An Open Letter to Trump on Tariffs, But He’s not Listening
This letter isn’t from me, but it’s a great read. I found it on X.
Open Letter by Shay Boloor
The frustrating part is that I was on board for a reset. Truly. I’ve said it publicly. I’ve written about it in this very feed. I understood the need for a detox. For decades, the U.S. economy played the part of the rich guy at the table — picking up the check for a global order that no longer worked in our favor. We hollowed out our industrial base. We enabled unfair trade imbalances under the illusion of diplomacy. We subsidized demand for cheap imports while outsourcing the hard questions about how our domestic workforce would adapt.
Eventually, that had to stop. It was unsustainable — financially, politically, and morally. We couldn’t keep pretending that a consumption-led economy held together by zero-interest rates and global fragility was a long-term solution. I wanted a rebalancing. I welcomed the idea of a harder, smarter America-first policy that pushed for fair treatment, reciprocal agreements, and a real industrial strategy rooted in technological superiority, national security, and capital formation. That would’ve been leadership.
But that’s not what this is.
What you’ve rolled out isn’t detox — it’s whiplash. This isn’t strategic decoupling. It’s scattershot retaliation dressed up as reform. There’s no roadmap. No operational playbook. No clear articulation of where this ends or what the metrics of success even are. It’s not an attempt to responsibly unwind America’s role as the global shock absorber — it’s a brute-force attempt to disorder the existing system with no viable alternative in place.
You can’t replace a fragile supply chain with chaos and call it resilience. You can’t build American industry by torching the scaffolding that underpins capital flows, labor mobility, and global coordination — especially when the U.S. itself no longer has the domestic capacity to meet its own industrial needs. You talk about bringing jobs home, but the U.S. doesn’t have the labor force, permitting structure, or wage flexibility to stand up full-scale manufacturing at speed. And now — after years of deportation policies and underinvestment in vocational training — you’ve made the labor gap even wider.
Capital isn’t going to rush to fill that void just because you raised tariffs. It’s going to wait. It’s going to sit on the sidelines and preserve optionality. Because right now, no CEO can confidently model a five-year capex plan. No board can greenlight supply chain onshoring when they don’t know whether a tariff rate will double next quarter based on your Twitter account or some arbitrary trade deficit formula.
That’s the issue. This wasn’t rolled out as part of a comprehensive American renewal strategy. It wasn’t coordinated with the Fed. It wasn’t communicated clearly to Treasury. It wasn’t backed by a labor reskilling program or any form of public-private manufacturing incentive beyond empty slogans. It was dropped like a bomb — seemingly designed more to shock than to build.
And in the absence of credible structure, capital is retreating — not realigning.
I was ready to endure the pain of a thoughtful, structured reset. Most long-term investors were. We’ve lived through tightening cycles. We understood that globalization, as it stood, had reached a breaking point. But this isn’t a correction of imbalances. This is a rupture without scaffolding.
What you’ve created isn’t reindustrialization. It’s an intentional sabotage of capital planning. No executive is going to build a factory with four-year political horizon risk, a floating tariff regime, and no labor certainty. No investor is going to fund expansion in a market where the basic cost of imports can change weekly based on what country has a current account surplus that week. The system you’ve launched isn’t designed for certainty. It’s designed for control.
And the irony is — we’re not even punishing bad actors. We’re punishing everyone. Allies. Poor countries. Longstanding partners. Israel gets slapped with 17% tariffs while dismantling their own to support American imports. Vietnam gets hit with 46% because it’s become too productive. Lesotho, one of the poorest countries on Earth, faces a 50% tariff because it doesn’t buy enough U.S. goods — as if that were a sign of unfairness rather than poverty. It’s incoherent. It’s cruel. And it undermines any claim to moral high ground.
You say this is about protecting American workers. But no worker is helped by policy so erratic that no employer wants to hire. No consumer is helped when import costs rise and domestic capacity doesn’t exist to replace them. No investor is helped when the cost of capital spikes in the face of weaponized uncertainty.
