It was hardly my intention to start the second post on this site with yet another anecdote from the early 2000s, but this is just too on the nose. Now that Donald Trump has scaled back some of the catastrophic tariffs he stupidly imposed, he’s being hailed by the usual MAGA media hacks as a genius dealmaker. But far be it from them to point to a single tangible thing that’s actually been accomplished here, other than the incineration of trillions in stock market value, which, despite Wednesday’s rally, has still not been fully restored.

While in college, around 2003 or so, I was assigned to be part of a dreaded group project. But along the way, our four-person group lost a member because – I shit you not – he had been caught setting a series of small fires in a dorm where he was a residential adviser. Apparently, people became suspicious when he happened to be first on the scene and put out several of them. (Oddly, there was a similar but much more destructive arsonist many years ago in my hometown before I was born. He turned out to be a cop. Word was, he was first on scene at a few of them.)

Anyway, I never saw the kid after that and I don’t know what happened to him. What I do know is that he wasn’t praised for extinguishing the fires once everyone knew he started them, and he sure as shit wasn’t considered (university) presidential material.

And yet, that’s what the Fox News crowd would have us believe about Trump, who isn’t even putting out the fires. Rather, he simply announced he will use less kerosene for the time being.

“Trump announced a brilliant move to pause the higher tariffs on countries negotiating with us, but meanwhile to raise China’s tariffs to 125%, to wall off China by boxing them out, further weakening their economic power,” Laura Ingraham gushed on Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s genius.”

“I’m just loving the reaction of stupid people,” Sean Hannity said on his radio show. “All of these people that have been trying to create in other people’s minds that Donald Trump does not know what he’s doing.”

The thing is, Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, other than probably enriching himself and his inner circle. He lowered tariffs on 75 countries to 10% because markets had fairly and squarely freaked the fuck out. And not just stocks. U.S. bonds, which are supposed to be the safest asset on the planet, had endured a massive selloff.

“Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “They were getting yippy, you know, they were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.”

And so, Trump scaled back the tariffs – which by the way, he justified using bogus numbers – because he’d sufficiently scared the shit out of the business set. Virtually every media outlet misleadingly echoed his announcement by saying the tariffs were getting a “pause.” In reality, he left in place his blanket 10% minimum tariff on virtually all imports while he ratcheted down the higher rates on imports from 75 countries to the base figure of 10%. Meanwhile, he jacked up tariffs on Chinese products to 125%, raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico to 25%, left in place the 25% tariff on all automobile imports, and kept the tariffs on steel and aluminum.

Markets surged on Wednesday, but make no mistake. The U.S. still has way more tariffs in place than it did at the beginning of last week. And unless Trump relents on those in a big way, the fires will continue until morale improves.