Malevolent Laziness

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, April 04, 2025

What a bunch of buffoons. 

If men could actually die of shame, then Donald Trump’s economic team would be toast—instead, it is only their reputations that have been buried.  

As I have been writing for some time, Donald Trump’s most fundamental character flaw—his laziness—has been his country’s saving grace, at least at times. Trump is an aspiring caudillo whose political models are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and a would-be tyrant who attempted to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020 election to a barely sentient Joe Biden—but, as bad as he was and is, he could have been and could be a great deal worse if not for the fact that he is unbelievably lazy, a Fox News-watching, social-media-addicted couch potato of a chief executive who might have wielded the levers of power to greater malevolent effect if he had bothered to work at his craft a little bit. 

But the so-called reciprocal tariffs are shockingly lazy even by Trumpian standards. 

Tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers (which include things like environmental and safety regulations that disadvantage U.S.-sourced goods in overseas markets) are a complex subject: Like most advanced countries, the United States works from a shared international system for classifying goods for tariff purposes, with more than 5,000 categories of traded commodities that comprise about 98 percent of all the products involved in international trade. Trump talks about tariffs as though he were talking about a bank setting loan rates: “They charge us 20 percent, we’ll charge them 20 percent,” that sort of thing. In fact, most countries that collect tariffs collect them at different rates across that group of 5,000 commodities, and most advanced countries, including the United States, collect at different rates depending on their trade relationship with the country in question. There’s no single number that captures it. There are potentially thousands of variables for each country with which we exchange goods and services. 

Also, many commodities are traded in only one direction: For example, U.S. fruit wholesalers import mangosteens from India and Thailand, and there is a tariff category for that fruit, but there isn’t any reciprocal duty on U.S.-grown mangosteens exported to India and Thailand, because there aren’t any U.S.-grown mangosteens. 

That’s a little thing (unless you are a mangosteen farmer) but the same holds true for major manufactured goods, too: Switzerland has a very sophisticated and productive economy, but there are no major automobile manufacturers based in the country (there are a couple of boutique firms) and, hence, nobody thinks much about tariffs on Swiss-made cars. Japan is a major automobile manufacturer, and, in spite of what you’ll hear the American president claim, Tokyo charges no tariffs on imported U.S. cars. (U.S. automakers have a tough time selling cars in Japan for other reasons, such as GM’s reputation for producing horrible junk.) Japan does have a tariff-and-quota system when it comes to imported rice, and U.S.-grown rice is taxed at $2/kilogram if imports exceed 770,000 metric tons per year. The United States is the largest exporter of rice to Japan, and total Japanese imports of U.S. rice typically do not run much more than half the quota figure, meaning U.S. rice exports to Japan are effectively tariff-free. Trump claims Japan imposes a 700-percent tariff on U.S. rice, which is, per usual, an idiotic lie.

Accounting for all that—thousands of categories of goods, hundreds of trading partners, complex quotas, several different kinds of trading relationships—would take some work.

And these Trump people hate work. That’s why Elon Musk’s idiot DOGE boys and their colleagues get into so much trouble by doing things such as eliminating Ebola-prevention programs: They are too damned lazy to do some reading and figure out what they are actually dealing with. That’s why they deport the wrong people and text their war plans to what’s-his-name over at that magazine. They’re lazy. They don’t do the reading, and they don’t do their homework. They won’t look past their phones.  

Rather than actually figuring out what tariff rates would actually be reciprocal, the Trump administration has come up with a completely meaningless calculation: The “reciprocal” tariff rate has nothing at all to do with tariffs charged by our trading partners—it is simply the trade deficit (goods only; services are excluded) divided by total goods exports divided by two. Why two? No reason. It just sounded good to somebody. 

My old National Review colleague Kevin Hassett currently serves as director of the National Economic Council, and if he hasn’t died from embarrassment over this buffoonery or committed whatever is the economist’s version of seppuku, he ought to have his doctorate revoked. Working for Trump has never been good for anybody’s reputation, but who wants to end his career as the Rudy Giuliani of economists? 

