Trump was playing chicken with tariffs. Then he chickened out | Steven Greenhouse

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

74% : Trump, never one to admit defeat, insists that his climbdown was a victory, that the mess he made was marvelous strategy.
69% : Trump is eager to get China to heed his wishes, but China, the world's leading manufacturing country, can now see that Trump will back down when the heat is too great.
60% : If only he would do the same when it comes to his dangerously myopic cuts to scientific research, environmental protection and foreign aid.
49% : Once again, Trump showed that his second term is one of fiat, flub and flip-flop, of bluster and blunder, of shooting first and aiming later.
47% : Eager to persuade manufacturers to build new plants in the US, Trump said on Monday that many of his tariffs would be permanent.
47% : By using staggeringly high tariffs as a weapon, Trump has been acting like a mob enforcer, telling every business in town: I'm going to clobber you with my baseball bat unless you do what I want.
46% : If Trump had some smart, principled advisers, they might explain to him that many obstacles might prevent his tariffs from achieving their goals.
45% : Trump thinks this even though millions of Americans are delighted to buy well-made sneakers from Vietnam (which would cost consumers far more if they were made in the US).
44% : But for Trump, permanent evidently meant two days.
42% : With his grievance-driven, zero-sum worldview, Trump no doubt believes that other countries are unfairly taking advantage of the US whenever we trade with them - and he wants to get even.
42% : With the nation's low 4% unemployment rate, it will be hard to find workers to do the manufacturing jobs that Trump wants to bring back, especially when he's rounding up and expelling many immigrant workers.
39% : In a second term of fiat, flubbing and flip-flopping, Trump pursued his desire to wield a club over everyone and everything By imposing punitively high tariffs, Donald Trump was playing a high-stakes game of chicken with America's trading partners - but it was Trump who chickened out and suspended his tariffs just hours after they took effect.
35% : Trump and his team pointed to a potpourri of often-conflicting goals: to erase trade deficits, to collect trillions of dollars for the treasury, to bring back manufacturing jobs, to give Trump negotiating leverage to crack down on fentanyl and immigration and reduce other countries' tariffs.
35% : If Trump had taken a class with Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at MIT, he might have heard Solow's wisdom about why there's no big worry about bilateral trade deficits: "I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn't buy a darned thing from me.
35% : If Trump were smart and strategic, he - instead of alienating those countries with his tariffs - would have formed an alliance with those countries to pressure China.
33% : In a fit of pique over China's retaliatory tariffs, Trump has imposed stratospheric 145% tariffs on China.
32% : Trump has not climbed down, however, in his showdown with China.
32% : When it came to tariffs, Trump made some basic political fumbles.
32% : " Our allies are no doubt furious with Trump.
30% : And then Trump ridicules them by saying they were rushing to kiss his behind.
25% : Before Trump unexpectedly suspended the tariffs, US stock markets had lost more than $10tn in value, and stock markets overseas plummeted, too.
24% : Trump trumpeted his tariffs in part to show strength, but he ended up in an embarrassing retreat (he did maintain a 10% tariff on many countries).
19% : Trump thinks that trade deficits are evil.

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