What did Donald Trump do today?

He fudged some numbers to make his ongoing tariff debacle look scientific.

The latest chapter in the Trump Trade War saga saw him sending out letters to fourteen countries, informing their leaders that he will impose taxes on American importers of their goods in August. The letters were riddled with typographical and grammatical errors in the style of one of his social media rants, to an extent that appears to have been a deliberate choice. (It's not clear what he—or whoever published them without editing them—hoped to gain from that.)

In April, Trump announced staggering taxes for consumers on goods imported from effectively every country in the world—and also a few rocks uninhabited except by penguins, for some reason. Trump called these "reciprocal" tariffs, but almost immediately, analysts noticed that the seemingly random tariff numbers assigned to each country were the result of a formula that, to put it generously, had nothing to do with any existing barriers to trading American-made goods.  

The letters today threaten to impose effectively the same numbers, but this time plus or minus a few percentage points at random—apparently to make it seem as though the "formula" has been revised to yield more nuanced numbers.

Trump almost immediately backed down from those tariffs when markets plummeted at the prospect of the United States isolating itself from the rest of the world market. To save face, he gave himself 90 days to reach individual trade deals with every affected country—which is, again, effectively the entire world. Since then, he has made one partial agreement in principle with the UK and another with Vietnam. (Neither is binding and neither has gone into effect.) 

Even today's resetting of the July 9th deadline to August 1 isn't something he's willing to commit to, for fear of spooking the markets again: Trump admitted he wasn't "100% firm" on that, either. Markets were broadly down today, although it's unclear whether that's for fear of Trump actually following through at some point, or simply because sustained uncertainty is bad for business in and of itself.
 

Why does this matter?

• The United States economy literally cannot afford this level of incompetence. 

• The laws of economics do not suspend themselves no matter how badly Donald Trump wants to believe he's a business genius and a master negotiator.