Back in March, as part of his “America has been taken for a ride for too long, and Uncle Don isn’t gonna take it anymore” shtick, Donald Trump announced 25- and 10-percent tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The immediate impact was that one of his few qualified advisers quit in protest; the short-term impact was our allies’ (understandable!) rage, plus uncertainty in the business sector. It’s still too soon to tell what the long-term repercussions may be, but they presumably involve retaliation that will hurt, among others, American farmers. Around the same time, riding high on the obvious success of his steel and aluminum gambit, Trump threatened upwards of $150 billion in China-targeted tariffs, a negotiating tactic that has thus far resulted in Trump announcing his intent to . . . save a Chinese tech company that violated U.S. sanctions. And now, because that went so well, he’s considering slapping imported cars with tariffs, too.

In a statement released Wednesday night, the Commerce Department said it had launched an investigation into whether or not foreign-made cars imported into the U.S. pose a threat to national security “following a conversation” with the president. In asking the Commerce Department to probe the situation, Trump is hoping to employ the same highly dubious legal statute he did to impose tariffs on steel and aluminum, which gives the president the authority to restrict imports thought to threaten national security. (In fact, when Gary Cohn, along with Steve Mnuchin, Rex Tillerson, and James Mattis, were trying to convince Trump not to go down the tariffs road, they argued that such levies would actually hurt national security, saying they would “harm the global economy and damage relationships with allies.”) And as was the case with the first round of tariffs, the response has basically been, W.T.F. is wrong with this guy?

“To treat auto imports like a national security threat would be a self-inflicted economic disaster for American consumers, dealers, and dealership employees,” Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association, told Bloomberg. “[This is] a bad day for American consumers,” John Bozzella, the chief executive of Global Automakers, told NBC News. “To our knowledge, no one is asking for this protection.” Likening the president to a junkie, Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said the whole thing appears to be less about national security and more about a sick man looking for his next hit. “After the steel and aluminum high, President Trump has now become addicted to tariffs,” Bown told The New York Times. “He is now clearly abusing this national security law simply to get his tariff fix. And this law is the easiest access he has found.”

Phil Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, simply chalked it up as yet another example of the president behaving like an imbecile, saying the idea “seems to imagine a world in which each country produces its own automobiles and then they swap them back and forth. In fact, we live in a world in which viable auto companies are heavily involved in global supply chains. It would harm U.S. consumers at the margin, while undermining the global trading system and inviting certain retaliation.” Trump’s own party, too, was incensed, with Senator Orinn Hatch saying in a statement that “Taxing cars, trucks and auto parts coming into the country would directly hit American families who need a dependable vehicle, whether they choose a domestic or a global brand.”