The Trump economic lunacy continued over night with a litany of headlines coming out of the White House that could have made front pages on at least three different newspapers. Let me list them:

1. Trump slams China with a 104% tariff!
2. Elon Musk ridicules Trump trade advisor Navarro!
3. US recession a 40% chance of happening!

Unsurprisingly, the Dow Jones has finished in the red, off 320 points after making a bright start to the trading day that followed our market surging yesterday 166 points or 2.27%.

However, a day is a long time in the Game of Thrones tariff drama that the former-TV-star-turned President is creating on the set of his real life show called being the US President!

Our market will be down today, with SPI Futures predicting a 136 point slide at the open!

Seriously, this is crazy stuff. It shows when even Elon Musk, a big Trump supporter, is going after the President’s number one tariff and trade adviser. Peter Navarro is the guy who was anti-Aussie and has argued for tariffs on our beef, steel and aluminium.

The AFR tells us: “Billionaire presidential adviser Elon Musk attacked White House trade counsellor Peter Navarro as ‘dumber than a sack of bricks’ (now there’s a turn of phrase!) as a fight over President Donald Trump’s tariff regime spilled on to social media on Tuesday.

He also tweeted that he is “truly a moron” (Musk has looked at Navarro close up so he’s making this call with some knowledge!) and mocked the trade adviser for in the past citing the work of “Ron Vara” — a fictional expert whose name is an anagram of his own!

This is like a script from an episode of Game Of Thrones, with Trump looking like Aerys II Targaryen, also called the Mad King and King Scab. The rats are starting to desert the ship and it’s the smartest ones who are leaving first.

Part of the reason Musk might be mad as hell could be this 104% tariff that Trump has wacked on China.

This means his Tesla cars now face a 104% price increase on the landed cost of one of his vehicles made in China and sold in the US. Apple has the same problem with its iPhones and Macs, which will become very expensive in the USA. Its share price was down 4.98% overnight and is off 24% in a month.

The share price drop of Apple since tariff talk got serious is 33% and a US$259 stock is now $172.42. The share price hasn’t had such a horror slump since the GFC!

This Trump trade war is like Cambodian Pol Pot’s killing fields where investors in the stock market and the companies they invest in are being killed BY misguided tariffs and deal-making that works OK in the corridors of corporate power of New York but not in the real world of planet earth!

Can’t you just imagine Vladimir Putin sitting back watching US TV in his armchair laughing his head off as Trump smashes the wealth of his allies, undermines their economies and destroys the common bond they have in opposing Russia’s encroachment on its neighbouring countries.

To many American voters and even global spectators Trump was a good idea in theory, in opposing the silly excesses of the extreme left-wingers of politics and society, who were imposing changes that many people opposed.

But Trump’s economics on tariffs is as immature and as flawed as the formula used to calculate the level of unfair protection the US has faced at the hands of its trading partners.

And stock markets are screaming that these Trump tariffs are as scary and threatening as the Global Financial Crisis and Covid. In both cases, government and central bank intervention was needed to prevent a market crash becoming a serious recession that turned into a Great Depression.

Trump created this mess. Only Trump can clean it up! Well, that’s not exactly true, because Congress could take away the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA), which he’s using by claiming there’s a national emergency “posed by the large and persistent trade deficit that is driven by the absence of reciprocity in our trade relationships and other harmful policies like currency manipulation and exorbitant value-added taxes (VAT) perpetuated by other countries.”

While a normal political leader would have dealt with this country by country, the Trump playbook calls for big publicity, aggressive bargaining and him winning. It looks like he might have bitten off more than he can chew and hopefully more influencers like Elon Musk, investor Bill Ackman and mega donor to the Republican Party and financier for the founders of The Home Depot empire, Ken Langione, who has basically looked at this tariff blow up and asked: “What the f?!”

I won’t be buying stocks until Trump gets real. And given his recalcitrant nature, Congress has to be the Game of Thrones king slayer.