Right. Then tariffs will take care of more of it. Glad trump voters and nonvoters thought this all through carefully. Otherwise it might be a disaster.
Regarding the tariffs ... In particular the proposed idiocy of 25% on Canada and Mexico. Trump sells whatever will advance his personal interest. A vindictive greedy salesman yes, but still just a cheesy salesman. A cross between theater characters aged salesman Willie Loman and uber-corrupt Volpone. Trump sells whatever will advance his personal interest. He is corruption personified. Everything he does is a sale for personal gain, and his life's measuring stick of success is money.
Focused with that view of Trump in mind, Trump threatening, but not imposing 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico is because he wants a personal payoff of some sort from Mexico and Canada. Trump's recently stated desire to visit China and "work things out" with Xi, is likely because he wants a Chinese personal payoff of some kind. When one looks at tariffs not as "the thing itself" but as yet just another way to extort payoffs for personal gain, as an extortion racket rather than a serious national economic policy, then Trumps assertions, flip-flops, changes of subject, and bluster, all seem to fit. (Trump's very recent flip flopping on tariffs, namely, he promised to impose tariffs on Day One.)
Tariffs are just today's version of Trump's latest extortion. But at an international level. And the public policy problem with this level of international corruption is that if some countries don't pay or give him what he wants and the retaliatory tariffs are actually imposed, we citizens will pay the price for a foreign country refusing to pay blackmail to an American president. The grift is a feature, not a bug, and partly dependent on the Felon's whims on any given day. That’s what I think is behind the tariff plan. In his last term, US companies that donated to trump got exemptions from tariffs. Delaying tariffs to give more bigwigs time come on a bended knee to ask for exemptions. I think he wants to scale up that grift to the max. A national and worldwide con is just beginning. But let’s not forget that he’s a conman with escalating dementia. That throws another wrench into the equation.
And when February 1 comes around, he will announce the level of decrease, (completely fictional) of drugs and migrants to prove how just the threat of his tariffs were. And his supporters will believe every word.
It's also possible that this is not the way he will handle this. One reason we saw some flip-flopping last term was because he was surrounded by cooler heads who could talk him out of ridiculous shit. No more. He could very well up the tariffs and does not abandon them. Whatever bad and concerning thing he says this time, will likely be even worse. Many promises that were made simply to get elected like bringing down grocery prices will be ignored however, because he does not care about that.