President Donald Trump and his supporters have offered many justifications for high tariffs, which can be boiled down to four broad arguments. One idea is that these are a negotiating tool, to be used to force other countries to lower their trade barriers. Another is that they will restore our manufacturing base and turn us into the superpower exporter we used to be. A third explanation is that we are trying to halt China’s rise into a geostrategic rival. And the best argument is that we need to rebuild our manufacturing capacity for vital goods such as semiconductors, in case of another pandemic, or a war.
289 Trump’s Unnecessary Trade War: The Biggest Unforced Policy Error in our Lifetimes OR the 1930s are Back “Have a Nice Day”
Augment?
Screenshot?
Secretary of Defense Rock: “Wall Street bets discord is so goddamn funny right now” — Bluesky
From predator to prey is how CNBC analyst Scott Weiss put it today at about 12:15 pm on The Halftime Report. He pointed out that he never thought Trump was going to be good for stocks which makes him perhaps a minority on Wall St. This was certainly not what Jim Cramer was saying before the election. Indeed one of the many mysteries of this last election was why so many on Wall St believed the particular snake oil that Trump is a “dealmaker” who will be great for the market. Then again I never unerstood the particular snake oil that Trump is a “dealmaker” who would be good for Ukraine.
UPDATE: Tim Walz argued on Chris Hayes the other night that the biggest myth is that Trump knows anything about business-which has the inconveience of being true Trump is at most a brander and a criminal-quote: early on he learned it was better to work with criminals than honest people
The idea that this is the biggest unforced policy error in the lifetimes of many of us-depending when you were born-was expressed by Tyler Cowen. Sumner quoted Cowen in his blog but finished with his own thoughts:
Of course it could be worse, much worse. What if we also had a HHS head that didn’t believe in modern medicine? What if we had a FBI director that didn’t believe in the rule of law? How about a State Department that didn’t think Russia was to blame for invading Ukraine? How about a Defense Secretary that liked to leak war plans to the media?
Seriously, all this goes far beyond tariffs. The Trump administration is trying to stoke global nationalism, even going so far as to support far-right European parties opposed to rearmament. They are trying to create a new might makes right global order, where countries like Russia are rewarded with territory ceded by weaker countries. The goal seems to be to destroy any sort of multilateral organization like Nato that would provide strength through numbers, as these alliances are most useful to smaller nations. This could lead to a wave of smaller countries developing nuclear weapons. China no longer has anything to lose from military adventurism, at least in terms of American economic retaliation.
Overall, the goal seems to be to recreate the conditions of the 1930s, a global trade war and an aggressive nationalism where the strong prey upon the weak.
Have a nice day.”
Bringing back the 1930s? – by Scott Sumner
FN: Interestingly Peter Thiel has been telling a narrative for sometime that implies HE TOO wants a return to the 1930s-see Chapter Charles Johnson.
Going back to Tyler Cowen he puts it succinctly: “Liberation day was even worse than expected:
Tyler Cowen: ‘Liberation Day’ Was Even Worse Than Expected
This is pretty much true about everything regarding Trump not just his trade policy. Going back to my question above whichi never ceases to fascinate me of how so many including people preusmably intelligent and very well educated could believe Trump is actually good for the stock market I think this goes backto a central fallacy with Trump. The economy did pretty well for the first three years before Covid hit. After Covid hit it was a disaster but Trump argued-not at all compellingly as far as I’m concerned but many apparently WERE COMPELLED-that somehow 2020 shouldn’t count on his record as Covid was bad luck and what happened under him would have happened under anyone.
Again many both on Wall St and Main St seemed to buy into this particular canard-also this particular brand of snake oil. Call it the Drinking Bleach fallacy-good analogy as Trump at one point literally advised the public to drink bleach to avoid Covid. There are certain types of people-much of it on what Al Gore once called the extra Y chromosome Right-who if you tell them they shouldn’t drink bleach they will do it just to spite you, “troll the libs” etc and then when it doesn’t kill them the first day will extrapolate from this they should drink bleach every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
This is how many who voted for Trump in 2024 reason and how he himself reasons. Indeed after the #GenocideJoe started telling people not to vote for Biden there was pushback on the issue of harm reduction-wouldn’t Trump 2.0 the Absolute Immunity Edition be even more dangerous? Many of them scoffed that they survived Trump the first time-and so presumably they assumed they would again. Trouble is that we-barely-survived Trump the first time not because he isn’t so bad but because there were enough people in his Administration who saw their main job of restraining his worth instincts and ideas.