This is not a plan to make America stronger. It’s a gamble that markets and allies will blink first. It’s brinkmanship with no floor.
And the most maddening part? There was a path. A real one. A version of this policy that could’ve worked — not in headlines or soundbites, but in practice. A path that applied pressure with purpose, that aligned economic force with long-term national interest, that sent a clear message to adversaries and partners alike without destabilizing global commerce or blindsiding capital allocators.
You could’ve gone after China — hard — and had the backing of nearly every serious investor and strategist on the Street. Not just because of trade deficits or currency suppression, but because China has been actively undermining our economy and our people. I would’ve supported a four-year plan to end all dependence on Chinese manufacturing unless they stopped stealing American IP (DeepSeek). No more games. Make it explicit: if they don’t comply, we’ll back Taiwanese independence and bring the entire global semiconductor economy with us. No ambiguity. No half-threats. As I see it, China is at war with us — and our policy should reflect that.
With the EU, you could’ve played it clean. Match auto tariffs percent-for-percent. That’s fair. And then leave the rest alone — especially goods and services. We run a huge surplus on services with the EU. It props up some of our biggest competitive advantages — enterprise software, consulting, cloud, defense tech, streaming, media IP. Tariffing the EU outside of autos would be like shooting your own foot for balance. We’re not in a trade war with Europe. We’re in a competition for global enterprise dominance — and right now, the U.S. is winning.
That’s what real strength would’ve looked like. That’s what an America-first trade doctrine could’ve achieved. You’d be rebuilding the system from the inside out — not just throwing bricks through the windows and calling it a redesign. Investors would’ve backed it. CEOs would’ve planned around it. Global partners would’ve respected it — even if they didn’t like it. And capital would’ve flowed toward American resilience instead of retreating from American unpredictability.
But instead of that, you went with chaos. And now, confidence is shattered. Not because the numbers are bad — but because no one knows what the numbers mean anymore.
That’s the cost of burning down the rules without building new ones.
So no, this is not the detox we needed. It’s not strategic decoupling. It’s not a path to renewal. It’s a slow, loud dismantling of the very foundation that has allowed American capital, innovation, and enterprise to dominate for decades. And it didn’t have to be this way.
But now we’re here. And the market is reacting accordingly — not to the fundamentals, but to the sense that the future may no longer be modelable. That’s not a trade. That’s an exit.
I don’t want this post to be hyper-political. This isn’t about red or blue. It’s not about the 2024 election cycle. It’s not about ideology. It’s about strategy. It’s about execution.
It’s about understanding that when you’re the United States — when you sit at the helm of the global economic engine — every policy you roll out reverberates through capital markets, supply chains, boardrooms, and governments. Words become signals. Signals become pricing. Pricing becomes pain — or progress.
And I hope — for the sake of the markets, for the sake of businesses trying to plan, and for the future we’re all investing into — that it’s not too late to recalibrate. Because we don’t need more noise.
Here’s a link to Shay Boloor’s post.
Trust and Other Things
I don’t agree with all of what Shay said but I certainly agree with much of it.
For starters Trump has no roadmap. He has nonsensical formulas that most economists find laughable.
The sorry aspect is Trump could easily have gotten much of the world to act against China. As it stands now, China could easily be the big winner in this.
Shay did not mention trust.
How can anyone believe Trump will honor any deal he makes when he breaks treaties at will? USMCA was ratified by the Senate 89-10.
Everyone knows there is no national emergency. Seven Republican Senators are willing to stand up against this.
The risk of giving any concessions to Trump is that he will just demand more.
Trump in No Mood to Deal
“What’s going to happen to the markets, I can’t tell you,” Trump said late Sunday. “I don’t want anything to go down. But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.”
“I spoke to a lot of Europeans, Asians, all over the world. They’re dying to make a deal,” he said. Trump called on China and other countries to address trade deficits. “Unless we solve that problem, I’m not going to make a deal,” he said.
So here we are. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
