Crazily, almost all Americans don’t understand how tariffs work and think the country the tariff is imposed on will pay it, when in fact, it’s the US importer, who then passes that extra cost on to the American consumer. This is not helped by Trump’s rhetoric “China/Canada/EU will pay, we will slap a 25% tariff on them”.
So true. It is this worrying level of ignorance that allows Trump to continually spout complete lies, over and over again. The problem is further compounded by a sycophantic US media that doesn’t challenge their Presidents in the way that our media would challenge a British PM who talked nonsense. How many times have we heard Trump say that 60% of the cost of the Ukraine war was paid by the US and all money from European countries was loans? Neither is remotely true, yet he is never challenged on it, so the US public believe it. It is no wonder that he is aligning the US with Russia as he is adopting a similar approach to Putin i.e. never let the facts get in the way of a good argument!