Trump 1.0 to a large extent relegated him to driving the bumper cars but the people really steering the car knew how to drive. Ok so I was just watching Sarah Longwell’s interview with Nicole Wallace and Longwell argued that for the kinds of voters she speaks to they have to “touch the stove” themselves-this is the problem. It’s better not to touch the stove at all. This is what we #ResistanceLiberals have been saying the last nine and three quarters years-Kamala Harris just had her first big public speech this week after Trump’s launching of a trade war against the entire world and said it: “I don’t want to say I told you so…”
This need to touch the stove yourself explains a big part of why we’re in the disastrous state that we’re in. So when the #ResistanceLibs say the famous words: ‘I don’t want to say I told you so…” it’s based on the understandable frustration of so many being so clueless as to need to touch the stove themselves-I mean what are they three?
So yet another analogy to look at it through is that Trump 1.0 was the Training Wheels Presidency-where the establishment Republican types in his government were able to a large extent sideline him-for the good of both himself, the country, and the world. This time though there’s no adult supervision
And this is the major difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 and why after Trump 1.0 at least some were inclined to buy into a lot of Trump’s proganda-like that you should only grade him on the first three years and all the deaths and the economic pain of 2020 was someone else’s fault anyone else’s fault. They were deceived into thinking Trump was really driving the plane and that maybe on the economy at least Trump really was a “stable genius with exceptional political instincts”-Trump’s words.
Indeed one arresting thing that has happened the last week or so is Trump has now lost Nate Silver one of the founding members of the Sensible Contrarian Centrists we’ve seen the last seven years or so. With Trump there’s always been the anti anti Trumpers of both the Left and the Right that claim liberals freakout way too much over Trump that it’s absurd to” react to every outrage” as they do as if there hair were on fire-this description makes me feel seen.
Of course like you learn in 5th grade math-two negatives equal a positive and so often anti anti Trump amounts to pro Trump. Many conservatives in 2017 and 2018 who had initially opposed Trump made their way to acceptance for a long time playing like they didn’t like Trump either but liberals dislike him TOO MUCH.
This as I argued in Chapter Nate Silver Indigo Blob Illusion was Silver’s own essential position the last 7 years or so-starting in 2018 it became palatable that Nate seemed far more annoyed with liberals for resisting Trump’s assault on US democracy than he was over Trump’s assault on US democracy-indeed he often dismissed the idea that Trump was such a threat not usually directly as he himself on some level seemed to know that Trump was at least potentially such a threat but he’d suggest that even if the liberals were right it was a suboptimal campaign strategy-the low info voters don’t believe it or don’t realize it.
I went into it more in that chapter but while Silver rightly admits that his failure to see Trump was a real threat to win the GOP nomination 2016 he seemed to have kind of overcorrected-to use Hillary Clinton’s word ever since. And he had a contrarian sensible centrist version of anti anti Trumpism.
His general attitude was to if not outright deny that Trump was something very new and different inside our body politic certainly to minimize it and often he seemed to suggest that the real deviation wasn’t so much Trump as the reaction by #resistanceliberals like myself to Trump.
However the last month you began to see some hints that he himself was becoming more concerned about Trump. This was fairly notable for those who have followed him for a long time as it breaks out of what’s been his general attitude since at least 2018-there are 2017 tweets you can find that showed he was already moving towards full blown contrarian sensible centrist ant anti Trumpism.
There was always this sense that he found nothing more cringe than being a Center Left #Resistanceliberal. There are many examples of this a few of which I listed in Chapter Nate Silver but here just a week into Trump 2.0 was one of many examples:
There are to be sure many problems with this attempt at a counternarrative starting with the fact that the threat of many things have increased over the last 10 years in US politics precisely because of disinformation. No one came close to claiming that one thing is worse than the other but disinformation certainly Russian disinformation has been a huge problem in US politics and is a big cause for why we are where we are today where things have gone so bad either the always cool and savvy Nate Silver is sounding resistance cringe. But Nate has spent the better part of seven or right years dismissing the idea that disinformation is a thing at all-he even went so far as lecturing the nation of Romania that they need to allow more Russian disinformation into their elections-despite the clear and present danger Russia is to their very survival.
Anyway in March Nate begun to show a little more consternation about Trump-which is totally off brand for his attitude the previous seven years.
Yes and as we discussed above it’s kind of fascinating how so many came into Trump 2.0 still believing the illusion that Trump is this genius on the economy. Again it’s the illusion of the Training Wheels Presidency-ie in Trump’s first term many of the GOP establishment figures and elites were able to save both Trump and the nation from himself. Like the journalist Michael Wolff has all these anecdotes of how much disdain Trump had towards economic advisers like Gary Cohn which just underscores how congenitally lacking he is in basic human gratitude-as it was thanks to Gray Cohn and Friends that he went into the 2024 election with many still falsely believing he knew what he was doing on the economy when he never did it’s just that he wasn’t flying the plane during Trump 1.0. This time it’s all him-it’s as if we’re 20 minutes into a 10 hour trip to Europe and we now realize that the pilot is drunk and has never flown a plane before and has locked himself in and won’t let anyone in except sycophants who tell him what he wants to hear.