Tariffs are not the only reason—or even the main reason—for imbalanced trade among nations. U.S. firms and consumers buy a lot of tropical fruit and low-cost goods from firms in poor countries where the people do not buy a lot of Boeing products or $300 selvedge jeans made in the United States on account of their being, you know, poor. 

The notion that international trade ultimately should balance overall is questionable, but the notion that bilateral trade relationships should balance—that exports from the United States (GDP/capita: $83,000) to Bangladesh (GDP/capita: $2,550) are going to match up with exports from Bangladesh to the United States—is entirely bananas. The United States consumes about 15 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, which adds up to a few billion dollars in our $28 trillion economy—but 15 percent of U.S. goods exports would equal the entirety of Bangladesh’s private consumption or nearly 70 percent of its total GDP. And 15 percent of total U.S. exports would exceed Bangladesh’s GDP. But consumers of Bangladesh-made T-shirts (garments are the country’s largest export) are going to be subjected to a 37 percent sales tax by the Trump administration because Americans are being brutally victimized by the wily Bangladeshis, who have conspired their way to a median monthly income of less than $300. Apparently, we’ve got to get us some of that top-level economic thinking. 

You clowns. 

Americans Will Pay the Price for Reckless Tariffs

National Review Online

Thursday, April 03, 2025

Believing that a country is in bad shape if it imports more goods than it exports — i.e., if it has a trade deficit — is, in most cases, a harmless error in reasoning. It’s the sort of thing that seems to make sense at first glance, but any halfway decent economics professor can train it out of students in one or two lectures.

That error in reasoning becomes harmful when the person who believes it is the president of the United States, and he is willing to claim emergency powers to act on it unilaterally. That’s what Donald Trump has done with his executive order to raise tariffs on virtually every country on earth.

As a share of the economy, the executive order is likely the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history. In nominal terms, it’s the largest tax increase, period. And it comes without any input from Congress. In fact, it effectively overturns USMCA, CAFTA-DR, and the twelve bilateral free trade agreements that Congress has approved. On Tuesday morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down over 1,100 points, or about 2.6 percent, in reaction to the news, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq collapsed around 800 points, or 4.6 percent.

Trump claims extraordinary powers to impose these tariffs on the basis that the trade deficit is a national emergency. He claims to be helping U.S. manufacturing firms, but groups such as the National Association of Manufacturers oppose the tariffs, probably because about half of U.S. imports are inputs for domestic production.

Even Joe Biden, under intense pressure from his progressive supporters, did not declare a national emergency for climate change. There’s about as much evidence that climate change is a national emergency as there is that the trade deficit is one, so expect the next Democratic president to waltz right through the door that Trump has opened.

Speaking of old, wrong Democrats, Dick Gephardt in his wildest dreams probably never imagined the protectionist spree that Trump has wrought. The White House claims to have calculated the “tariffs charged to the U.S.A. including currency manipulation and trade barriers” for nearly every country.

These numbers are far in excess of the tariffs that countries impose on U.S. goods — because the formula used to calculate them has nothing to do with tariffs. Instead, it is the trade deficit divided by the amount of imports. The tariffs levied are either 10 percent or half of that trade deficit ratio, whichever is higher. If the U.S. has a trade surplus with a country (and the U.S. has a trade surplus with over 100 countries), it is set at 10 percent automatically.

In effect, it’s a 10 percent minimum tariff for all imports, with many top U.S. trade partners facing much higher rates. There’s no consideration given to alliances. Taiwanese goods are taxed at 32 percent, South Korean goods at 25 percent, and Japanese goods at 24 percent. Venezuelan goods, on the other hand, are only taxed at 15 percent, and Iranian goods face the bare-minimum 10 percent. The U.S. has a trade surplus with Iran, in large part because they face economic sanctions due to their malign behavior, and so we do very little business with them.

Take a country like Costa Rica, for example. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Costa Rica accounts for less than 0.2 percent of the total U.S. goods trade deficit, so even if you think trade deficits are bad, it’s basically irrelevant. Some of the top imports from Costa Rica include products such as bananas and coffee, which are hardly grown at all in the U.S. because of geography. But now, because of Trump, Americans will be taxed at 10 percent for buying Costa Rican bananas and coffee.

