I don't see why they can't afford it. They just have to exempt selected corporations from tariffs or give them the equivalent tax write-off.

I think it's going to be a bit harder than 'tax write off' for a company that won't be paying any because it really has no profits, not just that it's lying about it on the books they show the IRS (assuming anyone can still be bothered). For instance: China refused to recertify the American slaughterhouses that used to sell them beef, then slapped a $3 a pound tariff on top of the global $2.75 wholesale price; so even if recertified those companies can't sell meat to China. The Chinese are buying Australian instead, so no harm to their consumers.

Still, thanks to the Republicans, about 26,000 tons a month of fatty corn-poisoned American beef now has no buyer. Trying to dump that much more onto retrenching American consumers is going to push the wholesale price a lot lower than the $2.75 a pound they were getting from China; and you'd have to be more than slightly naive to think any of those savings would be passed on to the consumers by way of incentive, except under duress and at the last ditch. So...no increase in consumption while margins implode. Oh, well; no profits in sight to tax. Sucks to be the lowlife traitors in the cattle industry who voted Republican, doesn't it?

And sure, maybe Trump could bail them out if this was it; but everyone in the agriculture/mass consumption/working class goods China trade is hurting. He can't steal enough money to make it up to all of them; and it's the entire world, not just China.

Oh, and changing the tax code is a lot harder than a few Republicans committing a few felonies and the other Republicans lying that it's kosher. That has to go through Congress, specifically through the Republicans who couldn't write a law correctly if they were about to be sacrificed to the volcano gods for failure; and in this case also has to get buy in from all the Republicans from states that don't raise meat cattle. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.

A little detail I just noted elsewhere: 25% of Chinese imports are in categories where the US provides more than half of that category of goods. 55% of US imports are in categories where China provides over half of that category. Given that, and the demonstrable world preference that China wins a trade war against the US/Trump, who do you suppose is going to lose the 'find an import substitute' game; and who actually has the smallest chance of being able to find the money to make a compensation scheme work?

The big electronics companies (NVidia, Apple, etc) are already being granted exemptions from tariffs as they make all their stuff in China. Trump doesn't need Congress to create company- or sector- specific carve-outs from his Chat-GPT generated penguin-taxing nonsense tariffs. The companies will still lose money on the other end due to retaliatory tariffs from trade partners, but I don't think that matters to Trump. He just wants them begging him for relief. And I don't think he's particularly concerned about how he's going to pay for them when the economy falls into a ditch, either. Deficits only matter when Democrats are in charge.

This is an insider trading grift, a ploy for extortion, and a wodger-measuring contest, in that order.

Doing the dictator does seem to be the point, yes.

One hears that Trump is going to the Pope's funeral. So is the idea here to get out of DC in order to escape dealing with his own failures, to mock the deceased, to try to strong-arm the Curia into choosing some fascist pederast of an American cardinal to replace him, to try to get Italy to break with the EU over trade; or does someone think he's actually capable of multi-failing some combination of those all at once?

The dictator stuff abounds. First there's rounding up immigrants, documented or not, and renditioning them to an El Salvadoran gulag; then there's sending plainclothes state agents of unidentifiable provenance to intimidate their lawyers; and now there's holding naturalized citizens up at the border to harass for fun. What's revolting is how many corporations, universities, law firms and famous people are bending the knee at the slightest whiff of trouble.