If you listen to some of the pro MAGA chatter on social media, last week’s “Liberation Day” was not only a success but a master class in how to play chess while the rest of the world is playing checkers.

Essentially, following wide swaths of global panic and abysmal numbers on the stock market, the Trump Administration decided to change course and put a pause on the reciprocal tariffs on the rest of the world.

Frankly, that’s a good thing that couldn’t come fast enough.

Trump and his advisers saw the writing on the wall and decided that their initial widespread use of extraordinarily high tariffs was having a disastrous effect on the marketplace.

So they changed course, and that is perhaps the best news we could’ve received as pursuing a massive tariff policy was almost certainly going to lead to a recession, something that none of us need.

If reports can be believed, even before the administration decided to go another way, nations around the world were beating down the president’s door to cut a deal. Indeed, it seems that scores of nations like Japan and the European Union are currently in talks with the White House to sort out a better economic deal with hopefully more to follow.

I seen more than a few people on Twitter claiming that this is a massive victory for the president, not only because it opens up the possibility for a radical shift in trade policy but also because a massive 145 percent tariff rate still remains on China.

This is being touted by several MAGA friendly users as the checkmate that President Trump was looking for all along, namely to secure better trade deals while boxing China in and lighting a fire under them.

Personally, I’m glad we’re in a much better place than we were last week, but I half wonder if the damage has already been done, on the both the economic front and the world stage.

However I have to say, that if this was actually the goal all along, it seems like there was a more efficient and less chaotic way to do so.

I’ve written before that Trump being unpredictable and volatile is great when it comes to foreign policy. However, the other big perception of Trump up until this point was that he was incredibly stable economically and among the more reasonable world leaders when it comes to money and trade.

But his latest moves have completely upended that image of him, something that can only hurt him and the nation if the idea was to thwart the Chinese and get more countries to cut us fairer deals.

I continue to maintain that none of this chaos and global hostility was truly necessary or even practical in the grand scheme of things. I would argue that Trump probably could have gotten better results by going about this more diplomatically behind the scenes as opposed to setting the global marketplace on fire.

Because if the goal was always to isolate the Chinese and put the economic squeeze on them, then the best way to do so would be through collaboration with other nations.

For as much as I dislike all the talk about globalism and Americans being “citizens of the world” the fact remains that America is deeply intertwined with the global markets and we have benefited tremendously from it.

When it comes to other countries, there are no “good guys” only lighter and darker shades of gray.

The so-called People’s Republic of China is the darkest shade of gray on the color palette, and that’s me being charitable to President Xi Jinping and his communist regime.

On the world stage, China is our largest geopolitical foe and it’s not close.

China steals much of our intellectual properties, repurposes it and turns profits for its own nefarious ends. And while you might say that every major superpower steals from each other for their own gain, the Chinese always take things a step further.

Like a bad spy movie, the Chinese will employ leggy femme fatales to seduce gullible congressman out of national secrets. They will create entire social media platforms (cough, cough TikTok) to corrupt the American mind, steal data and sow discord via radical propaganda.

Hell, if they’re feeling particularly bold, they will sometimes construct gigantic spy balloons to hover menacingly over American military institutions in order to collect Intel at their leisure. 

Therefore, Trump’s harsh tariffs and economic pressure campaign makes a lot of national security sense.

As I wrote last week, China not only holds a massive chunk of our debt but they are also responsible for an incredible amount of our over-the-counter drugs and medical equipment manufacturing.

This means that if they absolutely wanted to, China does indeed have the means to hurt America and up end what has been decades of cheap goods that Americans have grown fat off of without having to think about the human suffering that arrangement has brought.

The Trump Administration is absolutely correct to divest from the Chinese as much is possible while getting others to do the same. However, that job is made much more difficult when the countries you hope to go along with your plans don’t like your leadership anymore than they do president Xi.

You don’t have to be a foreign-policy expert to know that if play the role of global rabble-rouser for too long, are a source of great instability and verbal hostility, then those other countries are not going to want to play ball.

This isn’t to say that the US has to be the darlings of the world and everyone has to be our best friend.

But if the idea is to orchestrate a global game of chess, where the pieces have autonomy, then the chessmen have to know their roles and trust that the master player behind them has a vision for victory.