Perhaps most galling is the 17 percent tax rate levied on Israeli goods. Israel is party to the longest-running U.S. bilateral free trade agreement, in effect since 1985. There were almost no Israeli tariffs on U.S. goods to begin with, but as a gesture of goodwill earlier this week, the Knesset abolished the few remaining tariffs. The truly “reciprocal” response would have been for the U.S. to eliminate all tariffs on Israeli goods, but Trump’s policy was never about reciprocity; it was about his sincere and mistaken belief that tariffs are good.

If trade deficits were inherently bad, we’d expect poor countries to have trade deficits and rich countries to have trade surpluses. In the real world, there’s basically no relationship, which is why economists don’t pay much attention to it. The United Kingdom, Japan, Egypt, and Uganda have trade deficits; Australia, the Netherlands, Russia, and Angola have trade surpluses.

Even if it were true that the trade deficit is bad, higher tariffs won’t necessarily reduce it. They reduce the amount of imports, but they also reduce the amount of exports, as companies shift their focus from abroad to the protected home market. The order says that if the trade deficit isn’t reduced, the president can continue to raise tariffs until he is satisfied. No specific target is named.

The last thing that worked to substantially reduce the U.S. trade deficit was the Great Recession, because a bunch of people lost their jobs and couldn’t afford to buy as much stuff as normal. You probably remember that as a bad time, but if trade deficits are truly national-emergency-level terrible, then the 2009 reduction in the trade deficit should have been great news.

Trump likes to frame his trade policy as “commonsense.” To treat allies worse than enemies and raise taxes on consumers and businesses at a time when the cost of living is a major concern is anything but commonsense. Trump’s mistaken beliefs about trade have been a constant since the 1980s, but now they have been combined with an enormous grant of power, and Americans will pay the price.

Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire

By Rogé Karma

Thursday, April 03, 2025

According to President Donald Trump, April 2, 2025—the day he unveiled his executive order implementing global tariffs—will be remembered as a turning point in American history. He might be right. Unfortunately, April 2 is more likely to be remembered as a fiasco—alongside October 24, 1929 (the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression), and September 15, 2008 (the collapse of Lehman Brothers)—than as the beginning of a new era of American prosperity.

The stated rationale behind Trump’s new “reciprocal tariffs” has a more coherent internal logic than Trump’s previous tariff maneuvers. (Stated, as we will see, is the key word.) The idea is that other countries have unfairly advantaged their own industries at the expense of America’s, both through tariffs and through methods such as currency manipulation and subsidies to domestic firms. To solve the problem, the U.S. will now tax imports from nearly every country on the planet, supposedly in proportion to the barriers that those countries place on American goods.

The goal, according to senior administration officials, is to pressure other countries into removing their trade barriers, at which point the U.S. will drop its own. In his Rose Garden speech announcing the tariff order, Trump demanded that foreign countries “terminate your own tariffs, drop your barriers,” and “don’t manipulate your currencies” if they hoped to get a reprieve from tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has even argued that many of the new tariffs won’t ever need to go into effect, because other countries will be so quick to comply. In this telling, Trump’s reciprocal measures represent the tariff to end all tariffs, paving the road to a system of genuinely free trade and a return to American industrial dominance.

But the logical consistency, such as it is, is only internal. When the new tariffs come into contact with external reality, they are likely to produce the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Most obviously, the tariffs don’t appear to be based on actual trade barriers, which undermines their entire justification. Contrary to White House messaging, the formula for determining the new rates turns out to have been based simply on the dollar value of goods the U.S. imports from a given country relative to how much it exports. The administration took the difference between the two numbers, divided it by each country’s total exports, then divided that total in half, and slapped an import tax on countries at that rate. The theoretically reciprocal tariffs are not, in fact, reciprocal.

The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.”

Even if other countries did figure out ways to shrink their trade imbalances with the U.S., that still wouldn’t necessarily lead to a reprieve: Trump imposed 10 percent tariffs even on countries, like Brazil, that import more from America than they export to it. The only thing the White House has made clear is that any decision to remove or raise tariffs will be made by Trump himself. “These tariffs will remain in effect until such a time as President Trump determines that the threat posed by the trade deficit and underlying nonreciprocal treatment is satisfied, resolved, or mitigated,” read the White House’s memo on the new order. Translation: The only way you will get a tariff reprieve is by groveling at Trump’s feet.

To see the impossible choices that Trump’s tariffs impose on other countries, consider the trade restrictions that the administration accuses the European Union of maintaining against American products. These include food-safety regulations that ban certain ingredients, digital sales taxes, and the value-added tax—the European equivalent of a national sales tax that funds much of its members’ welfare programs. Calling most of these “trade barriers” in the first place is nonsensical, because they apply equally to foreign and domestic goods. The upshot is that, in order to meet Trump’s demands for tariff removal, Europe would need to overhaul not only its trade practices but much of its tax and regulatory system.

The best way to predict how countries will react to Trump’s newest tariffs is to look at how they responded to earlier ones. China and Europe quickly met past Trump tariffs with steep retaliatory measures of their own. Even in a friendly country as dependent on U.S. trade as Canada, Trump’s threats have generated a surge of anti-American nationalism that has upended the country’s domestic politics. “The idea that foreign leaders are going to commit political suicide to give Trump what he wants is crazy enough,” Scott Lincicome, the director of general economics and trade at the Cato Institute, told me. “The idea that they’d do it with basically no guaranteed upside just completely boggles the mind.”

Trump’s newest tariffs have already sparked widespread outrage among America’s trading partners. The head of the European Union has said that the body has a “strong plan to retaliate” against Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, and multiple individual European countries are considering their own additional retaliatory policies. France has floated the idea of expanding the trade war beyond physical goods by targeting U.S. tech companies. China vowed to take countermeasures against what it described as “self-defeating bullying.” Brazil’s president is considering retaliating, and the country’s National Congress, which includes many vocal right-wing supporters of Trump, recently approved legislation to empower him to do so.

If that pattern holds, Trump’s tariffs are likely to backfire. The result will be a one-way ratcheting up of tariffs across the globe, creating a trade wall between the U.S. and the rest of the world and indefinitely raising the cost of all imports.

Trump seems to welcome that possibility. During his Rose Garden address, which was titled “Make America Wealthy Again,” the president spoke at length about outcomes that are likely to occur only if the U.S. does not lower its tariffs, such as bringing in “trillions and trillions” of dollars of revenue and forcing companies to open factories inside the U.S. to avoid the new barriers. He sounded much more like someone who expected the tariffs to stay in place indefinitely than someone using them as a negotiating tactic.

In theory, the flip side of sustained higher prices would be a boost to American manufacturing, as consumers choose to purchase domestic goods over foreign ones. But here again, reality might laugh at the theory. About half of all U.S. imports are inputs that go into our own manufacturing production, meaning that American companies will suffer from higher prices too, even as retaliatory tariffs make it harder to sell their products abroad.

Perhaps the greatest damage will result from global uncertainty. After weeks of economic chaos, Trump’s big announcement was supposed to finally provide some clarity, allowing businesses to plan for the future. Instead, the future is more cloudy than ever. No one knows which of the tariffs will stick and which will be lifted. Countries will appeal to Trump to get their tariffs removed. Industries will lobby for carve-outs. The White House has announced no clear system for removing or reducing the tariffs, and even if it did, the ultimate choice will lie with the president himself, who is not known as a model of consistent and predictable decision making. These are the makings of an economic slowdown. “I would be shocked if we make it through next year without a recession,” Kimberly Clausing, an economist at the UCLA School of Law, told me.

What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or “New NAFTA,” which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal.

Trump’s Nonemergency Tariffs

By Rich Lowry

Friday, April 04, 2025

The Trump administration is using Humpty Dumpty rules to justify its new tariffs.

The anthropomorphic egg famously said in the Lewis Carroll novel Through the Looking Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

For the Trump team, that word is “emergency.”

President Trump has imposed sweeping global tariffs based on his purported authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA). The president has declared the trade deficit an emergency, which supposedly unlocks his power to impose tariffs that would otherwise have to pass Congress.

“Pernicious economic policies and practices of our trading partners,” says a White House fact sheet, “undermine our ability to produce essential goods for the public and the military, threatening national security.”

This is an abuse of language and logic in the service of bad policy that hardly interacts with the alleged threat to national security.

In a typical congressional botch job, the IEEPA was meant to be a limitation on presidential emergency powers after the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act led to ceaseless states of emergency. But according to the Congressional Research Service, as of January 2024, presidents had declared 69 national emergencies under IEEPA, with 39 of them ongoing.

As a House committee noted around the time of the IEEPA’s passage, “emergencies are by their nature rare and brief, and are not to be equated with normal ongoing problems.”

Prior declarations of emergency have tended to involve specific countries, events, or groups — the Iran hostage crisis, the civil war in Yugoslavia — that have resulted in very specific sanctions.

As the IEEPA itself says, the law should be used “to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat.” The U.S. trade deficit is neither. We’ve been running a deficit since the 1970s. This is the very definition of a chronic issue, the causes of which are not amenable to a bumper-sticker solution.

Trump’s tariffs are obviously a product of his utterly sincere belief that tariffs are beneficial. This is a long-term priority for the president, not the result of his hand getting forced by exigent circumstances.

The policy doesn’t even match up with the legal pretext. If national security were really the justification, we wouldn’t be tariffing allies who will — if we don’t fundamentally alienate them — provide supplies and manufacturing capacity to us in a true crisis.

All sorts of foodstuffs, from fruits and vegetables to chocolate and coffee, are getting tariffed, and they have nothing to do with national security. Our ability to make precision missiles doesn’t depend on the price or availability of Australian beef and Guatemalan bananas.

In some cases, the tariffs aren’t even in response to a trade deficit. We are imposing a 10 percent tariff on countries with which we have a surplus.

More particularly, how can our trading relationship with our friend Israel be in a state of a crisis, when the Jewish state reduced its tariffs on all U.S. goods to zero? We imposed a 17 percent tariff on Israel, anyway.

Likewise, Vietnam, an anti-China bulwark, slashed its tariffs on a variety of U.S. goods, and we still hit it with one of the highest rates announced, 46 percent.

Trump’s insistence that a nonemergency that requires congressional legislation is instead an emergency that allows him to act unilaterally may pass muster with the courts; they are loath to second-guess such presidential determinations. Yet, the declaration is still a very bad idea.

The free hand that Trump has arrogated to himself could undermine his own policy — businesses may believe that the new tariff regime can be changed just as easily as it has been imposed. A congressional enactment would be more stable.

And, a future progressive president will surely pick up where Trump left off. What’s to stop President Ocasio-Cortez from declaring a climate emergency?

In sum, it’s best, especially when making consequential determinations, to adhere to the true meaning of words, even the much-abused “emergency.”

Get Ready for the Great Dissembling

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 03, 2025

Every several generations or so, we are drafted into a great experiment to show the extent to which Washington can reshape the economic landscape by fiat, even if that involves repealing the laws that govern the dismal science. It takes another generation for those whose hubris consigned their fellow Americans to penury to pass from the political stage, after which point fresh eyes and new political conditions allow critical retrospection on the great experiment. It’s a long and painful cycle we should hope to avoid.

For example, before it was safe and, eventually, fashionable to look askance at the New Deal and the extent to which it deepened and lengthened the Great Depression, Americans were confronted with a variety of competing rationales that purportedly explained why Americans languished in the doldrums of the 1930s.

It was a crisis fueled by the “overproduction” of the 1920s, when manufacturers and farmers were said to have created far more products than consumers could afford. There was a profound “uneven distribution of income,” too. The prosperity that typified that decade was not widely shared, exacerbating the problems of “overproduction.” Then there was all the “speculation” of the 1920s — a phenomenon illustrated by the 1929 stock market crash, which exposed the folly of overextending credit.

But that’s not all. There was also the “maladjustment in gold distribution,” which describes the Federal Reserve’s policy of sequestering and “sterilizing” gold inflows to the country to insulate the country against gold-backed price hikes. By the time John Maynard Keynes published his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, some new explanations for the Great Depression had secured a place in the national consciousness. Among them, the claim that the 1920s was defined by “inadequate investment” by public sector entities and “over-saving” among their private counterparts.

