Behold as the dimwitted convicted felon embarrassed himself on the world stage yesterday as he was forced to “pause” part of his disastrous, intellectually vapid and ham-fisted on again, off again tariff policy, claiming that he reversed his latest haphazard tariffs because 75 nations called him with desperate pleas to “make a deal” to renegotiate trade agreements.

He’s lying, of course.

When asked for specifics, such as the names of any of those countries, a mendacious White House refused to provide any. That’s a tell. What we got instead was this bag of fecal jive from Donald Trump.

“I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.” With typical Trumpian narcissism, he characterized the foreign leaders who made the imaginary calls as simps groveling to his self-described “genius.” Mocking their pleas, he parodied, “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!”

We know he was lying because he frequently tells false stories like that, never identifying the person who addressed him but always making sure to let us know that they called him “sir.” It’s his tell. The only surprise from yesterday’s bout of buffoonery is that he didn’t say the foreign leaders were “big strong guys with tears running down their faces” like he often does.

The real story is that he was forced to retreat on his nonsensical imposition of wildly inaccurate, slapdash and arbitrary tariffs on dozens of nations, even on random remote islands inhabited only by penguins, because it finally dawned on the dolt’s enabling advisors that they were causing potentially irreparable economic calamity.

Almost everyone understands clearly that Trump’s ill-conceived and absurd tariff schedule is what tanked stock markets in the US and globally, wiping out trillions of dollars in wealth, including from millions of people’s retirement investments. But the operative element which caused him to cave wasn’t concern over that as much as it was the warranted fear expressed to him by top business executives and market experts that his policies would lead to a catastrophe in the bond market. Those warnings were apparently voiced to him directly by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in an Oval Office meeting early yesterday followed shortly after by Trump’s nearly complete capitulation to stark reality.

Trump’s tariff bomb led to an immediate sharp sell-off in US government bond markets which are considered to be the safest and most stable haven for investors, including foreign governments. His nonsensical reciprocal tariifs further opened the self-inflicted wound he caused by sparking a trade war in the first place. He poured caustic salt into the wound and it led quickly to the erosion of worldwide confidence in the security of US bonds and the very warranted concern about a subsequent low demand for them. The Federal government relies on revenue from bond sales to fund spending for which tax revenues are insufficient to meet. Treasury bonds are essentially the bedrock of our economic stability. Stock market volatility is bad enough but when confidence in our Treasury bonds is significantly weakened, it’s a swift path to sure economic hell in a hand basket.

Normally, US Treasury bonds rally when there is a stock market crash because large investors move assets toward them as a safe haven in times of market uncertainty. However, solely because of Trump’s utterly kooky and inexplicably bungled reciprocal tariffs, the opposite happened. Bond yields usually fall when markets crash, but this time the bond market also had to contend with the mercurial and unpredictable whims of an impulsive, cognitively impaired and out of control American president. Foreign countries reacted by abstaining from buying new US Treasurys and by selling the debt they already held in them. That sparked fear among people much smarter than Trump that a recession which his tariffs would likely cause could easily become a depression.

Further, when bond yields go higher, the government has to pay more interest on them which reduces revenue. It also increases the interest rate we pay on our own debt so it explodes deficits and the national debt. Those alarm bells started ringing and, despite saying only a day earlier that there would be no “pause” or reconsidering of Trump’s tariffs, the administration went back on its word and caved mightily.

While the stock markets rallied on the news yesterday that the reciprocal tariffs would be paused for 90 days, the fact that Trump’s initial across the board tariffs of ten percent (and a special tariff of 125 percent on imports of Chinese goods specifically) were not rescinded, means concerns over the impact on the economy remain. Markets returned to huge sell-offs today (the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq were off today by 2.5%, 3.5% and 4.3%, respectively), because economists still believe there is a strong possibility that Trump’s tariffs will single-handedly cause a recession.

In other words, while we might have temporarily escaped having the global economy collapse from Trump’s attempt to drop a nuclear trade bomb, he’s still lobbing conventional trade bombs to devastating effect.

Make no mistake. Trump didn’t “pause” his wildly over-aggressive tariffs because they worked. He did it because they failed spectacularly. Everyone except his most insistently ignorant MAGA base knows it. They’re the only ones swallowing it when, even after he unilaterally and purposely destroyed the investment portfolios of millions of Americans, Trump said, “I know what the hell I’m doing.”

No, he doesn’t. He shows us that be has no clue whatsoever each and every time he says tariffs are paid to the US by foreign countries when, in reality, they are paid by the American companies which import foreign products and eventually by American consumers in the form of higher prices. He further proved it in spades over the last week that he has no idea what he is doing as his policies annihilated the stock markets and threatened to shatter the US dollar as the world’s preeminent currency. And his abject ignorance was especially evident yesterday as he tried to spin his almost 180° flip-flop and colossal failure into the preposterous notion that he, and only he, is playing 3-D chess while the rest of the world is playing checkers.

What he really is and what he’s really doing are akin to a stupid and petulant child who isn’t any good at playing the game so he knocks over the board and scatters the playing pieces all over the room. He’s an imbecile pretending to be a savant but he’s using us and our economic welfare as pawns in the charade. Even worse, sycophantic Republicans lawmakers mostly sit idly by and pretend that their unruly kid is so cute and wise and strong. They step on his Legos, thank him for leaving them on the floor and then ask us to take off our shoes and step on them as well. It’s time for them to stop coddling the delinquent dips**t and take away the toys before he breaks all of his and all of ours, too.