The maladministration is trumpeting their “deal” with the EU. The headlines say 15% tariffs on EU goods into the US and 0% on US goods into the EU.
But the devil’s in the details and I’ll bet that the EU negotiators ran rings around Bessent, Lutnik and Greer without them even knowing they were being taken.
All of these “framework” agreements are not trade deals. They’re statements of intent to keep talking. These countries know two things. First, Trump is a liar and would never adhere to any agreement, so finalizing a trade deal is is waste of time. Second, there are three possible solutions on the horizon. The U.S. courts could strip the Trump regime of its patently illegal and unconstitutional unilateral import tax/tariff power. While not a certainty the Supreme Court’s MAGA 6 would follow the law and Constitution, they could. The other countries also are running out the clock in the hope Democrats seize control of Congress and put an end to the tariff nonsense. Finally, Trump is old and in poor health and they hope he is replaced by J.D. Vance at some point. While Vance is an awful person in other ways, he’s likely not a lover of tariffs.
It’s a handshake deal, and we know Trump doesn’t even honor deals that are put to paper.
Are they like the investigation of the Bidens that Donnie wanted Zelensky to announce without any other follow through?
Peter Thiel envisions a lower population planet led by techno-elites with allowances for technofeudal economies and lebensraum for all good people. Getting there could be pretty grim, however. With fewer people to pay down or service public debt, growth would have to come from productivity gains (automation, AI, robots). Wealth sharing and equal access to tech seem unlikely at this point. Instead, a financial crisis followed by a debt reset (debt forgiveness) ending with a musical-chairs competition of all people to secure participant status in the reset economy could be the outcome.
Most governments in advanced economies have policy tanks working out emerging or future political conflicts. For example, ending the social safety net increases poverty, homelessness, and social unrest. How should the government respond? Better crowd control is only a very temporary solution. Could there be poor houses, or ways of channeling affected people into jobs performed by migrant labor? How many superfluous people will the Influencer Economy support? This is important, because, as unlikely as it seems, someday whatever government that remains in the US will have moved beyond golf course marketing, windmill hate and organized denial of basic geochemical and geophysical processes to new topics and new issues.
Don’t go all real world on me; I prefer hyperbole. 
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I read the conversation as
Trump: You will make glorious investments in the US.
Foreign country: Erm. We can’t make private entities do that.
Trump: Do it anyway.
If people are reduced to poverty, who the hell is going to buy all their technocrap?
Trump dictating his mental notes. He doesn’t notice when there’s silence on the other end of the line.
First, I might point out, general groups are never monolithic. That said, billionaires fund the Republican party. It is their party.
Marcy Wheeler explains why the Republican party is stuck with Donald Trump here nicely:
Now, we might think billionaires are a sophisticated group. Not so, many think exactly like Donald Trump thinks. They approve of authoritarianism, and think, just like any of the other Republican constituents, that the fallout will not hit them.
It has dawned on some of the lower income Republican leaning constituents that the fallout will hit them. Hence, Donald Trump’s disfavorability ratings. This has not yet hit the billionaires and I doubt it ever will signficantly.
There’s an appeals court hearing on Thursday that no one is paying any attention to. On a ruling by a powerful court that no one has ever heard of, the US Court of International Trade. Hoping that hearing will get some attention.
Government sponsored plagues?
Never forget that Russia (via Cambridge Analytica) played a major role in pushing Brexit, essentially as a dry run for tRump 2016. 
None of this is on paper (yet). At best, it is a framework for discussions that might result in an actual agreement that will be signed and put on paper. None of that means that DonOLD Dementia doesn’t believe that he has an actual agreement, so I expect that U.S. Customs is working on actual order that will be on paper (or its electronic equivalent) implementing their understanding of President Dementia thinks the agreement is at their time of writing.
To be sure things would have a happy ending?
Sounds like you’re taking this to a new dimension to explain Donnie Dementia’s delusion state, where delusion eventually becomes (I guess) his 100% personal reality, and he does believe it. We can’t live in his reality of course, as we would get punched in the face in a matter of minutes b/c we have to live with and in everyone else’s reality.
I hope he doesn’t layoff half of the U.S. Customs employees, especially those charged with interrupting what he really meant.
Not really, all I’m saying is that Donnie Dementia’s delusion state is his reality and he imposes his delusional reality on those around him.
By what sorcery does the EU get dollars to invest in the USA, without running a bigger trade surplus? Do they promise to stop buying Treasuries? Who else is supposed to bankroll the federal debt, which sets a new world record every second, when every other country is promising to do the same?
When tariffs make all their stuff too expensive, and we quit buying it, then where they gonna get the dollars to invest and lend?
I am seriously beginning to wonder if his marriage to the daughter of a Communist official has tipped toward destroying rational capitalism of the sort Weber knew to be necessary for it to function. Trump is introducing caprice and irrationality into our economy in a way designed to return us to feudal conditions.