President Donald Trump‘s unilateral imposition of the steepest tariff regime in about a century has not caused the dramatic increase in excess inflation expected by more Keynesian economists. Neither have the tariffs decimated our economic growth, thanks to Trump’s tens of billions of dollars in savings just in deregulation.

But Trump is rediscovering the fact that trade wars are not actually “good and easy to win,” as he once boasted. In a retaliatory response that absolutely everyone saw coming, China ended its American soybean purchases for the first time in 20 years, leaving more than a quarter of the nation’s soybeans — and a majority of its soybean exports — without a buyer.