rapid Response 47 channel.

The surprises soon arrived. For example, the last part of the list includes the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an Australian territory with no inhabitantsand which has a large colony of penguins, which – obviously – do not export any products to the United States. According to the White House, these islands (which have no commercial relations) impose 10% tariffs on the US, so in revenge they impose a tariff with that percentage. It’s completely absurd.

It also imposes tariffs on countries with free trade agreements with the US.

There’s another slightly ridiculous case. For example, Trump also imposes a 10% tariff on the Cocos Islands, an Australian territory in the Indian Ocean with 544 inhabitants and whose economy depends almost entirely on Australia, since its agriculture is almost subsistence-based, tourism is scarce, and its only known export product is stamps. The White House claims that they impose 10% tariffs on US products there, but this is false, since Australian law applies there.

In fact, the first part of the White House list includes Australia with 10% tariffs. The list claims that Australia imposes 10% tariffs on US products, but this is false. Australia has had a free trade agreement with the United States since January 1, 2005. Following Trump’s announcement that he would impose tariffs on the United States, Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, said on March 12:

This is against the spirit of our two nations’ enduring friendship and fundamentally at odds with the benefits our economic partnership has delivered over more than 70 years. Australia has no tariffs on goods from the United States.

In fact, The US also has free trade agreements with several other countries, including Canada, Israel, South Korea, Chile, Colombia, and Costa Rica, countries on which Trump has also imposed tariffs. Obviously, these tariffs are a violation of the international treaties signed by the US, but the current president of that country seems to care very little about the treaties.

Trump’s trap: he presents what is a trade deficit as a tariff

How does Trump justify this nonsense? Well, he doesn’t do so like many of his followers, who claim that these tariffs are reciprocal: they are not. The executive order clearly exposes the trap from its very title:

“Regulating Imports with a Reciprocal Tariff to Rectify Trade Practices that Contribute to Large and Persistent Annual United States Goods Trade Deficits“

As the text makes clear repeatedly, this is not just about tariffs, but about trade deficits, that is, the negative difference between the US’s exports (what it sells) and imports (what it buys) from other countries. American journalist James Surowiecki commented last night:

Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficitwith that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.

So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.

An economic nonsense with exclusively political ends

So, with these tariffs, Trump is not seeking reciprocity, but rather inventing data with the absurd purpose of preventing the US from importing more than it exports to any country: it is something purely ridiculous and surprising in a well-known businessman, but not in a politician who believes that anything goes to get votes.

It’s normal for a country not to always have a trade surplus with every country it interacts with. Everything will depend on the products each country needs or sells. These tariffs lack economic logic and seem designed to sell a nationalist ideological narrative to Trump’s voters, a narrative that blames other countries for all of America’s problems. It’s an unrealistic and ridiculous narrative, which will cause serious damage to the US economy, but it will allow Trump to sell this nationalist narrative to that segment of his electorate that has no understanding of macroeconomics.

Trump favors Russia and punishes Ukraine with his tariffs

On the other hand, curiously, the White House does not impose any tariffs on Russia, but it does on Ukraine (10%). Some have claimed that this is because the sanctions imposed by the US imply that this country does not have commercial relations with Russia, but this is not true: according to the US government itself, in 2024 the US imported Russian goods worth $3 billion, while US exports of goods from the US to Russia were $526.1 million. Significantly, the US trade deficit in goods with Russia was $2.5 billion in 2024, so according to Trump’s nationalist theses, imposing such tariffs on Russia would be justified.

In contrast, according to the US government, US goods exports to Ukraine in 2024 were $1.7 billion, an increase of 60.7% ($635.9 million) from 2023. At the same time, US goods imports from Ukraine totaled $1.2 billion in 2024, a decrease of 10.1% ($133.8 million) from 2023, likely due to the Russian invasion. Thus, The US achieved a trade surplus with Ukraine of $497.0 million in 2024, an increase of 282.2% ($769.7 million) compared to 2023.

According to the thesis of that executive order, Trump would have more reasons to impose tariffs on Russia than on Ukraine, especially considering that the Ukrainian people are fighting for their survival and that Moscow is waging a war of aggression against its southwestern neighbor. Trump’s imposing tariffs on Ukraine but not on Russia demonstrates a clear arbitrariness in governing, in which economic arguments don’t matter and what ultimately prevails are the president’s likes and dislikes, which have already become very clear in recent weeks in relation to that war.

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His clumsy strategy has had terrible effects on the conservative movement

Trump and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a predictable failure to which he contributed

@ElentirENG Esp4·02·2025 · 19:29

Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States on January 20 of this year. He had a significant challenge ahead of him.

This is not a peace process: it is favoring Russia and will not only have effects for Ukraine
Trump’s shameful attitude towards Zelensky: rudeness to the victim and praise to the aggressor

Trump said he would end this war “in 24 hours”

He set the challenge for himself during his run for the White House. In May 2023, Trump said he could achieve peace in Ukraine: “I’ll have that done in 24 hours”. He didn’t want to reveal how he would do it until after the election, so many voted for him as if they believed the Republican candidate had some kind of magic formula to resolve the war. Finally, in February we were able to find out what the formula was: pressure Ukraine to give in to the invader, blaming Ukraine for the Russian invasion and committing the indignity of voting alongside Russia and Korea of the North at the UN against a resolution rejecting the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Obviously, with this strategy, Trump only managed to strengthen Putin, believing that he would obtain in an office what his army failed to achieve on the battlefield in three years. At the same time, Ukraine has shown itself unwilling to submit to Trump’s whims, given the US president’s attempts to use the Russian invasion as a pretext to seize a large part of the invaded country’s mineral wealth.

In mid-March he said that when he announced that he was a “little bit sarcastic”

In the middle of last month, seeing that things were not going his way, Trump claimed that when he promised to end this war in 24 hours he was being a “little bit sarcastic”. This is a cynical way of saying that he lied to his voters, that he had no realistic plan to end the war, and that all his hopes were based on Ukraine surrendering. Hopes generated by Russian propaganda that has poisoned the ranks of the Republican Party in a regrettable way, as we have seen in recent weeks.

The US president realizes his failure

On Sunday, March 30, Trump said he was “very angry” and “pissed off” at Putin over his attempt to oust Zelesnky as president of Ukraine. “If Russia and I can’t come to an agreement to stop the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I believe it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but I do believe it was Russia’s fault, I’m going to impose secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” he said in remarks to NBC.

Finally, yesterday the Reuters reported that senior officials in the Trump administration acknowledge that Washington may not be able to negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine in the coming months. This is a way of acknowledging that the White House has reached an impasse and that Trump is beginning to understand that he has failed.

A clumsy strategy that has served to strengthen Putin

The problem is that Trump’s failure has been paid for by others. With his irresponsible actions, the US president has emboldened Putin and pushed many Western conservatives into the arms of Russian propaganda, a move that Trump’s own team has facilitated by embracing some of the Kremlin’s worst lies. This has caused serious moral damage to the Ukrainian cause, undermining much of its support in the US and elsewhere, and it has also served to make Putin believe that his strategy of terror was on the right track, which explains the recent wave of constant Russian attacks against civilian targets in Ukraine.

The damage Trump’s strategy has caused to the conservative movement

Beyond those who have been taken in by Russian propaganda, many conservatives have put all their faith in Trump, believing him to be a brilliant negotiator, unleashing a wave of insults against those of us who criticize the US president’s immoral strategy of putting all the pressure on the invaded country and not the invader. They have accused us of being “warmongers”, they have accused us of wanting war, of wanting people to die, they have spread the slogan that if we supported Ukraine we should go fight there, and other infamies whose purpose was to silence those of us who criticize Trump’s pitiful strategy regarding this war, applauded by many uncritically.

Finally, the facts prove us right: Trump is not the brilliant negotiator some claimed, and behind his regrettable statements about Ukraine in recent weeks there was no skillful strategy whose fruits we should patiently await, like someone waiting for a tree to turn into a raccoon. The only thing Trump’s strategy has served is to break the conservative movement and favor Russia, at a time when the invaders had suffered such a colossal number of losses that the only minimally sensible thing would have been to end the invasion and withdraw from Ukraine.