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April 03, 2025 10:42 AM UTC

Markets Crash While Gabe Evans Plays Pool With Your Future

  • 34 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

CNBC reporting today on a massive market selloff provoked by President Donald Trump’s announcement just after markets closed yesterday of sweeping tariffs taking effect against basically every nation in the world including our closest economic partners and allies. Despite some hope that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs would be more lenient than the worst fears, Trump went what can best be described as “full Herbert Hoover,” and set off a global trade war that could devastate the American economy on the way to its transformation into Trump’s Juche utopia:

Stocks nosedived Thursday sending the S&P 500 back into correction territory, after President Donald Trump unveiled sweeping tariffs of at least 10% and even higher for some countries, raising the risks of a global trade war that hits the already sputtering U.S. economy.

The broad market index dropped 4%, putting it on track for its worst day since September 2022. The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled 1,500 points, or 3.5%, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 5%. The slide across equities was broad, with decliners at the New York Stock Exchange outnumbering advancers by six to one.

President Donald Trump unveiled on Wednesday sweeping tariffs of at least 10% and even higher for some countries, raising the risks of a global trade war that hits the already sputtering U.S. economy.

As the Washington Post reports, close allies and trading partners are shocked and dismayed by the size and scope of Trump’s tariffs:

“The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic, and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, whose country got off relatively lightly with a 10 percent blanket duty. “This is not the act of a friend.”

The European Union, which was hit with a 20 percent blanket tariff, is ready to respond if talks with Washington fail, said the head of the E.U. executive branch, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

“There seems to be no order in the disorder. No clear path through the complexity and chaos,” she said in a statement describing the tariffs as a “major blow.”

While untold billions of dollars in market value went poof today, Vice President J.D. Vance told the nation to ride out the pain, and forget everything they promised you last year about bringing costs down on Day One:

“What I ask folks to appreciate, we will not fix things overnight. [Pols emphasis] Joe Biden left us with largest peacetime debt and deficit in peacetime in America’s history. You don’t fix that overnight. We are fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us,” Vance continued. “It will not happen immediately. If we pursue deregulation and cost-reducing policies, people will see in their pocket book and benefit from the fact that foreign countries can’t take advantage of us, and jobs will be more secure.”

Back in Colorado, tireless Trump cheerleader Rep. Lauren Boebert is as all in as she can manage, reposting the eminently clueless far-right agitator Charlie Kirk’s praise for the Dear Leader’s master plan:

Your future is like a game of pool.

But as Colorado Public Radio’s Caitlyn Kim reports, the booby prize for the worst possible spin on the unfolding disaster of Trump’s “Liberation Day” may go to Colorado’s most vulnerable Republican member of Congress, Rep. Gabe Evans:

“What we saw the President do this afternoon was implement reciprocal tariffs, which means that if they have a tariff on us, then we have a tariff back on them, but if they lower their tariffs or get rid of their tariffs, then we lower or get rid of our tariffs as well,” he said. “I’m a big believer in free trade, but free trade has to be fair trade as well.”

He likened it to a pool game, with Wednesday’s broad announcement as the rack break. [Pols emphasis] “It seems like everything’s in flux, but at the end of the day, I am absolutely confident that by getting back to free and fair trade practices… that will ultimately bring down the prices of goods for all Americans.”

The first problem is that despite the insistence otherwise from the White House, many of the tariffs imposed yesterday were not “reciprocal” at all, meaning based on tariffs charged by those other countries, and the methodology of the tariff calculation was not consistently applied.

The bigger problem is that Rep. Gabe Evans is likening Trump’s unilateral trade war, which could devastate the American and global economies, to a pool game. Specifically a “rack break,” the most chaotic moment at the beginning of the game where, as Evans says, “balls are going everywhere.” Here’s his verbatim answer:

EVANS: I liken it to a game of pool. You start off the game, the balls are all neatly racked, and then you, you break the rack. And it looks like the balls are going everywhere but then a good pool player is actually able to get the result that they want, um, as a result of being able to sink the balls in the different pockets. And so, I think that’s where we’re at right now…

If you’ve ever played pool, you know that the rack break doesn’t always end well. In fact, it’s possible to lose the game in that one shot.

But more importantly, what is happening to the markets today, and is about to happen to businesses and consumers across the nation, is not a game.

Rep. Evans’ cavalier attitude while the economy nosedives into fully preventable chaos lashes Evans even tighter to the Trump brand, which Evans has embraced in this highly competitive district from the beginning of his run. If next year at this time the consensus of expert opinion that this trade war will severely damage the economy has proven correct, Gabe Evans will pay the ultimate political price. No one should relish the prospect of a crashed economy for political advantage, but for Gabe Evans the choice to defend Trump in this moment could truly be fateful.

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34 thoughts on “Markets Crash While Gabe Evans Plays Pool With Your Future”

  3. Why do all these people on the right think Trump has this sophisticated multi-part plan in mind? He doesn't. He's stupid. He's an idiot-savant in marketing including running for office. But he's an inept buffoon in terms of administering the state.

    He's not breaking the balls to carefully line up his shots. He's dropping a hand grenade onto the middle of the table.

    On the topic of pool, if you want to see an amazing shot – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geC3wkcC0TM

     

    1. "Why do all these people on the right think Trump has this sophisticated multi-part plan in mind?"

      Because he said so. It's like from God's mouth to the MAGA member's ear.

  4. Um…huh?

    Why is Gabe talking like a six year-old in a sandbox purposefully isolated from other children?? “I’ll take my ball home and then you’ll take your ball home but if you bring you ball back I’ll bring mine back. That’s what fair trade is. A fat sickly orange man says so…so….so…BLPPHHHHFFT”

  5. After her Oliver/Roger Stone mix up, has the representative from CO's 4th congressional district mistaken the Reverend Jim Jones for the Dow Jones today?