Again PACE Sumner: have a nice day.
Finally the last week Nate has much more explicitly called out Trump and his chaos Administration.
This was big news as again if you’d been reading his tweets the last seven years you’d definitely come away from it believing that Nate thinks it’s the #ResistanceLibs who are the cringe ones. What’s “cringe” is freaking out over all the terrible things Trump does much less the terrible things Trump does. But the last few weeks have been too much even for someone as sensibly centrist as Nate-you would think that things like Trump simply grabbing graduate students majoring in physics simply because they wrote an article in the NYT critical of Israel and attempting to deport them if not lock them in concentration camps got to him.
He wrote an article here that implicitly admitted errors made by those in his own position:
Still, I certainly don’t see anything in the first ~75 days of the Trump administration that would limit the downside case. And there have been a few worrying developments. The White House issued an executive order last week asserting more federal control over elections, for instance. The EO doesn’t seem that worrying on the surface: The courts will fight back, and I’m somewhat sympathetic to conservative concerns about both voter ID laws and the prolonged delays in calling elections because of mail voting. Also, from a strictly partisan standpoint, making it harder for “marginal” Americans to vote may not benefit Republicans in a country where so-called “low information” voters increasingly vote GOP.
However, I don’t love the White House sniffing around this territory. Nor do I like Trump making any pretense of running for a third term, however unlikely this is to succeed judicially.2 And, I really don’t like Elon Musk heavily “incentivizing” voters to participate in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election by writing million-dollar checks.
The base case remains that the American system is bowed but not broken. Particularly the elections component of the system. But I’ve increasingly found myself thinking that contrarian centrist types, a group of which I suppose I’m a card-carrying member, are too complacent about this, too insistent on mean-reversion and related heuristics when things clearly aren’t going well.”
SBSQ #19: What is Elon’s endgame? – by Nate Silver
He’s certainly correct that he’s been a card carrying contrarian centrist type going back to at least 2018 so the fact that he’s going “cringe resistance” now tells you how bad things are getting in Trump 2.0.
Back to yesterday-though Silver wrote this before the market followed up on a day it lost 1500 points on the Dow with a Friday where it lost 2200 more points on the Dow. Silver makes the same point Tyler Cowen did-this is the worst policy “error”-is it an error if it’s what you wanted to do?-in your lifetime.
It’s hard to think of any occasion when America dealt itself such a self-inflicted economic wound.
Silver Bulletin wasn’t around for the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930, which helped to catalyze the Great Depression. But the tariffs that President Trump announced just after markets closed on Wednesday, which triggered the fifth-largest point drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Thursday — with further massive losses underway today — are bigger than Smoot-Hawley.
Again the day Silver was referring to was Thursday April 4 when the Dow fell 1500. It would follow up on Friday with another drop of 45% larger than Thursday. So it’s place as the fifth largest point drop in history would last an entire day.
In fact when you’re talking about the biggest market drops in history Trump is “overrepresented” to say the least. Occupy Democrats put out this little chart BEFORE FRIDAY
After Friday, Thursday’s drop spent only one day at number 5 slipped to number 6 while Friday took number 3 all time between only Trump 1.0 on 3/12 and 3/16-which just missed a 3000 point loss. Again there was this strange narrative post 2020 that somehow it’s NO FAIR to count all Trump’s 2020 losses against him. Certainly what has happened in just 2 months and a week starting Trump 2.0 problematizes this strange narrative to say the least. Because clearly the first three years of relative prosperity weren’t due to Trump but despite him.
Or as SNL put it this was the worst week for the stock market since September 2020-when Trump was also President. Note though that September 2020 didn’t even make the top seven worst stock market falls above-or top eight after Friday.
UPDATE: Use SNL quotes
Yet another way to put it is as David Jolly says: Trump is worse for the economy than Covid was
Ex-GOP Rep Says Trump Tariffs ‘Worse Than COVID’ for Economy
Sumner commented after quoting Tyler Cowen calling it the “the biggest unforced US economic policy error” in his lifetime:
Tyler Cowen suggested that this is the biggest unforced US economic policy error that he’s observed in his lifetime:
This is perhaps the worst economic own goal I have seen in my lifetime.
