We knew Donald Trump is bad at business. Now the world does, too.

I’ve lived in New Jersey for the vast majority of my life, and for that entire time Donald Trump has been a presence in the Garden State. In the good old days, it was only on the periphery of public life. In fact, New Jersey was mostly a place where Trump liked to fail at business.

He owned the Jersey Generals of the UFL , a longs-shot challenger to he NFL until Trump came along and hastened the league’s demise. He owned a phalanx of gold leaf coated casinos in Atlantic City, which met the same fate. Trump’s current holdings in Jersey include Trump National Golf Course in my hometown of Bedminster.

You probably know it best as the site of LIV golf events and frequent presidential visits. I know it as the golf course where he buried his ex-wife that I have to drive by whenever I go to the farmers market. Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration unveiled its long awaited and universally despised tariff plan , which was seemingly generated by feeding an AI mountains of cocaine and asking it to come up with an economic model specifically designed to cause a global recession.

The tariffs went into effect earlier this week and the markets reacted by dry heaving their guts out. About 13 hours into this glorious new age of global trade equity, Trump got tired of fielding calls from apoplectic billionaires and called a 90-day timeout in order to stop the death spiral. Trump’s tariffs haven’t yet succeeded in their stated goal of bringing manufacturing jobs back to America, but they have managed to inject heaps of uncertainty into global economic markets.

Congratulations citizens of the world, you are now learning what we here in New Jersey have known for decades: Donald Trump is bad at business . Those six bankruptcies weren’t a coincidence and “The Apprentice” was just a TV show , in reality he’s really bad at this. Trump University, Trump Water, Trump Magazine, Trump Steaks, Trump Airlines, the list of failed ventures could fill a bathroom in Mar-A-Lago.

Only some of these ventures were scams, but all were failures, Trump’s tariffs are both. Sheneman has drawn political cartoons for The Star-Ledger since 1998. His work is syndicated nationally through Tribune Content Agency.

Find him at Drew Sheneman’s Cartoon Cavalcad e . Thank you for relying on us to provide the local news you can trust. Please consider supporting NJ.

com with a subscription..