‘Trump playing 4-D chess? I don’t think so’: John Curley questions his tariffs strategy

President Donald Trump officially increased tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports to 25% Wednesday, claiming it will help promote and create more U.S. jobs.

Trump has fluctuated on his tariffs, deciding to pull back on a plan that would have doubled U.S. tariffs on Canadian steel and metal imports to 50% mere hours after initially proposing it when the Canadian province of Ontario threatened a 25% surcharge on electricity for multiple U.S. states in the northeast. Ontario has since suspended its new electricity charges.

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With the whiplash of political decisions creating economic uneasiness, KIRO host John Curley tried to make sense of Trump’s strategy.

“It’s like the old Muhammad Ali,” Curley said on “The John Curley Show.” “So Muhammad Ali’s theory was, I’m going to just lay in against the ropes. I’m just going to put up and block the punches (against George Foreman). And he took some huge punches. Even Foreman said, ‘I hit him so hard. I’ve never hit anybody that hard before. I couldn’t believe he was still standing.’ Well, Muhammad Ali took a wicked body shot that he carried with him for the rest of his life. Even Ali said, ‘Man, that hurt,’ but all he thought was if I can just last a certain number of rounds, he will punch himself out, and then once he’s out of gas, that’s when I’ll take him apart.

“So Trump says I’m going to do all these tariffs, then everything gets all stirred up, and then the fear of a recession and the market and all this other stuff, those are the punches that he’s now taking,” Curley continued. “Do you then bring people to the table to try to renegotiate some of the current trade agreements between Canada and Mexico? I don’t know, but people say he’s playing 4-D chess. I don’t think the guy’s doing that.”

Trump’s tariffs vs. McKinley’s tariffs

Trump has frequently cited President William McKinley, dubbing him the “Tariff King,” as a resource and example for tariffs being productive for the country and its economy, and that the tariffs the current Republican Party has drawn up will make “the lives of our countrymen sweeter and brighter” and that the tariffs are going to “make us very rich and very strong, and we will use the hundreds of billions of dollars in tariff dollars to benefit the American citizens and pay down our debt.”

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“Oh my God, you can’t compare the two economies anymore,” Curley said, reminding everyone McKinley served as president from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. “Only 2% of the U.S. government’s revenue comes from tariffs. And now, if you want to build something, it takes, I don’t know how many countries to build it. We’re not just simply building these things on our own. And Trump’s idea, which I keep thinking he believes, is that we’ll have high tariffs, and then we’ll start manufacturing everything here. Well, what’s it going to cost? How much capital? How much investment would it take?”

Listen to the full conversation here:

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