On the 14th of February 2025, Channel News Asia headline reads: “Snap Insight: Trump’s reciprocal tariffs put Asia’s history of trade openness at risk”. A commentary by Deborah Elms of the Hinrich Foundation.
From the article:
Mr Trump has long argued that the global trade and economic system is unfair to the US. He has aired a variety of grievances, but one point has captured his attention – the fact that each country has a different tariff schedule.
What he is now aiming to do is to reset this structure by applying “reciprocal tariffs”. This means if Country A charges a 10 per cent tariff on incoming phone cases while the US charges only 3 per cent on the same product, the US will start to apply a reciprocal tariff of 10 per cent for Country A.
Hi, my name is Terence and I am your host for the Daily Monsoon, a podcast where I connect current events to matters of faith. And today, I want to use Deborah’s article to share my insight on Trump and tariffs.
There is a lot of news on Trump and tariffs. It is his favourite word in the dictionary. And he has upset a lot of people. Not surprisingly, China is one of them, but also long-time allies, like Canada.
This is what I think and future events will prove me right.
Trump is the ultimate deal-maker. And you can’t make deals with groups. You can only make deals with people, preferably one person at a time.
You can’t make a deal with the EU. The EU is a blob. To negotiate with the EU is to negotiate with a book. The rules and precedence has already been established. If you want to sweeten the deal with one member, that fellow has to go back and check with all the other members, so you have to sweeten the deal with all members, and that just ties up the deal-maker’s options.
What is good for one guy may be bad for another guy. What is good for everyone may be too expensive and by the time everyone agrees it’s a good deal, the situation has changed and it’s time to start negotiating a new deal.
So multilateral agreements just doesn’t work with Trump.
He doesn’t deal with underlings or the middle men. He goes right to the top, whether it’s Kim, Xi, Putin, or whether it’s Starmer, Trudeau or Macron.
He deals with you as a person. He gets a sense of what you love and hate, what will make you look good or bad, and in the end gets you to do what you want.
Making deals is how he sees himself. He makes deals one to one, not one to many.
And that’s why he ends up throwing long-standing arrangements out of the window, whether it’s with the UN, NATO, or the EU.
I think we can all appreciate going right to the top.
All the Karens in the world have taught us that the best way to get your problem fixed is to say, “I want to talk to your manager.”
But why stop at problems in the bank, at the supermarket, at the IT store, why not go to the boss of all life, the boss of all creation? Why don’t we say, “I want to talk to the BOSS?”
And that is what Christian prayer is.
But we can’t come to God as a Karen, demanding God solve our problem to our satisfaction.
We can’t come to God as Donald Trump, working an angle to get a good deal out of God.
How can we come to God? Isaiah 66:1-2 reads:
Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest? All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.
The Karens and Trumps of the world have a good instinct, to go directly to the decision maker, the one with the power to make things happen.
So let us come to God with a humble heart.
This is the Daily Monsoon, a podcast where I connect current events to matters of faith.
Before I end this episode, I want to share something that occurred to me after recording yesterday’s episode.
You know how nigger is a bad, offensive, word, unless it’s a black guy saying it. It’s a word used to describe black slaves.
But it’s weird that it’s bad to say nigger but it’s okay to say slaves. The word slave comes from the word Slav and the Slavs, the people group, are still around today.
They should all come together to form some sort of Slavic Anti-Discrimination group, and that’s just a mouthful, so we will call them the SAD people. And this SAD movement will fight against the common usage of the word slave because it makes little of the pain and hurt sustained by the Slavic people all these centuries.
Jokes aside. What I wanted to bring up was how Slava Ukraini means Glory to Ukraini and Slava Isuzu Christo means Glory to Jesus Christ.
What does Slava remind you of? Slave.
And I just thought how interesting languages are. That Slava can mean glory and yet remind me of slave, and it’s an association that reminds me that in the Bible, Jesus is the king of kings and lord of lords and yet also the suffering servant.
Thanks for listening. Bye bye.