‘Mickey Mouse is smarter’: Economist Jeffrey Sachs mocks Donald Trump over tariff policy

Renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs launched a scathing assault on Donald Trump‘s tariff technique, calling the US president’s commerce insurance policies so “delusional” that even Mickey Mouse would know higher.
Not mincing any phrases, Sachs delivered a harsh critique of Donald Trump’s commerce insurance policies, declaring that Trump’s understanding of commerce is so essentially flawed that “he wouldn’t pass a basic economics class.”
He condemned the president’s fixation on commerce deficits as each “childish and dangerous.”
Sachs attributed a staggering $10 trillion loss in world wealth to Trump’s financial methods and cautioned that the United States is edging towards authoritarianism, characterised by “one-man rule by emergency decree.”

Rejecting Trump’s accusations that different nations are “cheating” the US, Sachs argued that the true difficulty is not commerce however extreme US authorities spending.
Speaking at a public discussion board, Sachs recounted Trump’s justification for levying tariffs on nations like Lesotho. “What Trump said was, ‘Lesotho sells us more than we buy from them, so they’re cheating us.’ That is literally what he said,” Sachs defined. “It’s completely delusional.”
According to Sachs, Trump’s workforce then scrambled to create a formulation to impose tariffs on nations like Lesotho primarily based purely on the commerce imbalance. “They made some absolutely stupid formula that you would not accept in a first-year, third-week economics class. It came out of the US Trade Representative’s office. They probably were told, ‘Do it overnight, the boss wants it,’” he mentioned.
Sachs described the end result as a listing of tariffs calculated on a country-by-country foundation, an strategy he deemed completely mindless. “You cannot make this stuff up,” he mentioned. “This used to be not a Mickey Mouse country, my country. But this is Mickey Mouse. And I apologise to Mickey Mouse—he would not do this. Mickey Mouse is smarter than this.”
Sachs, a long-time critic of each political events’ failure to sort out inequality, accused Trump of promoting “a pseudo explanation” and “a pseudo remedy” for financial discontent. “What Trump is doing is giving a story to swing states like Michigan and Ohio—it’s China’s fault, it’s Mexico’s fault, it’s Lesotho’s fault.”
He additionally identified that the lack of manufacturing jobs within the American Midwest was pushed extra by automation than commerce. “Now if you go to an automotive plant, it’s all robots,” Sachs mentioned. “That’s not because the jobs went overseas—it’s because the assembly line itself became an automated phenomenon.”
On broader world challenges, Sachs expressed alarm at Trump’s choice to drag out of the Paris Climate Agreement and promote coal. “Yesterday, King Donald issued an executive decree to bring back coal. It’s willful destruction of wellbeing. Willful,” he mentioned, including that the remainder of the world should keep away from coming into what he known as “crazy land.”
The President has claimed tariffs are a robust software for financial leverage. Earlier this month, he introduced sweeping new tariffs on nearly all buying and selling companions, solely to reverse most of them every week later after a market downturn. “We’re making a fortune with tariffs. $2 billion a day. Do you believe it?” Trump mentioned at a latest Republican occasion.
However, official figures inform a unique story. According to US Customs and Border Protection, the precise determine collected from customs duties is simply over $260 million per day. Despite Trump’s claims, the true financial advantage of his tariff insurance policies seems far much less important than he suggests.