The Trump White House rarely admits defeat. It prefers the posture of inevitability: broad shoulders, big hands, and economic proclamations delivered with the rhythmic confidence of a real estate listing. Thursday morning, that posture cracked.
Buried in a late Friday news dump, Donald Trump issued a sweeping executive order exempting more than 100 food items from the reciprocal tariffs he once insisted were essential to safeguarding America’s economic security.
The order itself makes clear why: domestic demand, production capacity, and trade negotiations all made these exemptions “necessary and appropriate.” In other words, the policy had become politically and economically untenable.
Plan, help farmers by removing their cheap labor and making it difficult for people to buy their produce but practically removing it from the shelf.
Step two add tariffs so that the price of the same imported produce can go higher to compete with us prices on a produce that is rotting on the field.
Step three drop the tariffs so that prices plummet and us farmers cannot ever match the desperately low prices. This is where we are.