"You're wrong. You've been wrong, you've been wrong all your life on this stuff," Trump told John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of business news giant Bloomberg News, when the pair disagreed about tariffs and their impact on the U.S. dollar.

"What does The Wall Street Journal know? They've been wrong about everything," Trump said when Micklethwait mentioned the paper's editorial page being critical of the bigger budget deficits it says his plans would cause.

Trump said his proposed tariffs - 10% to 20% for most goods and 60% or higher for Chinese goods - would not fuel inflation, which has been steadily slowing after hitting the highest annual rate since the 1980s in 2022.

Importers pay tariffs to bring goods into the country. Those charges, though, are then passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices, most economists say. In a recent survey by the University of Chicago's business school, 95% of economists said they agreed that tariffs are passed on.

Trump said there are two possible objectives of tariffs: to raise money and to incentivize foreign companies to relocate production to the U.S.

"If you want the companies to come in, the tariff has to be a lot higher than 10%, because 10% is not enough," he said.

After Micklethwait, who worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and was editor in chief of The Economist magazine before joining Bloomberg News, suggested that there would be a "massive" negative effect on the economy from Trump's proposed tariffs, the former president snapped back.

"It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong," Trump said.

Trump focuses on one aspect of tariffs: They increase the cost of foreign goods inside the American market, hopefully giving US based producers of the same goods a competitive balance with foreign producers who usually pay far less for labor than is required in the US. That part is right, however, it overlooks a few large factors tariffs alone cannot address.

Not every good or product can be made (or grown) in America regardless of what Trump might think, yet those products too will become more expensive for American buyers and consumers, obviously driving inflation higher. And there is no international nor American law that enables our government to collect any tax or tariff directly from foreign importers. Tariffs and taxes can only be collected from Americans, be they individual purchasers or corporations that market or use imported goods. If a foreign producer's imported goods are not price competitive within the US market, those goods won't be imported into the US, they'll be sold elsewhere in other global markets.

But make no mistake, unless there is direct competition with a US-produced product, the entire cost of any tariff will be added to the selling price Americans pay for the imported goods. The tariffs are not paid by the foreign exporters nor their countries.

Trump juvenilely thinks that high tariffs will force foreign producers to make their products domestically with American workers in order to maintain price competitiveness in our market. But not every product or good can be made domestically, nor do we have the existent infrastructure and capacity to immediately do so as his tariffs kick in. Even 25% of the Big 3 auto company's domestically-built vehicle content comes from foreign producers. The reason we talk about global supply chains is that 'global' is precisely what they are, usually for reasons of overall economic efficiency and industry profitability. And foreign governments will not allow their own export industries to see their US market negatively affected without returning in-kind tariffs against US exports, largely food products, but also many others.

Trump telling experts that they're wrong and he's right is simply another example of his own ignorance and incomplete understanding of what those in the room know intuitively. Trump - left to his own devices - will burn the US economy to the ground if given the opportunity. And those who know better are simply another set of 'enemies of America' for even questioning his economic genius exemplified by the six times he's driven businesses into bankruptcy because he knew better than those advising him.