Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office in January with immense popular support, promising world peace and a return to America’s glorious past.

Yet, just over 100 days later, his policies represent a stark departure from America’s foundational values, creating precisely the chaos he vowed to avert. His execution blueprint follows a predictably disturbing pattern: aggressive escalation followed by abrupt U-turns. From initiating trade wars to brokering truces, the new Trump doctrine comes with frequent pauses and reversals.

His economic strategies, centred on imposing retaliatory tariffs and industrial-era protectionism, are strikingly anachronistic — old rules from an outdated playbook. Rather than sparking a manufacturing renaissance, Trump’s tariffs rattled global markets, triggered uncertainty and economic turmoil, and destabilized sophisticated supply chains that took decades to optimize.

Attempting to punish consumerism through tariffs, while hoping to restore America’s industrial might, signals a fundamental misunderstanding of how America became great in the first place.

Indeed, the central fallacy of Trump’s tariff strategy lies in its nostalgic misunderstanding of America’s economic trajectory. America’s greatness was not simply due to protectionism or its industry prowess.

America rose to glory because of its innovation, strategic investment in education, and forward-looking global engagement built around multilateralism.

Today’s supply chains are complex, intertwined global networks, reflecting structural realities far beyond Trump’s simplified view that industries and factories can simply return to American shores. His policies overlook fundamental American values such as liberty, freedom, whilst completing disregarding how the twenty-first century has dynamically evolved.

The recent pause in tariffs with China, a 90-day respite, saw tariff rates reduced from 145 percent to 30 percent, revealing the irrationality behind Trump’s so-called trade war. His premature celebration of a “total reset”, barely 40 days after “Liberation Day”, masks the reality that this truce was borne not of strategy but of desperation — amid plunging approval ratings, surging prices, and mounting supply chain costs.

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