April 3, 2025.

Trump's announcement last night that he was placing high tariffs on countries around the world came after the stock market closed,

but it drove stock futures dramatically downward.

Overseas, global markets also plunged.

Today, before the stock market opened, Trump posted on his social media site,

The operation is over. The patient lived and is healing.

The prognosis is that the patient will be far stronger, bigger, better, and more resilient than ever before. Make America great again. Fittingly, it was former Trump lawyer Rudy

Giuliani who rang the bell opening the stock market today. Giuliani represented Newsmax, the right-wing media channel with ties to Trump.

As soon as the market opened, stocks fell straight down.

By the end of the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped 1679 points, falling

about 4%, its biggest fall since the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020.

The S&P 500 fell 274 points, or 4.8%.

The NASDAQ composite fell more than 1,050 points, or almost 6%.

The losses wiped out about two

trillion dollars. Trump justified the tariffs by declaring that the U.S. is in the midst

of a national emergency. But this afternoon he left the White House for a long weekend in Florida,

where his private Doral resort outside of Miami is

holding the first domestic golf tournament of the season of Live Golf, which is financed by the

sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. Trump's tariffs are not an economic policy. Tariffs are generally

imposed on products, not on nations. By placing them on

countries, the White House was able to arrive at its numbers with a nonsensical formula that

appears to have been reached by asking AI how to impose tariffs, a suggestion I dismissed as

...