On Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump traveled to West Virginia where, during an event billed as a discussion about “tax reform,” he literally threw his prepared remarks into the air and ranted about an immigrant rape epidemic (fact-check: false), how Hillary Clinton received “millions” of illegal votes (false), and MS-13 cutting people up with knives on Long Island (true)—none of which would have concerned Wall Street if the president had kept his jubilant self-liberation confined to the campaign trail. Instead, later Thursday night, Trump doubled down on his definitely-not-a-trade-war with China, threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion of Chinese imports, on top of the $50 billion announced last week.

The proposed move, which would triple the amount of Chinese goods slapped with levies, would be retaliation for China’s own retaliatory measures. Trump had deemed China’s response “unfair,” saying it could “harm our farmers and manufacturers” which, Earth to Trump, was the point. In announcing 25 percent tariffs on, among other things, soybeans and automobiles, Chinese leaders were hitting the president where they knew it would hurt, as the biggest soybean producers include Iowa, Ohio, Missouri, and Indiana. Unsurprisingly, in response to the president’s newest threat, China’s Commerce Ministry said Beijing would have no problem issuing countermeasures, should it come to that. “The Chinese side will follow suit to the end, not hesitate to pay any price, resolutely counterattack and take new comprehensive measures in response,” read a Ministry statement.

Trump, of course, was warned that this would happen by virtually everyone, most notably his former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, who finally quit in frustration last month, when it became clear that his cautionary tale about trade wars being lose-lose situations was not penetrating Donald’s skull. And now that he’s surrounded by a trio of perennially wrong economic advisers, including Peter Navarro, who said as recently as three weeks ago that China would never retaliate, he appears even more hell-bent on going down a road what will not make America great again. (“There’s no trade war here,” Cohn replacement Larry Kudlow promised Fox Business Network on Wednesday.)

Though there’s still a chance for both countries to forestall the measures through negotiations, sources say this doesn’t appear to be a case of Trump’s trademark bluffing. A person familiar with an internal tariff conversation told Axios, “The president seemed serious. People took him seriously. This wasn’t just some flippant thing, when he says something and you can tell he’s not serious.” Even Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who is historically aligned with the (dwindling) free-trade contingent of the White House, endorsed the concept of the additional responsive tariffs (which, in all fairness, is not actually that surprising, given that Mnuchin appears to have taken up permanent residence in Trump’s posterior.)

This all seems to boil down to the fact that the president of the United States may be well versed in Atlantic City bankruptcies, but he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about when it comes to trade policy, and he refuses to listen to people who do. For one thing, it seems to be lost on Trump that while, yes, we have a trade deficit with China, Americans actually get something out of that, i.e. cheap goods that, as New York’s Jonah Shepp points out, “have raised our standard of living even as our incomes have stagnated.” Increasing the price of imports, therefore, is equivalent to “a marginal tax hike on all of us.” For another, as The New York Times reminds us, China has a far greater arsenal of trade-war tactics at its disposal. The Chinese government has much more control over its economy than the U.S., which would allow it to protect the public from factory closings or job cuts by forcing banks to support the industries hit by American tariffs. China “can spread the pain of a trade war while tolerating years of losses from state-run companies that dominate major sectors of the economy.” Meanwhile, as Shepp notes, China could “go for the ‘nuclear option’ of dumping its sizable hoard of U.S. Treasury bills and messing with the U.S. bond market, thereby causing a spike in interest rates.” That would be costly for China, but President Xi Jinping has already said he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win this thing.

Meanwhile Trump, who not so long ago declared that “trade wars are good” and “easy to win,” is now arguing that because we’ve “already lost,” we have nothing else to lose! On Friday, he phoned into the radio show Bernie & Sid to reiterate that point, saying: “We’ve already lost the trade war. We don’t have a trade war; we’ve lost the trade war. I’m not saying there won’t be a little pain, but the market has gone up 40 percent, 42 percent, so we might lose a little bit of it. But we’re going to have a much stronger country when we’re finished. So we may take a hit, and you know what? Ultimately we’re going to be much stronger for it.” So far, he seems to be the only person to actually believe that: