Donald Trump has torn up the rule book in his second presidential term — defying the courts, the congress and the constitution.
But it's his attempt to "make America wealthy again" by imposing tariffs on more than 180 countries and territories that have caused months of chaos, undermined business confidence in the United States, and pushed the world to the brink of a financial crisis.
With a three-month pause on the tariffs just days from expiring, leading experts in economics and international relations have told Four Corners they fear Mr Trump's "unworkable" and "absurd" trade policies will create more instability and plunge the global economy into turmoil.
'It's a very strange strategy'
For nearly 40 years, Mr Trump has been declaring his love of tariffs, telling Playboy magazine in 1990 that foreign nations were to blame for "ripping our country apart".
On the campaign trail in 2024, he described the word tariff as "the most beautiful word in the dictionary".
While the president did introduce tariffs in his first term, they were minor compared to what he unleashed in his second term.
Dubbed "Liberation Day", on April 2, Mr Trump stood on the White House lawn with an oversized chart outlining a series of tariffs the US would impose on dozens of its trading partners.
The tariffs, he said, would address what he sees as a "national emergency": the US's trade deficit on goods, where the country imports more than it exports.
But economists argue that the trade policies are "unworkable" and aren't the solution to Mr Trump's perceived crisis.
"It's been chaos," says Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for international trade policy.
"It's just crazy. Not only economically destructive but actually completely unworkable."
Economist Warwick McKibbin says Mr Trump's attempt to market the tariffs as "reciprocal" is grossly misguided.
"The whole idea of reciprocal tariffs is if someone's punching me in the face, I'm going to punch myself in the face," Professor McKibbin says.
"It's a very strange strategy from an economic point of view."
In the weeks that followed his announcement, Mr Trump paused, backed down, escalated and de-escalated dozens of tariffs.
The chaos that unfolded saw many public policy experts question whether there is a coherent plan behind the president's trade strategy.
"There's nothing about Donald Trump's policymaking that looks even remotely well thought out," says Evan Medeiros, former chief adviser on the Asia-Pacific to president Barack Obama.
"He's somebody that has had a variety of ideas for a very long time. One of them is that our trading partners cheat us, and we need to use tariffs to remedy that situation.
"He got his wish, only to realise it's completely unsustainable."
Dodging a descent into disaster
For his second presidential term, Mr Trump has curated a cabinet and team of advisers that either agree with him or buckle to his will.
"The Trump administration operates much more like a royal court," Professor Medeiros says.
"You have a king, you have various concentric circles of courtiers around them, and everybody sort of shuffles in and out of the Oval Office wanting to hear the musings of the king and just implement it."
One of the key architects of Mr Trump's tariffs policy is his senior counsellor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro.
Mr Navarro is a controversial figure. He claimed the 2020 election was stolen and worked on a plan to get the result overturned.
He also served four months in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena over the investigation into the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol.
A former Democrat, Mr Navarro has written a series of books focusing on what he sees as the threat that China poses to the rest of the world. He has described the country as the world's largest pirate nation and its biggest drug dealer.
Australian academic Tessa Morris-Suzuki exposed Mr Navarro for inventing an author called Ron Vara (an anagram of his last name). She says the fictitious Vara was cited at least 15 times in five different books.
"There are days when Peter Navarro, who is a radical protectionist, perhaps the only economist in the world who agrees with Trump's idea of reciprocal tariffs, gets into the Oval Office and has the president's ear," economic historian Sir Niall Ferguson says.
In the days after liberation day, financial markets were in freefall, and the president's decision to introduce tariffs triggered a sell-off in the US bond market — signalling that investors thought holding US government bonds was becoming increasingly risky in the economic environment.
"Once we started to see the bond markets start to rattle … that was a fairly clear indication that we were on the edge of a cliff," Professor McKibbin says.
"It would've been a disaster that would've spread very quickly to most countries."
It was only when heavy hitters inside the cabinet seized on Mr Navarro's absence from the Oval Office on April 9 that the crisis on the bond market was averted.
"Navarro had in effect, been locked in a broom cupboard and the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and the Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick got into the Oval Office, cornered Trump and said, 'You've got to do something, you've got to postpone these tariffs because we're about to blow up the global financial markets,'" Sir Niall says.
After that meeting, Mr Trump announced a pause on the reciprocal tariffs — imports from all countries except China would attract a 10 per cent tariff for 90 days — to allow individual trade deals to be negotiated.
Tariffs remained in place on steel, aluminium, cars and automotive parts, while the US later placed a 145 per cent tariff on Chinese imports. China retaliated with its own 125 per cent tariff on US imports — escalating the trade war between the world's two largest economies.
Achieving the impossible
Mr Trump has used various rationales for introducing his tariffs — including to raise revenue, to balance the trade deficit, to bring back manufacturing to the US, and as a negotiating tool for trade agreements with other nations.
"Basically the policy is going to fail," Professor Krugman says.
"If you impose a lot of tariffs, they'll have much less impact on the trade balance than Trump thinks because they will make America a less attractive place to invest.
"If less capital comes in, then that will probably mean a weaker dollar and a slightly less negative trade balance."
As for whether tariff revenue would help balance the federal budget as Mr Trump has claimed, Professor Krugman says that's not going to happen.
"Trump likes to say that, back in the 19th century, we paid for the government with tariff revenue. Yeah. We also had a government that had no social security, no Medicare, and barely had an army," he says.
