Many moons ago, Donald Trump made a bold declaration. Speaking to his Twitter followers, and presumably using both pointer fingers to type, like the Cro-Magnon man he is, the president proclaimed that trade wars are not only “good,” they’re “easy to win.” More than a year and a half later, this prediction has obviously aged extremely poorly. As of September, the trade war with China had reduced U.S. employment by 300,000 jobs, a number that was expected to rise to 450,000 by the end of this year and 900,000 by the end of 2020. As of October, the exercise had cost U.S. corporations $34 billion. Any benefit middle-class households received from the 2017 tax cuts has been offset, with economists predicting tariffs will cost U.S. households $2,000 a pop by 2020. The manufacturing industry is in a recession. Farmers have received more than $28 billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts that hasn’t even stopped the bleeding. The global economy has been pushed to the brink. Lies aside, very little progress on a resolution has been made. In a word, things are going badly. In three words, they’re going flamingly fucking badly.

Most people would examine the consequences of the very good and easy-to-win trade wars and think, Hey, maybe a new approach is in order considering I’ve basically been shooting myself in the foot over and over again. But Donald Trump is not most people, which is why on Monday he chose to escalate matters, slapping tariffs on steel and aluminum from Brazil and Argentina because he’s angry that China has been buying pork, soybeans, and other agricultural products from them as a direct result of his policies and also because he’s convinced himself that they’re devaluating their currencies, thereby making their goods cheaper to purchase abroad, in order to to screw over the U.S.

And in case there was any worry that this move was at all thought out pre-Tweet, don’t worry, it wasn’t: