Trump shows his steel

Trump's abrupt 25 per cent tariff on imports should have taken no one by surprise. He said he would do it during his campaigning as part of his America First policy. Certainly, Carl Icahn, one of his billionaire buddies and a former adviser, wasn't taken by surprise. He sold millions of steel-linked shares a week before the Trump announcement from the White House, according to the Washington Post. A very smart and prescient move I would say. He sold more than $31 million worth of shares in a company that makes cranes at $32-$34 a share, the paper said after checking the official share filings. After the Trump announcement the shares in that company dropped to $26 a share. I wonder how many other smart investors did the same. I make no other comment. Except to say it looks like many of Trump's advisers were totally against the foreign steel import tariff but he ignored them because he thought tariffs would be beautiful and easy and terrific and would be welcomed by every steel company in the US, never mind that the rest of the world is in uproar and threatening retaliatory tariffs on all kinds of things. This is called a trade war in normal parlance but Trump thinks a trade war will be fun and that the US will win win win. In other words America First is beautiful, and allies and trading partners can go hang. We should expect nothing less from a president who is slowly ticking off the promises he made during the election campaign. If one of his main White House economic advisers, Gary Cohen, resigns, as seems likely, I doubt Trump will worry too much but he might find it incredibly difficult to persuade anyone to replace him. As General John Kelly so perfectly put it when asked how he got his job as White House chief of staff, he replied: "God punished me."