Trump’s trade threats put the world on a precipice and may say a lot about his second term

CNN —

Global chaos delivered via social media is back.

Between 2017 and 2021, Donald Trump had the world on a precipice, bracing for his next move, gaming out whether his bluster was a bluff, an overture to a deal or a break with history, as he sowed mayhem to push adversaries off balance.

President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute gala at Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on November 14.

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Those days are here again, nearly eight weeks before his second term begins.

The president-elect’s online threats Monday of new trade wars with Canada, Mexico and China turned the United States back into an agent of instability, which can pitch a foreign friend or foe into a crisis in an instant.

Trump said America’s two Western Hemisphere neighbors would be punished if they didn’t stop the flow of undocumented migration and fentanyl across their borders. And he demanded China stop shipments of the drug as well.

His first major global brouhaha since winning reelection posed the following questions that will help define the character of his second term.

Is Trump serious about massive tariff hikes that could increase prices for US consumers as soon as he begins a second presidency, which was won partly because voters were so frustrated with inflation and costs of housing and groceries?

Or is the president-elect indulging his view that life and politics is one big real estate deal? And is he setting out an extreme position to create leverage for agreements that might be modest but polish his dealmaker’s brand?

There’s a third possibility — that Trump feels liberated by his