I think it's exactly what it seems: he's feeling pressure to end the tariffs, but is still an angry vengeful dickhead who thinks China and Mexico and Canada are his enemies.
All this flip flopping does nothing to stabilize the market, it's creating trust issues with the market. He's changed course 3 times this week alone. He'll change 3 more before Friday end of day. It's all to create confusion and distrust.
Yeah, that's the effect it's having, but if he wanted outright crash the economy (grind activity to a halt) he'd simply leave the enormous tariffs for every single trading partner on indefinitely.
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