I’d say the same, at least for mistakes that could be clearly identified as having occurred on a single day. (Monetary policy mistakes like 1929-32, 2008 and 2021-22 play out over longer periods of time.) In my study of economic history, I am aware of only two worse cases: Hoover’s decision to sign Smoot-Hawley (which triggered the biggest one-day stock decline of 1930), and the President’s Re-employment Agreement, which led to an even bigger stock market decline in late July, 1933.”
To be sure the problem with what Trump did is was it an error? Indeed what’s made things even more disconcerting the last month or so is he hasn’t even gaslighted on this subject-‘the country can take a little pain’ has been his narrative. He’s been basically admitting that YEAH there may be a recession but it will somehow be for the country’s good-which itself is gaslighting of a particularly nasty kind-sure we’re going to go through great pain but it’s for your own good! But he hasn’t even tried to do the typical Trumpian move of denying there might be a recession. And then we recall-for those who remember it in the first place-very late in the election, like the last week, Elon Musk had said there may need to be a recession but again for the country’s long term good.
What this long term good is supposed to amount to is not clear-maybe we’ll somehow get a few more low paying unskilled manufacturing jobs? Is that worth all the economic carnage? Ironic-Trump IS the American carnage once again everything from Trump and his GOP co-conspirators is projection. Certainly another brand of Trump’s gaslighting on the economy he’s doing everything he can to tank-it’s almost as if it’s deliberate?-is to keep claiming Biden’s economy when it was in the words of most leading economists “the envy of the world.” Now to be clear as I discussed in Chapter Sometimes the Bad Guys Win-there WERE some serious problems with the economy during Biden’s ‘years-these are long-term problems which I’d argue are the proximate cause of Trump’s regrettable rise. On a macro basis the US economy WAS the envy of the world during the Biden years the problem remains what it’s been for many years: wages.
Sumner argues that even if you buy the best case scenario in the effects of Trump’s tariffs they will hardly prove beneficial for the working class:
The indirect effects of tariffs may well be worse than the direct effects. I’d expect substantial retaliation from foreign governments, especially if the announced tariffs remain in place. The administration seems to believe that the US is not in a vulnerable position due to our trade deficit. But the flip side of that deficit is a capital account surplus; partly drive by extremely high US equity valuations. The US stock market represents roughly 60% of global market cap, despite the US having only about 25% of global GDP. That’s a tempting target for foreign governments. I could see the Europeans imposing aggressive taxes on the portion of US tech profits earned in Europe—what would they have to lose?
The distributional effects are also of interest. Older upper middle class people like me might benefit, as our foreign trips become slightly cheaper in real terms. (But only if we avoid recession, which is not a sure thing.) I mostly buy services, and spend relatively little on imported goods. WalMart shoppers will be hit hard. This is the MAGA base. Even in the unlikely event that a handful of manufacturing jobs are created, the vast majority of MAGA supporters will be worse off.”
Megan McCardle-who best I can tell is a libertarian type who in the past like Nate seemed to have a real problem with “Trump Derangement Syndrome” pointed out that not only were Trump’s very large and very broad tariffs pretty much the worst policy imaginable-once again raising the question wether Trump and his friends are deliberately tanking the economy-once again both he and Musk are on record as suggesting maybe a recession will be for the best-so much for Keynes’ observation that in the long run we’re all dead and WE will likely be dead before the alleged benefits of these tariffs make themselves felt-a handful of low paying unskilled manufacturing jobs in maybe 20 years?-but the way he announced them was the worst.
These tariffs, however, suit none of these theories.
None of these theories work, and that’s because Trump doesn’t really have a theory of tariffs. What he has is a series of intuitions: that exports make you strong and imports make you weak and dependent; that America was a better place when manufacturing formed the core of our economy; and that manufacturing tended to be strong when tariffs were high. Combine those intuitions with a penchant for showmanship and a chaotic approach to administration, and what you get is — well, just ask the penguins.
Opinion | Trump’s tariff intuitions won’t help Americans (or penguins) – The Washington Post
He has talked a lot about William McKinley not realizing apparently that this was an era that saw the US economy fall into a depression every three years-but again he seems to think depressions are a good thing. All the historical analogies of Trump’s tariffs are terrible-in that vein Sumner just published another post: about Smoot-Hawley:
Learning from Smoot-Hawley – by Scott Sumner
But that’s just it-with Trump we seem to be unlearning everything we learned the last 100 years. And again-while Smoot-Hawley was a major catalyst of the Great Depression Trump seems to kind of like depressions. Again calling it “liberation day” was yet again a particularly cruel version of gaslighting
Back to Silver:
In percentage terms — which is the better way to look at this — the drop in the markets wasn‘t quite so bad: a mere 3.98 percentage point loss in the Dow on Thursday, and 4.84 points in the broader S&P 500. Still, even though Trump had announced “Liberation Day” in advance, Wall Street has persistently failed to take Trump’s tariff threats seriously enough: Thursday’s declines were on top of the downward adjustments stocks already made after the Canada-Mexico tariffs, the auto tariffs Trump announced last week, and whatever expectations for “Liberation Day” were already priced into the market.
