The Donald’s Open Mouth Trade Bluster And Squirrely Economic Growth Numbers
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Let’s start with some basics. The very idea that the Donald’s wild-ass TariffPalooza could actually be working is just plain nuts. It’s not worthy of serious consideration because you can’t tax your way to prosperity. Period.
But first we need to treat with the insane hoopla that erupted Thursday AM when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli got all hot and bothered about a big drop of $18.8 billion in the October trade deficit. Alas, even a 10-second peek under the hood tells you it wasn’t real—just a screaming statistical anomaly.
To wit, fully 80% or $15.1 billion of the drop was owing to a seemingly mysterious plunge in pharma imports from Ireland in October versus September, which actually wasn’t so mysterious at all. About a week before the end of the month in September the Donald had informed the world on Truth Socialthat a 100% tariff on branded or patented pharmaceutical products would be effective on October 1st.
Since most of the big pharma companies source product in Ireland owing to its low corporate tax rate and also have the streets of Washington crawling with lobbyists and spies, they already knew another Trump tariff bomb was coming and therefore had the sluice-gates on airfreight to the US wide-open.
The Donald is supposedly the savvy businessman that America needs to get the government running right, but the truth is he doesn’t know squat about 95% of the economic issues he is dealing with. In this case, according to Grok 4, the average value for the branded and patented drugs which come out of Irish pharma plants is about $300 per pound, while the cost of air freight is about $3 per pound.
So you don’t even need a hand-calculator or degree from the Harvard Business School to work your decision matrix. Spend $3 and save the tariff increase from the existing rate of 15% in September to the Donald’s swell new 100% levy starting on October 1st. That computes to a $255 per pound savings or 85X your investment. So in a relative nanosecond the planes were chock-a-block with Pharma cargo from Ireland.
For want of doubt, note the anomalies in the table below, which shows the monthly level of pharma imports from Ireland. The September pre-emptive surge to $17.9 billion amounted to a 460% rise over the negligible shipments of $3.2 billion in August.
So the subsequent plunge to just $2.8 billion in October is not evidence that the Donald’s tariff nonsense is working: It’s actually proof that Trump and his cadre of protectionist dufus’ led by Peter Navarro and Howard Lutnick have no clue about what they are doing.
And the September/October volume shuffle is barely the half of it. For instance, during the fall quarter of 2024 before the Donald was back in the White House, the normalized level of Irish pharma shipments was about $11 billion for the quarter.
But then Trump 2.0 arrived in the Oval Office and shortly thereafter the airways were rife with rumors and announcements about the Donald’s impending Big Beautiful Tariffs, as well as a section 232 unfair trade investigation of pharma imports specifically. Not surprisingly, the pharma import surge from Ireland in Q1 was literally out of this world, reaching $47.3 billion for the quarter. That represented a 350% Y/Y increase from $10.6 billion of such imports recorded in Q1 2024.
In turn, the Q1 pre-emptive surge paved the way for a subsequent payback period of sharply reduced import shipments later in the year. During the three months of June-August 2025, for instance, Irish Pharma imports plummeted to just $15 billion, which was a nearly 40% Y/Y drop from the more normalized $24 billion import level during the same three months of 2024.
So what we have owing to the Donald’s endless sequence of threats, pauses, revised announcements and pro-tariff howling is monthly trade numbers which are resemblant of a frying pan full of Mexican jumping beans. And what we also have is a warning not to believe your lying eyes when a breathless financial reporter pins up one month of positive trade numbers, and, as we will amplify below, deceptively positive quarters of GDP growth resulting therefrom, as well.
In the case of Ireland-based pharma imports, the proof is surely in the pudding. Contrary to this week’s hoopla and the Donald endless paeans on the virtues of tariffing, Irish pharma imports during the first 10 months of 2025 totalled $106.2 billion, which represented a 40% gain over the same period in 2024 under Sleepy Joe!
That’s right. The Donald has absolutely nothing to boast about in this case, and, as we will now show below, with respect to the global trade accounts as a whole. That’s because the same monthly jumping bean effect of Trump’s open mouth trade policy has produced similar unnatural oscillations and aberrations in the overall monthly figures.
