Justin Wolfers

And so if you're a trader, you want to discount these because if you responded to each and every one of them, you'd sell off.

And then the next day the markets would rise as it became clear it wouldn't happen.

And then you lost a lot of money.

Yeah.

So you've got to scale your response to the likelihood that Trump will actually follow through.

If Trump follows through, in the short run, the obvious is he launches a trade war with the European Union.

Um, because remember he's talking about 25% tariffs by June.

You can't just, you know, it's not as much as he's picked out Germany that he wants to go after the United Kingdom.

You don't just declare a trade war on particular members of the EU, the entire union response, the EU plus Norway, plus the United Kingdom collectively is 22% of American exports.

So that's a big economic threat right there.

There are two other things you learn if he's serious.

One is if he follows through with a trade war, there's actually a chance he follows through with a war war.

That then is the end of NATO and the end of the post-war world order.

That in turn is the end of American military leadership.

We move into some complicated world and you can get one of these guys who likes to point at the globe and tell you how complicated that gets.

All I know is that

Ed, in the brief time you and I have been alive, we haven't seen fighting on our shores mm-hmm and that's not true for our grandparents.

And so even if you don't like what we've had, it's been remarkably successful relative to the rest of human history mm-hmm that we've grown up without wars on our shores.

So there's some chance that that's the end of that for the United States, the world economic productive activity.

It would be catastrophic.