Trump & His Sycophants Insist Economic Meltdown Was All ‘The Art of the Deal’

Fox News claims Trump got "everyone in the world to come to the table." Maybe, but it's the same way a child screaming and shitting their diaper would get everyone in the room to try and calm them down.

By Kylie Cheung  |  April 10, 2025 | 12:09pm
Photo: Getty Images Politics
Trump & His Sycophants Insist Economic Meltdown Was All ‘The Art of the Deal’
On Tuesday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared to the world that President Trump remained committed to his bogus tariffs that only took a week to tank the global economy, with no intention to pause or delay them; Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the same over the weekend: “There is no postponing, [the tariffs] are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks. That is sort of obvious.” On Wednesday morning, we knew we were in for a day when Trump insisted on Truth Social that we all “BE COOL!” as people watched their 401(k) fall by 25%; Trump also appealed to his supporters to not become “panicans” (???) and to continue to support his agenda even as they watched it ruin their lives in real time. But by Wednesday afternoon, in a sharp reversal, Trump announced a 90-day pause on high tariffs for over 75 countries that are now reportedly negotiating with the U.S.—while still maintaining a 125% tariff on China. Naturally, conservatives are now praising him for applying a small amount of dressing to an entirely self-inflicted wound.

The damage, of course, is already done. By Monday, over $11 trillion in wealth in the U.S. had evaporated. Trump has (further) exposed to Wall Street and the world that he’s a maniac. By his own admission, he wasn’t exactly playing 4D chess here: He backed down because, in his own words, people were “yippy” (?) and “afraid”—not because China and the McDonald Islands (which have no human residents and are primarily inhabited by penguins) had sufficiently learned their lesson.

Trump further tried to explain that “financial markets, they change,” adding, “Over the last few days, it looked pretty glum too, I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history.” Observant and helpful! Leading domestic violence researchers who coined the now-famous term DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim-offender) have already compared the entire fiasco and Trump’s furious gaslighting to the tactics of abusers: DARVO is “the strategy Trump and his team have been using for years to distort reality,” they wrote in a scathing Thursday op ed, pointing to how Trump “dodges accountability by shifting blame, silencing critics and reframing oneself as victim.”

Nevertheless, since Trump announced the pause, key members of his base and his favorite Fox News talking heads have all gone feral in lavishing praise on his business acumen. Leavitt, herself, chided reporters for not being “familiar” with Trump’s book, The Art of the Deal. The book, published in 1987 and ostensibly written by Trump and co-author Tony Schwartz, is known as a business guidebook in which Trump touts opening negotiations with huge, crazy demands in order to get the other side to give you what you actually want. (If you’re a Veep fan, you might know this tactic as a “cock-thumb.”) But, as Rolling Stone’s Miles Klee put it, the book is Trump “mostly [just] bitching about not getting enough credit for renovating the ice rink in Central Park.”

Yet, references to the so-called “art of the deal” are suddenly everywhere. The far-right, Trump-loved Breitbart News’ homepage headline on Wednesday evening read, “Art of the Deal: Trump Tariff Pause… Friendly Nations Down to 10% While We Negotiate… China Rate Cranked Up to 125%… Stocks Soar Immediately… World Unites Against CCP.” Bill Ackman, the obsessively pro-Israel hedge fund manager and right-wing commentator, has spent the past week raising questions about and even outright criticizing Trump’s tariffs. After the announced pause, he tweeted, “This was brilliantly executed by [Trump]. Textbook, Art of the Deal.” House Speaker Mike Johnson and conservative influencer Brigitte Gabriel also praised Trump for his purported, live-action Art of the Deal performance.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read the book—does it include a chapter instructing businesspeople to do something patently insane and then whip out the ol’ “Just Kidding Star” when everything predictably goes wrong? Or a chapter on setting your own house on fire, changing your mind while you watch your house go up in flames, then putting out some of the fire, basking in the credit for this, and continuing to live in a partially burned-slash-still-burning house? 

Before the reversal, the right-wing narrative was that Trump’s tariffs would restore a manufacturing boom in America. This sparked a comically stupid reckoning over masculinity among conservatives, who insisted that men being forced to trade office jobs for the steel mill would be the best damn thing to ever happen to them. On Wednesday night, Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro zeroed in on Trump’s masculinity, framing his cowardice and childlike incompetence as masculine strength: “We got a president who has the stamina to fight to make sure that we are a manufacturing country again,” she said, insisting that “Trump won. He literally got everyone in the world to come to the table.” He did, in fact, get “everyone in the world to come to the table”—the same way a child shitting their diaper and throwing a tantrum needs to be talked off the ledge by a group of adults.

Laura Ingraham, meanwhile, called Trump’s tariff fiasco “genius,” explaining, “Trump announced a brilliant move to pause the higher tariffs on countries negotiating with us, but meanwhile to raise China’s tariffs to 125%, to wall off China by boxing them out, further weakening their economic power.”

On his podcast The Sean Hannity Show on Wednesday evening, Sean Hannity inexplicably treated Trump’s spectacular failure and global humiliation as a victory in owning the libs: “I’m just loving the reaction of stupid people. All of these people that have been trying to create in other people’s minds that Donald Trump does not know what he’s doing,” he said. Hannity further suggested that he and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are all but soulmates (“I know the guy so well”), and that he never doubted Bessent: “This was the plan all along. I’ve been saying this… He’s lining up all these nations, one after another after another, to the point where they’re begging to do a deal with us.”

It’s unclear what was ultimately the straw that broke the camel’s back and convinced Trump to back down on dragging the U.S. into a self-inflicted recession—early reports indicate it was banking executives telling him to bite the bullet. Trump, himself, admitted he caved to public panic, while Bessent has denied that the tariff pause is because of the stock market. Before Wednesday, Elon Musk reportedly pleaded with the president to drop the tariffs to no avail, prompting the “First Buddy” to go so far as to openly feud with Trump’s top economic adviser Pete Navarro this week, calling Navarro “retarded.” 

As of Thursday morning, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is leading Democrats in demanding an investigation into Trump’s actions, which appear to have offered a boon to his friends on Wall Street: “Did Trump help insiders cash in on his tariff flip-flopping?” she asked. “It sure looks like corruption.”

Some of Trump’s key supporters and surrogates, like Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Dave Portnoy, Adin Ross, and Ackman, criticized the tariffs or complained about their personal losses as the stock market plummeted. By Wednesday, when the stock market began to rise again, Portnoy sang a much different tune, clownishly telling his haters to suck it because “I’M UP $8.2 MILLION TODAY.” And yet, perhaps if he—or any of these people—were capable of critical thinking skills, his real takeaway would be that under a Trump presidency, everything can go away in an instant based on the whims of a deeply unhinged and senile 79-year-old man.

 
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