This tortured exercise was made possible by virtue of the fact that, as one 1959 documentary observed, “The basic causes of the crisis remained stubbornly obscure even to the business leaders” tasked by Washington with getting their hands around it. And yet, the idea that motivated those who retailed these myriad overlapping explanations for the Depression was clear. As Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky put it, “The state is wise, and the market is stupid.”

It cannot be that the state lacked what Walter Lippmann assumed the government could command: A “body of knowledge that has been organized for [our] apprehension” assembled with the “highest of scientific virtues” in mind. Few dared acknowledge the imperfect information environment in which public officials languished or the observable fact that public interests are susceptible to capture by special interests. The planners had to be right. What would become of the plan if they were wrong?

This decades-long exercise in butt covering is worth remembering today as we prepare to confront yet another mulish effort by policymakers in Washington to remake the world economy in their own images. There will be many competing explanations for this project’s failure, the value of which will be in their ability to redirect angry voters’ attention away from the true sources of their anguish. We should expect it.

The Good News About Trump’s Tariffs

By Jonathan Chait

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

 

All Donald Trump had to do was start telling people the economy was good now. Take over in the middle of an economic expansion and then, without changing the underlying trend line, convince the country that you created prosperity. That’s what he did when he won his first term, and it is what Democrats expected and feared he would do this time.

 

But Trump couldn’t do the easy and obvious thing, apparently because he did not view his first term as a success. He considered it a failure, and blamed the failure on the coterie of aides, bureaucrats, and congressional allies who talked him out of his instincts, or ignored them. The second term has been Full Trump, as even his most delusional or abusive whims are translated immediately into policy without regard to democratic norms, the law, the Constitution, public opinion, or the hand-wringing of his party.

 

That is why Trump’s second term poses a far more dire threat to the republic than his first did. But it is also why his second term is at risk of catastrophic failure. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Trump’s insistence on sabotaging the U.S. economy by imposing massive tariffs.

 

This afternoon, in an event the administration hyped as “Liberation Day,” Trump unveiled his long-teased plan to impose reciprocal trade restrictions on every country that puts up barriers to American exports. Although at least some economists would defend some kinds of tariff policies—such as those targeted at egregious trade-violating countries, or those designed to protect a handful of strategic industries—Trump has careened into an across-the-board version that will do little but raise prices and invite reprisal against American exports. As an indication of the mad-king dynamic at play, the new plan imposes a 20 percent tariff on the European Union, partly in retaliation against the bloc’s value-added tax system—even though the VAT applies equally to imports and domestic goods and is therefore not a trade barrier at all. U.S. stocks, which have fallen for weeks in anticipation of the tariffs, plunged even more sharply after Trump’s announcement.

 

Trump would not be the first president to encounter economic turbulence. But he might become the first one to kill off a healthy economy through an almost universally foreseeable unforced error. The best explanation for why Trump is intent on imposing tariffs is that he genuinely believes they are a source of free money supplied by residents of foreign countries, and nobody can tell him otherwise. (Tariffs are taxes on imports, which economists agree are paid mostly by domestic consumers in the form of higher prices.)

 

He has compounded the unavoidable damage to business confidence of any large tariff scheme by floating his intention for months while waffling over the details, paralyzing business investment. Even taken on its own terms, a successful version of Trump’s plan would require wrenching dislocations in the global economy. The United States would need to create new industries to replace the imports it is walling off, and this investment would require businesses to believe not only that Trump won’t reverse himself but also that the tariffs he imposes are likely to stay in place after January 20, 2029.

 

If businesses don’t believe that Trump will stick with his tariffs, the investment required to spur a domestic industrial revival won’t materialize. But if they do believe him, the markets will crash, because Trump’s tariff scheme will, by the estimation of the economists that investors listen to, produce substantially lower growth.

 

Probably the likeliest outcome is an in-between muddling through, with slower growth and higher inflation. Even Trump’s gestures toward sweeping tariffs have already made the economy wobble and lifted inflationary expectations. At this point, getting back to the steady growth and cooling inflation Trump inherited will require a great deal of luck.

