Donald Trump just blinked

When Donald Trump announced on Friday night that he was enacting even more tariffs on Chinese goods, even he surely knew that this was guaranteed to make the U.S. economy even more of a mess. Yet he couldn’t very well back down from his failed trade war, could he? Trump can’t ever admit he’s wrong.

Yet over the weekend, reporters seemed to catch Donald Trump in a moment of weakness. When asked if he was having second thoughts about his failed trade war, Trump said “yup.” Later, his handlers tried to clean up the mess by insisting that Trump was actually regretting not having placed even more tariffs on Chinese goods. Nice try. But now something weird is happening.

China must have noticed when Trump blinked on tariffs, because this morning China announced that it wants a “calm” resolution to the trade war. What this really means is that China has won, Trump has lost, and now China is seeking to negotiate the terms of Trump’s surrender.

The question of course is how this will be interpreted by everyone involved. Wall Street investors seemed initially excited by the prospect of Donald Trump’s trade war being shut down, as they pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average up around 300 points right out of the gate this morning. But then they seemed to remember that the idiot is still president, and half those gains were quickly erased. Trump is trying to spin his loss as a win on Twitter, but will anyone outside his braindead base buy it?