Imagine, if you will, that a sitting U.S. president decided to drag his country into a high-stakes trade war with potentially disastrous economic outcomes. You’d probably expect that each and every move, from the initial tariff announcement to the subsequent retaliatory threats to even the tweets would be internally deliberated, studied, and officially signed off on by a team of at least a dozen experts. And, under normal circumstances, that would probably be the case. But in 2018, with former Miss Universe owner Donald Trump running the show, that’s not exactly how things are going down. Instead, President McTweets-a-Lot is reportedly ad-libbing his trade war with China, threatening to blow up negotiations before they can even get off the ground.

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Last week, after China responded to the U.S.’s package of $50 billion in tariffs with measures designed to hurt states that swung for Trump, President Totally Knows What He’s Doing threatened to respond with an extra $100 billion in tariffs—an announcement that, as we said, would normally have been well vetted. Instead, according to Axios, “There wasn’t one single deliberative meeting in which senior officials sat down to debate the pros and cons of this historic threat.” Not only was new National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow not consulted—as he told the networks last week, he basically found out about the fresh proposal when they did—but the whole thing was reportedly “present[ed] . . . as a fait accompli.” Chief of Staff and lead babysitter John Kelly was aware the boss was itching for more tariffs, but even he was said to be “blindsided” by the announcement. Meanwhile Marc Short, Team Trump’s top Capitol Hill liaison, was left “totally in the dark.”

Several senior officials blamed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, whom Trump had tasked with putting together the package, for not cluing enough high-level people into the fact that he’d received such a significant request from the president. Equally caught off guard by the whole thing? Wall Street. The Dow Jones sunk nearly 800 points on Friday before closing down 572 points.

White House officials like Kudlow and Mnuchin are attempting to calm people (and the markets) down by noting that none of the tariffs have gone into effect yet, and that there’s still time for the U.S. and China to come to an understanding—a line that would be a lot more comforting if China wasn’t saying Washington has proven completely impossible to negotiate with under “current circumstances.” “The United States with one hand wields the threat of sanctions, and at the same time says they are willing to talk,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters on Monday. “I’m not sure who the United States is putting on this act for.” He added that “under the current circumstances, both sides even more cannot have talks on these issues,” and threw in that the current situation is “entirely at the provocation of the United States.”

China’s tough talk would be easy enough to brush off if it looked like the U.S. was going to come out ahead in this whole thing. Unfortunately, threats unleashed by our president—who Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Friday still believes trade wars are “easy to win”—are unlikely to actually hurt China:

A researcher with China’s state planning agency said China’s economy will see little impact from the dispute, as its vast domestic market can compensate for any external impact.

Even with the U.S. tariffs, China can still reach its 2018 G.D.P. growth target of around 6.5 percent and the impact on employment will be limited, Wang Changlin, a researcher at the National Development and Reform Commission (N.D.R.C.), wrote in a post on the commission’s official microblog account.

That point, unsurprisingly, remains lost on Trump, who is not only dragging the U.S. into a war it will very likely lose, but doing so by the seat of his pants. While Kudlow and Co. maintain protest that we can “avoid a tit for tat with China on tariffs that could be economically disastrous,” one need only take a gander at the president’s Monday-morning tweets to observe that reasonable negotiation, at this point, appears about as likely as him voluntarily shutting down the @realDonaldTrump account.