Commanding His Own Reality

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, March 28, 2025

 

Greetings from the parking lot of the town hall in Dumfries, Virginia. Feel free to leach some of the excitement and glamour from the pundit’s life. I’ve got plenty to spare.

 

What I don’t have is time to spare. I’m driving (not at this exact moment—safety first!) to Williamsburg for a talk to the freedom conservatives. They often go by the sobriquet “FreeCons.” I thought this was a risky name given how it can be read as “Freak On”—as in let’s bust out some Hayek and get our FreeCon.

 

Wordplay! Nerd humor!

 

Speaking of both, the other day I was on TV talking about the economy or trade or some such. Donald Trump had recently boasted that egg prices have come way down, thanks to him, of course.  And you know what? They have. At the beginning of the month they hit a record of $8.17 a dozen and have since dropped almost 50 percent to just below 5 bucks. Now, the reason this has happened is complicated and has much less to do with administration policy than Trump claims. The main reason is that people adjusted to the high prices and so demand dropped, which gave producers time to rebuild their flocks after culling a millions of hens because of bird flu.

 

One thing the administration is doing is importing a lot more eggs, from Turkey, Brazil, and possibly the EU, which gets me to my self-indulgent wordplay. I pointed out, sarcastically, that the administration seems to understand that importing eggs will help lower the cost of eggs. But they seem to understand this only about eggs. It is, I said, an “eggcentric” trade policy.

 

Eyes rolled. Groans were heard.

 

But here’s the thing: That’s fantastic wordplay—if I do say so myself—because it is both literally and figuratively true. Figuratively, I was playing off the word “eccentric,” which means unusual or weird behavior or an unusual or weird person. “I know it’s weird that Todd eats the wrapper on his Filet-o-Fish, but he’s just a harmless eccentric.”

 

Etymologically eccentric comes from Ptolemaic astronomy (The Greek ek means “outside of” and  kentron means “center” or “centric”).  A body with an eccentric orbit is one with an “orbit not having the Earth precisely at its center.”

 

But it’s also literally true. It is an egg-centric view of trade. Apparently, the laws of supply and demand apply only to eggs.

 

And if you still don’t think that’s great wordplay: Screw you, that’s gold! Don’t be so hard-boiled.

 

I should note eggsperts say the administration plan probably won’t help too much with lowering the price of eggs. Not because the idea wouldn’t work, but because the administration isn’t importing enough eggs. America produces more than 100 billion eggs per year, and the Department of Agriculture is looking at bringing in hundreds of millions of eggs, mostly from Turkey, Brazil, and South Korea. That’s not chicken feed—though technically it started out that way (think about it!)—but it’s probably not enough. Also, these foreign eggs won’t be sold at the stores, they’ll be used by industrial bakers. But in theory importing enough would free up domestic production for retail.

 

I didn’t know all this stuff when I cracked my golden “eggcentric” bon mot, but the point remains. If you think importing more eggs lowers the price of eggs, maybe that’s true of, you know, other stuff too.

 

Here come wages and price controls?

 

I don’t like to make public predictions. The unwritten rule for pundits is to caveat their predictions in percentages. I think there’s a 70 percent chance that so-and-so wins his primary. Or: There’s an 80 percent likelihood that we have a recession. This way, you get most of the benefit of making a prediction, but on the off chance you’re wrong, you’re covered. Though it is nice when you’re proven right. I think the last time I made an outright prediction, it was that Joe Biden would pardon his son.

 

So it’s not without trepidation that I predict Trump will try some kind of price controls. One reason I’m willing to put on my Carnac turban (which makes me look quite eccentric in this parking lot) is that he’s already doing it.

 

First of all, tariffs are a kind of backdoor price control because they artificially inflate the price of imported goods, indirectly setting a minimum price level in the domestic market. Contrary to what we hear from Trump, tariffs don’t automatically lower the prices of domestically produced goods and commodities. They more often just lead to higher prices, period. If tariffs made domestic stuff cheaper, why not tariff foreign eggs?  When Trump announced his steel tariffs, domestic producers raised their prices, too.

 

But this is too much in Scott Lincicome’s wheelhouse.

 

So let me back up. As Yuval Levin and I discussed on the Remnant this week, the big-picture theme of the second Trump administration so far is that he is waging an all-fronts battle on restraints on his power and freedom of action.

