Fuck Cambodia specifically. Trump probably got a bad VD from there at some point.

Bro just crashed the market with a printed out excel sheet.

Tarrifs are a Trump Tax on ordinary Americans so they can give tax breaks to billionaires.

I don't know what the actual reasoning is but the 49/46% on Cambodia and Vietnam sounds an awful lot like how we still embargo Cuba like decades after failing to overthrow Castro.

In case anyones looking at this and asking question like "Why has Cambodia been dunked with 49% when they're clearly not a competitor to the US" or "Why is Trump claiming that the European Union has a 40% tariff on the US when the actual mean tariff on US goods into the EU is less than 5%", here's your answer to how these figures have been calculated.

• Take the US trade deficit with a given country (eg. China is $292bn)
• Take the total good imported by US (for China that's $439bn)
• Divide the first figure by the second! Why? Who knows! It's a number! Less talk more first grade arithmetic (if you're still following that gives us 67%)
• That gives us a random number which we'll pretend is that country's tariff of US goods even though it's completely unrelated in every way. We'll divide it by two to get the new tariff rate for imports from that country. Why? Honestly if you're still expecting there to be an answer to that question I'm wondering if you've been following. (that gives us 34%, well actually it gives us 33.5% but I'm not sure the Trump administration understands the idea of fractions so we'll just round it up from there)

The "reason" behind this is that Trump seems to think trade deficits are really bad, which is bad news for the US because it's had a trade deficit for the last 50 years. We'll ignore the fact that based on per capita GDP it's been the wealthiest country in the world for that time though.

Anyway, just to give everyone an idea of how completely, utterly unrelated to anything meaningful that figure is, let's take Cambodia. The country is very poor compared to the US so can't afford to buy anything that the US manufacters (Cambodians aren't driving round in Teslas or IMessaging each other). Some US companies use it for clothing manufacture because labour is cheap in Cambodia (see the previous bit about Cambodia being much poorer than the US). This means that Cambodia imports close to nothing from the US compared to what it exports, giving it a close to 100% trade deficit, so we wind up with a 49% tariff on Cambodia.

I genuinely don't understand the mindset that looks at the US's explotation of cheap labour in Cambodia and interprets the US as the victim in that relationship, but hey-ho maybe I'm just not biggly-smart enough to understand the 4d chess moves at play here. . .

Reference (because unfortunately none of what I said was made up and that geniunely is the calculation): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists

I don't have a ton of "the court is wrong" opinions, but Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution flatly gives Congress the responsibility of regulating trade and imposing tariffs. The President just doesn't (shouldn't) have the authority to change rates. The executive needs to execute the will of the Legislative branch.

I swear that if we could just all ignore him unless he does nice things, we'll make him stop. The tariffs are not his plan. That's someone else pulling the strings. He just likes the attention. Giving a malignant narcissist any kind of supply is just going to make him worse. His fans already treat him like the messiah.

Gray rock the shit out of him. Remove his name from the internet, hack Fox news - take it all down, and only give it back when he behaves like a good boy.

Cambodia be like

The guy is really playing economic Russian roulette. This can consequently go terrible wrong for the US.

As a 🇨🇦 my boycott will last a lifetime.

And crashed the market more!

Lol, the bitch waited till the markets closed to announce it.

This is going to be a bloody mess to witness from the outside. The US are shooting their own foot again and again with a bazooka and it is going to hurt the majority of its population

Surprised I don't see Brasil (sp?) on there not surprised I don't see Hungary Turkiye Russia or Israel on there.

"The corporations own the government" made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I'm actually starting to question that idea (it's definitely true for the majority of Democrats though). The only real reason I can think of where it would make sense to do stuff like this is to cause a crisis making it easier to abuse power later on.