  6. So Gabe knows his victory was basically a fluke so is grifting and licking Trump’s taint as much as he could until the inevitable happens. Because otherwise why is he such a spineless partisan hack?

  7. Headlines are clear … and we don’t have photos of people jumping from windows …. yet.

    • The Dow plunged as much as 1,500 points, and the Nasdaq lost 5% as Trump’s moves sent shockwaves through markets. 
    • Trump’s tariffs wreak havoc on battered Wall Street 
    • Trump just put the Fed in an ‘even greater bind’
    • Apple sheds $300B, leading ‘Mag 7’ tariff smackdown 
    • Dollar drops by most on record as traders brace for more pain 
    • Wall Street giants plunge as tariff turmoil roils the finance world 
    • Oil plunges on tariffs, surprise OPEC move

    close to the end of trading.  report shows

    • ^RUT Russell 2000 1,915.46 -129.90 -6.35% 
    • ^IXIC NASDAQ Composite 16,578.33 -1,022.72 -5.81%
    • ^GSPC S&P 500 5,403.34 -267.63 -4.72% 
    • ^XAX NYSE AMEX COMPOSITE INDEX 4,931.02 -231.42 -4.48% 
    • ^DJI Dow Jones Industrial Average 40,607.10 -1,618.22 -3.83%

  8. What a relief!?!?!!!

    I feel as though a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders and I’ve been liberated from the burden of ever having to worry again about having a retirement!!!

    And pretty soon I imagine, not just government workers but perhaps also 40% to 50% of all Americans are going to be liberated from the drudgery of having to go to work!!!!

    Happy days are here again . . .

  9. The MAGAturds that stalk this site have been eerily quiet recently. Are you ready to face an economic collapse? Becasue red states and red regions within blue/purple states are gonna go first and face the worst of it. 

    1. As JiD noted yesterday, one of our MAGA-turds may be struggling with his own economic collapse which predated the stock market crash today.

      Moderatus, as we all know, works – or worked – for the federal government. No word on whether he has been spared from DOGE's yuge and bigley colonic irrigation of all the fecal matter clogging the bowels of the federal government.

    1. If Americans couldn’t handle a bit of inflation last year, there’s no way they will handle something magnitudes worse. What’s even more ironic, we know who directly caused this economic pain, something that can never be fairly blamed on a single politician. Until now. 

      1. Maybe we'll finally see voters in red states start burning effigies of Trump.  Only then I'll believe the cult of personality spell has been broken.

        2. The MAGA losers are a lost cause. But I’m thinking about the moderate and swing voters. That’s when we get a revolt. But even then, a small but still significant amount of Republican voters won’t able to ignore this. Nobody except MAGA voted for a guy for “economic reasons” just to blindly accept the order of “actually, you better like paying more for everything and suffer much more financially than before”.  

          1. I know a number of people that voted for Trump. For one of them it was the border. For the rest, it was that Trump would be better for the economy than Harris. They're gettable with this disaster.

      2. When all that nice cheap shit that the MAGAverse likes to buy at Walmart – which comes from Bangledesh or Vietnam – is no longer cheap shit, they are going to start to wonder why.

        Anticipate Trump blaming "Biden's inflation" for the price increases. (It was really devious, you know, because that scheming and manipulative comatose octagenarian was able to plan and delay the impact of his inflation until he was safely out of office.) Or he will tell them that the price increases are a very small price to pay to "Own the Libs." 

        We will have to see how many of them buy that nonsense.

        I had to laugh when Scott Bessent – you know, the administration's big GWM (gay white male guy with money) – put out that bit about the American Dream is not simply about being able to buy cheap stuff, I was astonished at how clueless these people are.

        Being able to buy cheap stuff is th epitomy of the American Dream.

      1. Why would he go to New England skiing? What would he expect to hear from people who live in NY or MA, not to mention the locals who elected and re-elected that old Trotskyite, Bernie Sanders?

        I would expect JD Vance to ski somewhere ideologically friendlier, like Montana or Idaho. But not Utah (too many Mitt Romney types). And not Jackson Hole (too close to the Cheneys).

  11. As Rep.Grpoebert well knows, Math, among other things, can become very hard . . .

    . . . but lying is easy!
     

     

    The formula, which resulted in wildly different tariffs for various foreign countries, including several uninhabited islands, first came to wide attention thanks partly to analysis by an anonymous social media user who reckoned the percentage rate of the tariffs matched other countries’ trade surpluses with the U.S. divided by their exports. The journalist James Surowiecki also noted the correlation.

    “They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates non-tariff barriers, as they say they did,” Surowiecki wrote. “Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.”

    In other words, the supposedly reciprocal tariffs, which are supposed to combat arbitrary foreign barriers to U.S. goods, are themselves based on an arbitrary formula. 

    In a response on X, the website formerly known as Twitter, White House spokesman Kush Desai called the analyses “incorrect” and pointed to a fuller explanation of the formula from the U.S. Trade Representative, which claimed that other countries’ “non-tariff policies” cause them to sell more goods to the U.S. than we sell back to them. 

    “If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said on its website, which included a seemingly more complicated math equation and several academic citations.

    [The U.S. Trade Representative’s explanation of the “reciprocal” tariff formula.]

    Alan Cole, an economist with the Tax Foundation, said he suspected Desai didn’t really understand the equation. 

    “So they thought, ‘Our thing is more complicated and smarter-looking than that. It has more fancy Greek letters. It can’t possibly just be a very, very simple division,’” Cole told HuffPost. “After you cancel it out, it’s the same formula.”

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-house-tariffs-formula_n_67eeae9ce4b0c989cefdfebb

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