 

This is a hugely important point that a lot of folks on the right are not grappling with very well, me included. The tendency is to break things down into categories like “good Trump” and “bad Trump” as we judge each controversy on its individual merits. There’s much to recommend this approach. It’s the grown up, judicious approach and it’s a bulwark against the more rabid tendency to assume the worst, ignore inconvenient evidence, and refuse to acknowledge that there are good arguments for some things he does.

 

So, what’s the problem with taking each tree for what it is and ignoring the forest?  The problem is the forest matters too. Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, his scurrilous and sinister war of intimidation against law firms, his relentless pursuit of firing potential dissenters and installing loyalists—many appallingly unqualified for the job—throughout the government speaks to his actual motivations and worldview. Dividing everything into Good Trump and Bad Trump is an artificial distinction imposed on the organic whole of Trump. A Unified Field Theory of Trump ignores this artificial distinction.

 

Let’s do this Hannibal Lecter style.

 

Hannibal Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this creature you seek?

 

Clarice Starling: He says crazy things?

 

Hannibal Lecter: No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What need does he serve by saying crazy things?

 

Clarice Starling: Attention? Adoration?

 

Hannibal Lecter: No: He craves. That’s his nature. And what does he crave? Make an effort to answer.

 

Clarice Starling: Praise?

 

Hannibal Lecter: No! He wants to dominate! To be seen as the master of things.

 

The whole Trump wants reality to cooperate with him and when it doesn’t, his instinct is to assume that sinister anti-Trump forces are responsible. When it comes to economics, this view is traditionally associated with the left. Remember “Greedflation”? This was the idea that inflation wasn’t real and that evil corporations were raising prices when they didn’t have to.

 

As Dominic Pino wrote a few weeks ago, Republicans are already laying the groundwork for their own version of greedflation. Trump and his surrogates have insisted—despite all evidence—that foreign countries will absorb the cost of tariffs to retain access to our market. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flatly predicted that China will “eat any tariffs that go on.” Well, as Pino noted, that’s not what happened with Trump’s first-term tariffs. And if it was true, the benefit of tariffs would be negligible because Americans would just keep buying Chinese stuff.

 

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday:

 

When President Trump convened CEOs of some of the country’s top automakers for a call earlier this month, he issued a warning: They better not raise car prices because of tariffs.

 

Trump told the executives that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices, people with knowledge of the call said.

 

In other words, he’ll treat these companies the way he’s treating various law firms. Trump’s 25 percent  tariffs on foreign cars—including cars made by American companies in Canada and Mexico—will undoubtedly and incontrovertibly raise costs for automakers for myriad reasons. And Trump is suggesting he will punish firms that pass those costs onto consumers. In other words, while he hopes Chinese firms will eat increased costs, he’s demanding that American firms do it.

 

At some point they will not be able to. Then what? Well, lots of things. But let’s stay on point. Trump cannot tolerate the idea that he’s wrong about tariffs (or anything else). As a result, when reality proves him wrong, he will not confess error and embrace free trade. I mean this is the guy who tried to float the idea that the Access Hollywood tape was faked. He’ll say the price increases are a conspiracy to hurt him, to increase profits, or both. And then he will look for ways to set prices to where they “should” be if sinister forces weren’t undermining him.

 

Donald Trump is not an autocrat, not because he doesn’t want to be one, but because our system is designed to thwart autocrats. He’s trying to hack that system. But fixing prices is what autocrats, and people with autocratic personalities or ideologies, always try to do. Right now, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is giving it whirl. Earlier this month he issued price controls on 30 different foodstuffs and accused supermarkets of price gouging (aka “greedflation”). “Prices don’t rise, they are raised,” he declared. This isn’t just a necromantic incantation intended to make Friedrich Hayek spin in his grave, it’s the kind of thing people do when they are drunk on power and think reality is theirs to command.

 

I am comfortable with my prediction that Trump will eventually try to do something similar. Fortunately, he doesn’t have the Economic Stabilization Act of 1970 to empower him the way Richard Nixon did. But I have every confidence his lawyers will find some pretext, perhaps the Defense Production Act (which Harry Truman used to seize steel mills).

 

There are only two ways I think I could be wrong. First: if he backs off tariffs entirely for fear of tanking the stock market (and I have no doubt he’d accuse the stock market of being in on the anti-Trump conspiracy). Second: if Congress actually grows a spine and stops him (stop laughing). But if he follows through on his cockamamie trade theories, economic reality will deliver a harsh verdict. And then the war on economic reality will really go into overdrive.