President Donald Trump is making a high-stakes gamble with his “shock and awe” tariffs. There are pros and cons to his tariff bomb. If it works (and in many ways, it already seems to be), the payoff will be yuge. But he needs time.

Democrats and their allies in the Leftmedia are not going to give him that time. Even conservatives who are doctrinaire free-traders are having a tough time seeing his bigger strategy. Yes, tariffs are taxes, but there’s a lot more to this.

A recent CBS News poll shows why leftists are banging the drum: They’re damaging Trump on one of his key issues — the economy. Three-quarters of Americans believe tariffs will raise prices, and two-thirds say it will make the economy worse in the short term. Nearly half think tariffs will add jobs, though. The answers become much more partisan when considering whether Trump has a plan and when we should judge those results. Democrats don’t think he has a plan and that we should judge him (harshly) right now. The worst news is three disapproval numbers about Trump: handling of the economy (56% negative), handling of inflation (60% negative), and overall approval (53% negative).

I know not to trust those numbers, and you know not to trust them either.

But millions of Americans catch wind of such polling, subtly affecting their perception of things. Before long, the media will be able to report on the clamoring outcry against Trump based on the fact that they’ve been telling people to be upset with him. It’s the definition of pollaganda.

Here’s a quick review of what’s actually happening.

The April 3 jobs report was a good one, with 228,000 jobs created — it was higher than the previous month and exceeded expectations. Wage growth is also outpacing inflation, which was down to a lower-than-expected 2.4% in the latest report. That’s not far from what policymakers consider “normal.” (Yeah, I know, that’s a whole different discussion.)

Note: Beware pointing to the inflation report as evidence that Trump’s tariffs aren’t going to raise prices. The numbers it evaluates came in before his big “Liberation Day” tariff announcement. Let’s look at it again in a month.

As of this morning, the Dow Jones is down a little more than 3% in April, which isn’t good, but it’s hardly the catastrophe the media portrays.

That brings me to Friday’s notice from the Trump administration: a lengthy list of tech items exempt from the massive tariffs on China. They’re still subject to tariffs of 20%, just not the additional 125% levies. Those items make up roughly a quarter of U.S. imports from China. The exemptions came on the heels of last Wednesday’s announcement of a 90-day delay for major tariffs except China.

The president clarified on Sunday. “NOBODY is getting ‘off the hook’ for the unfair Trade Balances, and Non Monetary Tariff Barriers, that other Countries have used against us, especially not China which, by far, treats us the worst!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’”

The bad news is that Trump undercuts his own “emergency” argument by using different “buckets” for tariffs. If this is an emergency, why tax cheap Chinese knockoffs on Amazon but not iPhones? Picking winners and losers is a bad idea … unless the objective is to get Xi Jinping to negotiate. In fact, Trump signaled that by warning of coming tariffs on “Semiconductors and the WHOLE ELECTRONICS SUPPLY CHAIN.”

Indeed, that’s the good news: Tariffs, and maybe especially their apparent haphazard nature, have brought more than 100 countries to the negotiating table. Markets don’t like the uncertainty, which explains the volatility in recent days.

“Tariffs can be an important tool in the toolbox when used in targeted ways,” opined Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren. “But right now, what we’ve got is chaos.”

Yes, and Trump depends on using chaos to bring about desired changes. “You have to show a certain flexibility,” he said this weekend. “Nobody should be so rigid.”

The only thing Trump is fairly rigid about here is that his ultimate goal is reining in China. Columnist Josh Hammer argues it’s Trump’s life’s work. As Hammer notes, Trump has been sounding off on trade and tariffs since at least the 1980s, and his policies aim to “reset the U.S.-China economic relationship.”

If there is to be war, Trump reasons, better a trade war than a shooting war. And Trump didn’t start this trade war, either. Hammer concludes, “America’s trade war with the rogue Chinese superpower must happen. The Chinese Communist Party must be crushed — and there is no one better to crush them than the White House-dwelling class traitor par excellence, Donald Trump.”

That’s so far outside the acceptable repertoire of the coastal elite that it’s no wonder they’re panicking.

Follow Nate Jackson on X/Twitter.