 

Why didn’t anyone around Trump talk him out of this mistake? Because the second Trump administration has dedicated itself to filtering out the kinds of advisers who thwarted some of his most authoritarian first-term instincts, as well as his most economically dangerous ones. The current version of the national Republican Party, by contrast, is dedicated to the proposition recently articulated by one of Elon Musk’s baseball caps: Trump was right about everything.

 

In this atmosphere, questioning Trump’s instincts is seen as a form of disloyalty, and Trump has made painfully evident what awaits the disloyal. As The Washington Post reports, “Business leaders have been reluctant to publicly express concerns, say people familiar with discussions between the White House and leading companies, lest they lose their seats at the table or become a target for the president’s attacks.” Asked recently about the prospect of tariffs, House Speaker Mike Johnson revealingly said, “Look, you have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy”—a phrase containing the same kind of double meaning (have to) as Don Corleone’s offer he can’t refuse.

 

This dynamic allows Trump to do whatever he wants, no doubt to his delight. But the political consequences for his administration and his party could be ruinous. Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.

 

A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

 

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

 

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

Zelenskyy Was Right

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, April 02, 2025

 

If you were concerned that Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were teaming up to force an unjust peace on Ukraine, you can stop worrying. Whatever Trump’s true intentions, Putin clearly doesn’t want anything to do with his plan. The Russian dictator is humiliating Trump, and people in the president’s orbit are starting to notice. Even Trump has said he’s “p—ed off.” So we might be close to the break-up of his most toxic bromance.

 

It’s been almost 30 days since Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said yes to a 30-day cease-fire proposed by the U.S. This was supposed to have “put the ball in Putin’s court.” But, in reality—as is the case with Hamas vis-à-vis Israel—the ball was always in Putin’s court. It’s up to the party that’s waging the war to stop the killing; the party fighting for its survival is obligated to defend itself until it can’t. In any event, Putin has rejected the cease-fire proposal, demanded Ukrainian territory not currently under Russian control, called for the easing of Western sanctions, and speculated about replacing Ukraine’s government.

 

All Trump’s efforts have bought him nothing but total Russian rejection. Just think about how he’s carried on in pursuit of this fantastical deal. Before being elected, Trump bragged that it would take him a single day to impose peace on the two countries. Once in office, he boxed Ukraine out of opening negotiations and called Moscow directly. After speaking with Putin on the phone, Trump at once became his American PR flack. “We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations,” he posted on Truth Social. “President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’”

 

Then Trump began attacking and pressuring Ukraine. Right off the bat, he ruled out Ukrainian NATO membership and a return to pre-invasion borders. Next, the administration proposed a mineral-rights deal that would obligate Ukraine to pay the U.S. billions in natural-resource revenues. In late February, Zelenskyy came to the White House, where—in the most vulgar public episode in the history of the Oval Office—Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated him for his supposed ingratitude. After kicking Zelenskyy out, the administration halted intelligence-sharing and military aid to Ukraine. Trump and his acolytes ramped up personal attacks on Zelenskyy, calling him a “dictator,” etc., until Zelenskyy showed sufficient public remorse. Then came the cease-fire agreement and another round of praising Putin. All of this, not incidentally, has severely strained U.S.-European ties.

 

And Trump thought Zelenskyy was ungrateful?

 

Putin has played the great dealmaker for a chump. It’s all coming to naught. Russia is stringing the U.S. along, while Zelenskyy is wary of signing a rewritten version of the mineral-rights agreement. No deals seem to be getting done anywhere.

 

Now, those who went out on a limb for Trump when he turned on Ukraine are trying to undo the mess they’ve gotten into. Yesterday, Senator Lindsey Graham—who said, after the Oval Office debacle, “I don’t know if we can ever do business with Zelenskyy again,” and who called for the Ukrainian president to resign—introduced a bill that would, in his words, “sanction the hell out of” Russia. And Trump is also talking about imposing massive sanctions on Russian energy. If he does so, it would automatically make him tougher on Putin than Joe Biden ever was, as Biden refrained from properly going after Russian oil. That should be a sufficient incentive in itself.

 

The irony is that this is exactly what Zelenskyy was trying to warn Trump and Vance about at the White House. He was attempting to explain that Putin is a deceitful marauder who doesn’t respond to diplomacy or abide by the obligations of treaties. They punished him for it when they should have been taking notes.