Here are some excerpts from Kevin Williamson’s excellent National Review article “We Are Not Winning the Trade War” on Tariff Man’s “idiotically conceived and incompetently executed trade war”:

President Trump proposes to mitigate the effects of his incompetently executed trade war by expanding that trade war. The problem with winning a race to the bottom is that you end up at the bottom.
President Donald Trump’s idiotically conceived and incompetently executed trade war with China shows no signs of abating — the president himself said this week that he’d be happy to see negotiations drag on throughout the coming year — and now Trump has decided to expand the theater to Brazil and Argentina.

Trump says he is imposing tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina because those two countries have engaged in a policy of competitive currency devaluation, i.e., they have artificially driven down the value of the real and the peso, respectively, in order to gain an unfair advantage for their exports. Trump charges that this has hurt U.S. farmers and says he is imposing these sanctions on their behalf.
Like a great deal of what comes out of this White House, the new tariffs and the rationale undergirding them exhibit a very fine blend of dishonesty and stupidity.

It is true that the real and the peso have declined in value of late. But this is not programmatic devaluation; rather, both Brazil and Argentina are in the midst of severe self-imposed crises in their national economies caused by excessive public debt and misgovernment, afflictions with which the United States is increasingly familiar but as yet resistant to, owing to the sheer size and dynamism of our economy. When a nation’s finances tank, its currency tends to fall in value as investors scurry off rodentially from the keeling schooner that is the ailing nation’s economy. Your people get poorer, and so do your businesses, particularly those with debt denominated in foreign currencies and those that buy a lot of imported goods or inputs. But your exports do get cheaper. That’s the one real upside.
….
Being poor is the worst kind of competitive advantage to have, and only two kinds of people pursue that advantage as a matter of national policy. The first kind is tyrants, such as the ones in Beijing, who for years artificially lowered the standard of living of the Chinese people on the theory that the Communist bosses could play a long game in which economic development would happen on their terms and under their control, without much real economic power accruing outside of the state.

This policy also appeals to a second kind of people: idiots. That would be us.

Americans are so selfish that we even envy foreigners their poverty. Americans — President Trump and his advisers are hardly alone in this — look at the situation of Argentina, Brazil, China, India, etc., and say to themselves: “That’s not fair! We need some of that, too!” We believe, without quite putting it that way or understanding what we are advocating, that we would be better off if we were more like the poor, low-wage, backward countries with troubled currencies.
…..
Now President Trump proposes to mitigate the effects of his incompetently executed trade war by expanding that incompetently executed trade war. He is trying to cure arsenic poisoning with cyanide. Funny kind of “winning” for the Trump administration.

Related: Here’s another example of how Tariff Man’s insane trade war is backfiring and adversely affecting America’s businesses from NPR “His Company Makes Speakers. Now He’s Speaking Out, Opposing Tariffs“:

The Misco speaker company in St. Paul, Minn., is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. But the company’s future is uncertain — a result of the trade war between the U.S. and China. Today, Misco employs about 100 people in the Twin Cities and manufactures a wide variety of speakers for musicians, home theater buffs, even drive-through restaurants.

The Misco factory is still in Minnesota, but it depends on some components imported from China. Since last fall, the company has had to pay tariffs on those components — tariffs that are now 25%.

Misco president Dan Digre Digre has tried passing some of his tariff bill on to customers, and he has asked component suppliers for a tariff discount. But the company has had to absorb most of the extra cost itself.

“It comes out of our bottom line,” Digre says. “And that’s the money that we need to be reinvesting in new technology, in new products — all of the things that makes your business competitive in a global economy.”

Every time Digre imports components from China, he gets a bill from U.S. Customs and Border Protection saying how much he owes in tariffs.
“A surprising number of people that I talk to — you know, smart, intelligent, well-read people — think that somehow China is paying the tariffs,” Digre says. Perhaps that’s because President Trump keeps making that claim.

“This is a tax that is not on foreigners. This is a tax on our own people,” Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., complained at a recent congressional briefing. “This is a tax unilaterally imposed by the executive branch.”

Bottom Line: We are not winning Trump’s “idiotically conceived and incompetently executed trade war” that is taxing “our own people” like the Misco speaker company in Minnesota.

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