Séamas O'Reilly: It’s very clear to me that Trump is both stupid and evil

Trump’s tariffs are useful in ways that are not being declared

President Donald Trump speaks after signing an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House Wednesday, April 9, 2025, in Washington. (Pool via AP)

Following politics in the time of Donald Trump is like trying to remember the plot of a forgettable thriller on Amazon Prime. Momentous twists evaporate seconds after they arrive, in time for the next gun battle or double cross, leaving you unsure of what, if anything, you’ve just watched. 2025 has not yet had an empty week of humdrum local politics, only days so packed with incident that you feel your flesh burning as you read each new outrage, each new insult to your senses.

There are no empty weeks, only days packed with so much incident that you cannot make sense of them at all.

Nothing lasts, nothing lands. All bets are off. One scandal blends into the next and you can barely countenance the enormity of one among the dozens of horrors you’re presented with every day. In my case, this is even more pronounced once things enter the financial realm. I can’t pretend to know too much about the American economy, but my general rule of thumb is that if my timeline is 90% people posting scary graphs then it’s safe to assume that things are not going well.

What I do know, vaguely, is what a tariff is: a tax on other countries’ goods passed on to your own citizens once they buy them. This does make a certain amount of intuitive sense. I’m sure each of us can accept the merit of the Irish Government taxing, for instance, cheaper foreign potatoes or whiskey, so that Irish people buy locally-grown ones instead.

That’s the theory and, in many cases, the current reality for specific protected goods and services traded between nation states and economic blocs, Ireland and the EU included. But if you were to slap a unilateral tariff on everything that other countries produce, you might soon realise that there are many things that Ireland does not produce, either because we lack the resources or expertise, or because they’d be prohibitively expensive, or logistically impossible, to make at home.

You might also twig that Ireland exports billions’ worth of products abroad, and if the countries we handicap with tariffs decide to do the same to us in retaliation, the money we’d lose if those exports went away might be a very high price to pay for protecting our homegrown spuds and gargle.

That – the most wilfully simplistic description of ‘why unilateral tariffs are short-sighted’ I can muster – is what America appears intent on disproving to its hilt. The richest, most powerful nation in the world slapped tariffs on every single one of its trading partners last week and sent stock markets around the world into freefall. Every economist alive is declaring this a move of unprecedented political folly. Retaliatory tariffs were announced by other nations, most notably China, further depressing the markets, and leading to yet more unhappy-looking graphs I was forced to parse as if I’m not someone who has to double check how tariff is spelled each time I type it.

President Donald Trump on a television on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange. Picture: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

For over a week, these effects have been studied by more learned heads than mine. In some cases, reality appears to be warping around their desperation for any of this to make sense. On Monday, a single X user named Walter Bloomberg claimed Trump was considering a 90-day cessation of his tariff plans.

This was totally made up, but because it came from a guy who bought a blue tick, chose Bloomberg as his username, and was saying something the money men desperately wanted to hear, it resulted in an 8% jump in the markets, followed by an immediate cratering when his report was found to be untrue.

Thus, an $8-per-month blue tick led to a $4 trillion market correction in the largest and most sophisticated economy the planet has ever seen. If this all seems stupid, well it is. From Trump leveraging tariffs on barren islands populated only by penguins, to the fact his list of countries appears to have been generated by ChatGPT and thus uses internet domain holders rather than nation states, meaning British or French dependencies are given different rates than the UK and France themselves, or — in a much more diplomatically incendiary move — that Taiwan and China are considered wholly separate economic entities. And then came Wednesday, when Trump did announce a 90-day cessation in his policies – barring China – and the market limped upward from its deathbed. Suddenly, I felt a trickle of something altogether more sordid and stupid beneath it all.

If there’s one canard of his time in office that I hate above all others, it’s the “he’s smarter than you think” defence. I reject the false choice between Trump being stupid and Trump being evil. People contain multitudes, and it’s very clear to me he’s both.

But there’s also the fact that Trump’s tariffs are useful in ways that are which are rarely acknowledged. The wealth transfer they represented – a chaotic world where America’s economy and status in the world was all but destroyed – is something many in his orbit have actively campaigned for; a great economic reset that kills the market where it stands, so they might pick from its bones afterward. In the face of Trump’s reversal, we are faced with several possible truths. One, trumpeted by the admin itself, is that this was the plan all along, to prove that America means business. Unless the business they mean is “shitting themselves in public”, we can dismiss this out of hand. The prevailing alternative view is that this has been a resounding embarrassment for Trump, a mortifying rebuke to the worldview and instincts of an incompetent fool.

Others, most notably senator Elizabeth Warren, are beginning to moot a third option. One in which the world’s most powerful human being, a stupid man with a criminal record for financial misdeeds, lowered the price of every single stock on the planet before then raising them all with a wave of his hand, in a manner that would grant immediate, near-infinite wealth to anyone he informed of such plans beforehand.

I wish I could tell you such thoughts were ill-founded. That such a reality would be too stupid, too cynical to be true. But this is 2025 we’re talking about. They’re banking on the idea that nothing will last, and nothing will land. The market may be back up, but all bets are off.