US President Donald Trump has always been comfortable taking risks, from his early real estate deals to his late-in-life jump into electoral politics, USA Today reports.
Now by imposing tariffs that have started a global trade war, he is taking the biggest gamble of his lifetime.
And maybe of everybody else's.
Trump is betting that mainstream economists and presidents since World War II have been wrong in generally embracing trade as the best way to build prosperity at home and forge peaceful relations around the world. Instead, he argues that slapping on the steepest tariffs since the 1930s will bring a windfall in federal revenue and force an historic resurgence of manufacturing in the United States.
U.S. customs agents began collecting 10% baseline tariffs on Saturday, with stiffer rounds to begin this week.
"THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN," Trump posted on the social-media site Truth Social. "HANG TOUGH, it won't be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!"
That confidence isn't shared by everyone.
Investors, for instance. After Trump's announcement, the S&P 500 plunged 10.5%, and the Dow dropped by nearly 4,000 points, the markets' worst week since early in the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. In two days, the markets lost more than $6 trillion in value, a decline that millions of American could track in real time in their retirement accounts.
