If there was ever a time to get a case for your phone, that time is now. With the looming trade war, you may not be able to afford new electronics pretty soon and there is literally no hope of winning this. It’s ludicrous to try and wage a trade war on a nation that actually produces things and nations in Latin America, Africa, and Asia (the places providing the world with raw materials) want to work with.

What’s going to end up happening, if the Trump administration doesn’t get real and pursue mutual cooperation, is that the American economy is going to become isolated and it’s American consumers that’ll be hit the hardest. Almost half of our consumer goods come from China and for many of these, like the iPhone, they’re made using American intellectual property. Imposing tariffs on these is like taxing Apple directly. So it’s not going to affect the trade deficit, it’s just going to lower the amount of goods traded and increase the costs for everyone involved. Who’s gonna end up feeling that? Consumers.

If it gets bad enough, American companies are gonna end up laying people off. China, on the other hand, isn’t going to allow market turbulence to derail its economy. The whole reason they’re where they are today is that the government is constantly stepping in and preventing crashes through top-down planning and even expropriation and nationalization. If anything, a trade war plays right into China’s hands. Now they have all the more reason to further regulate and limit what foreign companies operating within China can do.

And though China’s known for their exports (they basically supply Japan and Korea with their consumer goods, as well as much of Europe), their internal market is massive and more than self sustaining. Even if American companies start pulling out of China, Chinese companies can just come right in and pick up where they left off and then it’s game over. The US lacks the infrastructure and the workforce to compete with China should this come down to actual production. China has better infrastructure, a bigger and more educated workforce, and the kind of calculated long term planning that the US lacks (now more than ever).

No matter what happens, America cannot win this. Best case scenario, like with most of his failures, Trump and the media will just ignore this and move onto the next big controversy.