Look at the chart below, the blue to the right of the zero lines are the winners, the ones that did not bend their knees to Trump’s tariffs racket. The ones to the left cowered and still wound up losing. The chart is from this article.
Why are those countries to the left losers? According to the Nobel Prize winner, it is because;
It has been clear from the beginning that a primary motivation for tariffs was that they empowered Trump personally. They allowed him to punish governments he didn’t like, demand subservience from other countries as the price of lower tariffs, and offer waivers and exemptions to companies that put money in his own pocket. And maybe Trump can’t bear the thought of losing that power.
Yet he already has. The language of Section 122 calls for a flat-rate tariff on everyone. This means that nations Trump tried to punish — like Brazil, which faced high tariffs for daring to try Jair Bolsonaro for treason — have just received a big break. Meanwhile nations that groveled to Trump, like the UK, have just learned that they humiliated themselves for nothing: