How to Digest Trump’s Latest Barrage of Tariff Threats

Donald Trump is seven weeks away from re-entering the White House and yet he’s already threatened to slap new tariffs on countries that are home to almost half the world’s 8 billion people. Which means we are learning all over again how to digest the president-elect’s threats.

If there’s an important lesson worth revisiting from his first trade wars, it’s that Trump’s warnings regularly run into procedural, political and even economic constraints. The result is often a largely symbolic version of the headline threat, or one that ignores it altogether. Disruption and drama rather than destruction is the way Trump’s trade wars have operated.