But make no mistake: Having finally realized the scope of the problem, Wall Street thinks these tariffs, which are already being reciprocated by China and other countries, will cause massive pain for American consumers and businesses.”
Silver then laucnhes into an argument that: “The stock market tells us a lot.”
He was irked by a Trump apologist on Twitter who argued: “The price of stocks says almost nothing about the long-term health of an economy.”
Certainly the argument that it tells you nothing about the long term economy has the inconvenience of being quite false. I also strongly suspect Silver is right that it’s very unlikely that Trump’s tariffs bring back manufacturing jobs
Vaush makes the point that you can’t manufacture everything in the United States because no one wants to pay those prices-the only way you coud keep prices down in such a regime is by treating workers worse than they do in Bangladesh.
(550) Republicans Think Trump Destroying The Economy Is GOOD, Actually – YouTube
Still back to the point that Silver’s recent sharp criticism of Trump feels so out of pocket in light of the last seven years:
Trump-supporting sycophants in Silicon Valley — I’m sorry to use such invective; it’s really not my style, but I don’t think a softer term is precise enough — are either lying to you or lying to themselves about this.”
It’s just so notable that he sounds apologetic-he’s been talking like liberals for years and when he does he never feels the need to apologize about it-he certainly never says SORRY.
And while that it’s great that he’s got religion on this NOW and he admits that “centrist contrarians” like himself are too sanguine:
It appears that Trump’s utterly pointless and destructive trade war against the entire world-except Russia-has led Nate to talk about something other than NCAA basketball-since Trump was sworn in January 20 until late March he seemed to have little to no interest in politics after being very politics heavy during the Biden years-in order to rip Biden and the Democrats.
But is it possible he can admit that maybe his anti anti Trumpism of the last seven years was maybe a little misguided? Implicit in FAFO is that as Kamala Harris said the other day-WE ie #ResistanceLiberals knew and warned about Trump for nine and a half years while so many on the Tankie Left and the MAGA Right-and the Nate Silver cum Shaid Hamid Center-dismissed us as cringe? I mean while many are shocked how bad Trump 2.0 has been-we’ve been warning about it for years and most of the time Silver has acted like liberals were the ones acting crazy.
I mean the question that still begs is WHY so many are shocked? If they had listened to Maya Angelou: when someone shows you who they are believe them the first time they would not be. But because so many made excuses for Trump at every turn and attempted to minimize and normalize him-and I’d definitely include Silver on this list as he’s acted like the ones not acting normal were #liberalresisters rather than Trump for the last seven years-and acted just because the first time the nation drank bleach it didn’t immediately die Trump was no seriouis threat to anything they’re shocked. Another analogy might be someone who got into drunk driving-the first 20 times they did it they got home safely. Again there’s been a Right, Center, and Left version of this-the #GenocideJoe folks as we noted above dismissed the threat of a second Trump term all that mattered was calling Biden #GenocideJoe. They claimed that we had survived Trump the first time.
I mean-maybe we did barely? But we came pretty close. If Mike Pence had caved to Trump’s bullying and refused to certify where would we be now? Again as we saw about now that Silver has been talking more about what a threat Trump is-again if only he’d seen this in 2022 rather than focused pretty much exclusively on Biden’s age-I mean if Biden were in the WH literally dead in the Oval Office we’d be in MUCH better shape today-the market wouldn’t be down 4000 points in two days. Trump’s been saying that we lost 20 trillion dollars in wealth due to free trade over the last 25 years-well he cost us 7 trillion dollars of wealth in two days and he’s only getting started.
To requote Silver here-let me say I hope he’s right. I’d pray he’s right if I believed in God and I’d pray if it would somehow make Silver right here:
The base case remains that the American system is bowed but not broken. Particularly the elections component of the system. But I’ve increasingly found myself thinking that contrarian centrist types, a group of which I suppose I’m a card-carrying member, are too complacent about this, too insistent on mean-reversion and related heuristics when things clearly aren’t going well.”
Hopefully he’s right though the American system came awfully close on January 6.
Silver has also noted that there’s no constituency for what Trump’s doing now-again frustrating as much of what he’s doing he promised to do and even though there are some new things he never did like invading Canada and Greenland it should have been clear that this guy is pretty much capable of ANYTHING. But too many people just chose whatever they wanted to believe or just assumed he didn’t mean the things he said they didn’t happen to like.
