Emmanuel Addeh in Abuja

World renowned Economist, Jeffrey Sachs, has launched a scathing attack on Donald Trump’s tariff strategy, describing the US president’s trade policies as childish and so “delusional” that even Mickey Mouse would know better.
Speaking during a panel discussion on the topic: “Protectionism: The End of Globalisation”, at the 4th Antalya Diplomacy Forum in the resort city of Antalya, in Turkey, Sachs argued that Trump’s trade policy agenda remains one of the worst  in history.

The United States recently announced what it termed “reciprocal tariffs” affecting trade with countries across the world, including Nigeria, China  close to 100 nations globally.
Rather than blame trade imbalance, Sachs maintained that the United States trade deficit was because of reckless government spending that has surpassed national income.

“If you pick up a credit card and you go shopping and you end up with a large credit card debt, you’re running a trade deficit with all those shops. It will be strange if you then blamed all the shop owners for having sold you all those things.
“That’s the level of understanding of the President of the United States. All that is happening is the United States is out-spending its national income. We have a big credit card in the United States, it’s called the government,” said Sachs.
World leaders were gathered at the forum, including heads of state, academics, diplomats, youth leaders and lawmakers to reevaluate diplomacy and find solutions to  pertinent global issues affecting the world. It was held with the theme: “Reclaiming Diplomacy in a Fragmented World”.

But Sachs delivered a harsh critique of Trump’s trade policies during, declaring that Trump’s understanding of trade is so fundamentally flawed that “he wouldn’t pass a basic economics class.”
He condemned the president’s fixation on trade deficits as both “childish and dangerous.”
Sachs attributed a staggering $10 trillion loss in global wealth to Trump’s economic strategies and cautioned that the United States is edging toward authoritarianism, characterised by “one-man rule by emergency decree.”
Rejecting Trump’s accusations that other countries are “cheating” the US, Sachs argued that the real issue is not trade but excessive US government spending.

According to Sachs, overnight, Trump’s team then scrambled to create a formula to impose tariffs on countries as small as Lesotho based purely on the trade imbalance.
“They made some absolutely stupid formula that you would not accept in a first-year, third-week economics class. It came out of the US Trade Representative’s office. They probably were told, ‘Do it overnight, the boss wants it,’” he said.
Sachs described the result as a list of tariffs calculated on a country-by-country basis, an approach he deemed utterly senseless. “You cannot make this stuff up,” he said. “This used to be not a Mickey Mouse country, my country.

“But this is Mickey Mouse. And I apologise to Mickey Mouse—he would not do this. Mickey Mouse is smarter than this,” the Columbia University Professor stated.
The former Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary General, and  long-time critic of both major US political parties’ failure to tackle inequality, accused Trump of selling “a pseudo explanation” and “a pseudo remedy” for economic discontent.

“What Trump is doing is giving a story to swing states like Michigan and Ohio—it’s China’s fault, it’s Mexico’s fault, it’s Lesotho’s fault,” he explained.
He also pointed out that the loss of manufacturing jobs in the American Midwest was driven more by automation than trade. “Now if you go to an automotive plant, it’s all robots,” Sachs said. “That’s not because the jobs went overseas—it’s because the assembly line itself became an automated phenomenon,” Sachs argued.

Speaking on broader global challenges, Sachs expressed alarm at Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and promote coal, characterising it as “willful destruction of wellbeing.
Earlier this month, Trump announced sweeping new tariffs on almost all trading partners, only to reverse most of them a week later after a market downturn. But the professor argued against the strategy.

Although Trump has said the US is making $2 billion a day from the new tariffs,  official figures from US Customs and Border Protection, puts it at just over $260 million per day.