"If you're willing to have a McKinley (US President 1897-1901) sized government, we could pay for it with tariffs."
Sir Niall says Mr Trump wants tariffs to raise large amounts of revenue, act as negotiating tools, and reindustrialise the US at the same time.
"It can't be all three of those things at once when you think about it," he says.
"If it's just a negotiating tool, it's not a regular source of revenue."
Manufacturing a different outcome
Dan DiMicco is one of the true believers when it comes to Mr Trump's tariffs.
The former CEO and chair of Nucor, the US's largest steel manufacturer, was a trade adviser to Donald Trump alongside Mr Navarro in 2016.
"He's going after the jugular on China, as he should," he says.
"It's not the Chinese people, it's the Communist Party and their leadership that has declared themselves as our existential enemy who want dominate the world in every category."
Mr DiMicco has seen manufacturing decline from about 20 per cent of the US workforce in the late 70s to around 8 per cent today.
"Our working class has been decimated, and they got nothing out of it," he says.
"We're going to bring manufacturing back. And this is a message to the entire world. Trump is sending out one message to the entire world, and he's sending out a huge, huge message to the Chinese Communist Party."
When challenged on whether anyone would invest in manufacturing in the US with uncertainty around tariffs, Mr DiMicco was adamant the jobs were already coming back.
"As you and I speak, there's deals being cut to build manufacturing plants in every critical industry that we've lost in this country today. And many of them are already breaking ground," he says.
But economic modelling done by Professor McKibbin for the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington DC on the impacts of Mr Trump's proposed tariffs suggests the policy will generate more losers than winners.
"The president is very happy to pronounce which firms are coming. The answer will be how many firms exit relative to those that are coming in," Professor McKibbin says.
"The actual overall impact on the economy is going to be a loss of capital, and therefore a loss of jobs."
Professor McKibbin — who has made accurate predictions around the outcomes of the Global Financial Crisis and COVID pandemic — says Mr Trump's tariffs will harm those he says he is seeking to protect.
"The two sectors that get hit the most are agriculture and durable manufacturing, which is the Trump heartland," he says.
"Agricultural employment will be down roughly between 4 and 8 per cent, manufacturing employment will be down between 5 and 10 per by the middle of next year.
"You'll get lower wages, you'll get higher prices, and you'll get no solution to the problems that these people face."
Temporarily waving the trade war white flag
By mid-May, the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on the virtual trade embargo between the world's two largest economies.
The US temporarily lowered tariffs on China to 30 per cent, while China reduced its tariffs on the US to 10 per cent.
But the chaos was far from over.
"This is not the end of a [trade] war," Professor Krugman says.
"We have tariff rates in place right now that will probably destroy about two-thirds of the trade we previously had with China. That doesn't sound to me like trade peace."
On the day of the announcement, Professor Medeiros told Four Corners that the president had made a big mistake in his trade war with China.
"Rule number one for dealing with China is accumulate as much leverage as possible, and as far as I can tell, Donald Trump started a trade war with China without having accumulated any," he says.
"Now we've negotiated a 90-day ceasefire, and not only have we not accumulated any leverage, but we've just signalled that we lack resolve.
"This is a very dangerous point for the United States."
While the tariffs may have been reduced, another key pressure point on the US economy had yet to be resolved.
China has a near monopoly on the processing and supply of rare earth minerals — elements that are critical for making cars, missiles, satellites, fighter jets, lasers, tanks and other key products.
It had turned up the heat on the US economy by introducing export controls on these critical elements, restricting their supply to the US.
Professor Medeiros says China has been preparing for this trade war since the first Trump administration, with export controls and antitrust investigations some of the weapons the country has at its disposal.
"China has created a series of what I like to call precision-guided economic munitions," he says.
"It's about going after American companies that produce in China and sell in China. It's about cutting off American access to critical commodities."
In response, the US had cut the sales of key technologies to China relating to aircraft and semiconductors.
Export restrictions on both sides of the ledger were at the centre of talks between the US and China in London in mid-June.
On Friday, China confirmed it had agreed to a framework with the US to negotiate the lifting of export controls on both sides.
The serious risks of future escalations
The trade war launched by Mr Trump could have ramifications for global security, strategic alliances and the economic world order for decades to come.
"I don't think the trade war is going to end," Sir Niall says.
"The issue is, does the trade war escalate into something bigger and more dangerous? How much damage does it do to all the economies concerned?"
Professor Medeiros sees the trade war as part of a bigger picture, a reordering of global power that will likely lead to greater instability.
"The trade war does capture the distrust, the animosity, the competition, which feeds into other areas of US-China security competition in the South China Sea, in the Pacific, very close to Australia, and then of course in the Taiwan Strait," he says.
Sir Niall says in a worst-case scenario, Taiwan could be drawn into the dispute between China and the US if the trade war escalates.
"It's conceivable that so much pressure is being exerted on the Chinese economy, which after all relies very heavily on exports, that Xi Jinping decides, 'You know what? Let's also bring national security into this debate and make a move on Taiwan,'" he says.
"I'm not talking about an invasion or a blockade, but it's perfectly plausible that at some point he says, 'You know what? Talking of trade, we're going to start collecting customs on goods going into Taiwan,' which after all the Chinese consider a province of China.
"That will be the moment that we leave the domain of trade and enter the domain of geopolitics.
"We leave behind trade war, and we run the risk of real war."
Watch Four Corners' full investigation, Trading in Chaos, on ABC iview.