It seems that there are 100 different brands of Trump apologist-either he didn’t mean it, he never said it, or he’s just trolling the libs. It’s true the constituency for Trump’s second term is small to nonexistent. But again so many voted for Trump based on the idea that Trump 1.0 was a Training Wheels Presidency. Most who voted for him wrongly believed he was really riding the bike, driving the car, really driving the train, or flying the plane.
Now they suddenly realize those first three years were pretty good despite not because of him. But now he’s locked in the plane cockpit laughing wildly and we still have 10 hours till we arrive in Switzerland.
Richard Hanania OTOH is a fascinating case Sumner discussed in the comments sectoin of the link I posted above:
A general note on current affairs. If you wish to understand what’s going on in America, the very best place to look is Richard Hanania’s substack:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/kakistocracy-as-a-natural-result
BTW, he voted for Trump in 2024—so please don’t say TDS.
As I read Hanania’s article it was simply stunning to me that this guy voted for Trump.
“Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism The problem with anti-establishment politics”
As I discussed in chapter Sometimes the Bad Guys Win I have major misgivings about populism myself so this guy in many ways is after my heart-even though it’s clear we also have some pretty serious disagreements as I read down further. But II do think this is the congenital problem with populism.
The mad man has done it. He’s stopped listening to anyone who isn’t a complete sycophant or the market, and enacted a tariff policy more extreme than we would have seen under what most thought was the worst case scenario.”
This is true-and why I would argue Silver SHOULD admit he was wrong to be so snarky with liberals since 2018. Because OTOH everything we said about Trump is true but OTOH he has often been even worse than we predicted. Even during his first term I’d seen the possibility of Trump refusing to leave Office if he lost as real but I wasn’t entirely sure he would. We’d been talking about Trump and Russia for years but even I didn’t necessarily envision him already talking about bilateral relations with Russia.. There’s really nothing that I or other liberals predicted during the 2024 campaign that in retrospect looks-uh wrong or exaggerated. Quite the opposite every surprise has been that we still didn’t entirely envision JUST HOW BAD TRUMP 2.0 the Absolute Immunity Edition IS.
The formula of “reciprocity” being used is so stupid I approach the topic with awe, and have an almost superstitious feeling that if I even describe it I’ll somehow become stupider myself, though you can read about it here. I don’t think this ship can correct course. The Trump movement has been selecting for loyalty to Trump above all else, and we’re seeing the results. As Vice President Vance said during his trip to Greenland, “we can’t just ignore the president’s desires.”
Trump is not only wrecking the economy, but it’s notable how the people around him and his base are relatively muted. On a vote to end Canadian tariffs, only four Republican senators joined Democrats in rebuking Trump, even though many more certainly know better. The effort will go nowhere in the House, even though it would likely be in Republicans’ interest to take a stand and try to force the president to take a less self-destructive path. Maybe not in the interests of individual members though, since GOP voters still love Trump above all else and reward and punish GOP officials on that basis alone, and we will likely need to see serious consequences for the economy if that has any hope of changing.”
FN: At this point you wonder if a discharge petition could gain traction in the House. Gregory Meeks discussed it and maybe there will be some GOP support? Eight Republicans did vote with the Democrats for proxy voting… Again though you can never be too cynical about the GOP
End FN
So how did the man who wrote this article actually vote for Trump just a few months ago? It turns out that he’s a self described Reagan Republican who wrongly thought Trump would be riding training wheels again.
When I said I would vote Trump in 2024, I was clear eyed about the human capital problem on the right. I just thought that the basic ideological basis of conservatism – free markets, individual rights, tough on crime and foreign adversaries – was sound and enough of it was left over to make even a Republican president this personally flawed a better option.”
“Yet I was expecting something of a repeat of the first administration, with Trump restrained by traditional conservative ideas, personnel, and institutions. As it turned out, the old Reagan coalition was becoming increasingly hollow, replaced by Trump worship, online edgelordism, and late arriving scammers like crypto bros and MAHA. The signs were there, and I talked extensively about how Trump was becoming something of a cult leader with few checks on his whims and desires. But I must’ve thought that maybe Jared Kushner would just wait until he fell asleep around noon and then start making all the right calls. Or that it would be Elon, but that Elon was a smart guy with libertarian views instead of someone whose brain had been completely melted by right-wing internet slop.”
Ok on Elon I’m NOT a Lockean-Silver also wrote about Musk recently-trying to be sympathetic of course–my take on Musk is that he was always bad. Anyway once again the punchline is that Hanania thought Trump would be on training wheels again. It seems to me that for someone as smart and perceptive as Hanania this was a form of self delusion. It should have been obvious that Trump wouldn’t have the GOP establishment guardrails around him this time. Indeed, it’s clear in retrospect-and it should have been clear long before November 5, 2024 that a second Trump term wouldn’t have those guard rails. While Trump blamed his disastrous last year on Covid, 2020 was also the year when he stopped even trying to listen to any qualified advisors. Honestly after January 6 how could you still believe that there was ANY restraining Trump going forward which was only further buttressed after the GOP Supreme Court gave him Absolute Immunity?
So while the many uninformed Trump voters voted for him again because they thought he was really driving the train the first three years of the first term, Hanania voted for him because he knew Trump hadn’t in the first term and wrongly extrapolated he wouldn’t this time either-again there was more than enough information to make it clear he would be this time.
Like Steve Liesman said on Deadline on Thursday there’s a joke on the internet: I’m really surprised and upset Trump is doing exactly what he promised to do-this is the sentiment of much of Wall St
Tech execs would “like to put this chapter behind us?!” So would we and unlike you we didn’t weaponize over a billion dollars of resources to elect him
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/we-d-like-to-put-this-chapter-behind-us-tech-execs-having-regrets-about-backing-trump/ar-AA1CmaJf?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ASTS&cvid=5b0073168b5a49269ad986600f3640eb&ei=15
Populism and kakistocracy
Kakistocracy as a Natural Result of Populism
On the question of Trump deliberately tanking the market there is a growing body of evidence-now it turns out that Margorie Taylor Green made some major stock market moves days before “Liberation Day”-again talk about Orwellian.
Trump actually reposted a post on Truth Social that he DID deliberately tank the stock market but that allegedly this was to the benefit of the working class-talk about not even passing the laugh test?
Trump Shares Video Claiming He’s Crashing Stock Market on Purpose
What could be more impeachable than this? The Dems should have already written up articles of impeachment for this-and Signalgate and 50 other impeachable offenses.
Trump likes to believe he’s a ‘very stable genius with exceptional political instincts’ AND a lot of people sort of drunk that particular brand of Coolaid during and after his first term. Few will make that mistake going forward-assuming we have a real election in 2028.
As Hank Hill once said: Let me put this in a way even a genius can understand: you are not a genius.
You are not a genius 🧠 – YouTube
Ok in all fairness there are some who like Trump’s tariffs: Russia tv propagandists
Trump’s Tariff ‘Buffoonery’ Elates Russian TV Propagandists
UPDATE:
Like Vaush always says-incels are the motor of fascism. But I think he’s onto something here-a lot of these dude bros hate women they think are doing too well in life they WANT to see the economy destroyed
UPDATE 3.0
UPDATE 4.0:
ProChoice Mike: “Trump wants all the benefits of US hegemony without any reciprocation” — Blueskyj
UPDATE 5.0: Krugman: Move over Herbert Hoover and at least Hoover didn’t do it on purpose
UPDATE 6.0 So Trump finally caved-and reduced MANY Of the tariffs though we’re still at 125% on China and 10% against the rest of the world. That the Trump hacks are declaring victory-he himself was celebrating the Dow up almost 3000 points yesterday doesn’t pass the laugh test. Trump lit the match then after a large part of the house was burned down and he reconsidered and called the fire department. This was a huge needless failure. The damage from this will be lasting for no benefit or purpose-an utterly pointless trade war against the entire world except Russia and North Korea.
And “Tarriffmagedon”-Justin Wolfer’s coinage-is NOT over.
Krugman:
Anyone sounding the all-clear on tariffs, or Trump economic policy in general, should be kept away from sharp objects and banned from operating heavy machinery. We’re in a hardly better place than we were before Donald Trump announced a tariff pause (in a Truth Social post, of course.) In fact, we may be in a worse place.
Let me make four points about Trump’s post-pause tariff regime.
1. Even the post-pause tariff rates represent a huge protectionist shock
2. Destructive uncertainty about future policy has increased
3. We’re still at risk of a major financial crisis
4. The world now knows that Trump is weak as well as erratic
Still a huge protectionist shock
Yesterday Trump announced that he wasn’t going to impose all those tariffs he announced last week after all. Instead, he’s putting a 10 percent tariff on everyone, and 125 percent on China.
Question of the day: Does the 10 percent rate still apply to the penguins of the Heard and McDonald islands?
Anyway, this new announcement still sets tariffs at a much higher level than they were before Trump took office, indeed higher than he suggested during the campaign. For example, during the campaign researchers at the Peterson Institute for International Economics constructed a model assuming Trump implemented a 10 percent tariffs across the board and 60 percent on China. The researchers concluded that this regime would impose a nasty shock on the US economy. Now we are facing a tariffs of more than twice that level against China as well as 10 percent on all other countries.”
Silver makes a similar point:
And now Wolfers:
And as he points out this is far from over:
This is long term damage to our economic standing in the world just like Trump’s absurdities about taking Greenland, invading Canada, etc have already damaged Nato and US credibility internationally perhaps irreparably.
Wolfers once again reiterates this point with the specter of the market tanking yet again: Trump didn’t actually undo the tariffs
UPDATE: Nate Silver also has an excellent piece on Trump’s tariffs-and the market reaction to his “pause”-though again as Justin Wolfers has emphasized the move dropped the US tariff rate from 32% to 25% which is still VERY high certainly compared with other first world industrialized countries.
(14) We shouldn’t rely on markets to tame Trump – by Nate Silver
Krugman talks about the “Thirdwordling of America”-it’s even worse than that we are doing it to ourself by elevating this man-to use the word loosely-to POTUS.
(14) The Third-Worlding of America – Paul Krugman
Krugman wrote this in light of the US 10 year yield spiking above Greece. He’s also talks about the sanewashing of Trump continuing apace.
Indeed and Exhibit One of this is Shadi Hamid:
This is just false equivalence on steroids-it’s not just a bland discussion of wether ‘tariffs are good or bad’ you can make an argument for targeted tariffs as Biden himself did. Even those who make an INFORMED case for tariffs-which need to go hand in hand with industrial policy-as Secular Talk has pointed out more than once-would never in their wildest dreams propose a sudden trade war against the entire world-except Russia-over night.
Speaking of which:
UPDATE: Oops the Democrats did it again. Just why Governor Whitmer? Talk about failure to read the room
Trump praises Gretchen Whitmer during Oval Office signing ceremony
Whitmer-an elected Democrat-commits the same fallacy as Hamid-that if you have ever supported targeted tariffs in a specific situation thereby you can’t be too critical of Trump’s trade war against the entire world-except Russia.
This by Hamid truly doesn’t pass the laugh test.
First of all he sets Trump such a low bar to claim success it’s very hard for him not to step over it-indeed he claims Trump already has a preemptive victory. Hamid declares Trump is virtually guaranteed victory unless “they fail so spectacularly that a whole generation of Americans sour on them.”
OTOH I guess you could argue it’s only been a week OTOH in that one week-though again a week was all it took for Hamid to declare Trump has won-we’ve seen the markets absolutely collapse:
FN
how much as the market fallen since liberation day – Search
End FN
Meanwhile as we saw in Krugman’s piece above the bond market has also seen a rise in US interest rates that’s fairly “spectacular” in such a short period of time-now higher than Greece. Meanwhile economic confidence is now at the lowest level since 1981-the start of the Reagan Fed juicing unemployment to whip inflation.
Which makes a good point-Trump’s economic stewardship thus far was a dumpsterfire well before the Orwellian “liberation day” indeed Trump’s trade war begun a few months ago and in one month Trump was able to take an economy which according to most economic experts called “the envy of the world” to experts already starting to forecast a nontrivial chance of a recession.
Indeed while Trump’s trade war against the entire world except Russia has been compared to Smoot-Hawley the one thing you can say in Hoover’s defense is that he wasn’t deliberately tanking the economy. As for turning voters against it for a generation well this seems to be a good start:
But since Hamid apparently doesn’t see this first week as either a spectacular failure or as there being any evidence Americans are souring on them at least the way Trump went about them it’s hard to imagine what he would need to see. Certainly appears he’s going to declare a Trump victory no matter what happens-ie his position that Trump has already preemptively won is unfalsifiable.
This is why I’ve never either liked Hamid or respected his work-as his framing makes no sense: he’s either gaslighting us or he doesn’t know the markets along with Trump’s poll numbers are tanking in which case he’s so ignorant on basic facts someone ought to take back his academic expert card.
UPDATE: This perhaps belongs in Russia First Chapter
It’s almost as if Trump’s a Russian asset as we allegedly cringe #ResistanceLiberals have been saying since 2016
UPDATE:
Trump’s tariffs represent a huge wealth transfer from the working class to the wealthier classes
Good way to see the current tariffs, as of literally today, is no tariffs on high value add manufactured goods marketed to middle and upper middle classes. Massive tariffs for cheap consumer items which amount to the biggest economic privilege of working class/middle class life in US.
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) 2025-04-12T23:07:54.774Z
UPDATE: Pretty ironic that China describes the US as a government run by one guy
“It feels pointless,” said one of the people in Beijing, noting the difference from the first Trump administration. Now it’s “just bullying and hostility.”
“This is certainly going to be quite different from what the Chinese side is used to,” said Yao Yang, an economist at China’s Peking University. “It’s very difficult to even contact the American government. The whole American government listens to just one guy.”
U.S., China barrel toward the bottom in escalating trade war – The Washington Post