Brian Beutler’s theory on why Trump loves tariffs so much is as good as anything I’ve heard. It certainly fits with my own observations of what makes Trump tick:
They’re extremely stupid. They’re so dumb they have people genuinely wondering if Trump has some devious ulterior motive for being so destructive. Is he trying to wreck the economy so he and his billionaire buddies can buy up its valuables in a fire sale? Did Vladimir Putin tell him this would be a good idea? I guess I wouldn’t rule anything out, but I suspect the answer is much dumber. Trump likes to set up situations where he can snap his fingers and things change, it makes him feel powerful. It makes it so people who hold him in contempt nevertheless have to kiss his ring. He likes anything that gives him kind of leverage. He wants to be an autocrat, and this advances that goal, at least insofar as it doesn’t crater the economy and ignite a major popular and elite backlash.
But he’s also been obsessed with tariffs since way before he had real designs on the presidency. At the risk of peering into a deranged mind, my “too dumb to be true, but probably is” hypothesis is that he’s obsessed with the Gilded Age (though he may not even know the term, or that it’s derogatory) because that’s when they built all these ornate mansions and estates. When he says ahistorical nonsense, like that the U.S. was never richer than under William McKinley, I think he’s confused about what “national prosperity” means. The robber barons had all the money and built lavish properties, ergo the country was “rich.”
He lives in Mar-a-Lago, which was built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s. And while she, as heiress to the Post Cereal fortune, was not a “robber baron” in the traditional sense of the word, that’s the vibe he likes. It’s what you’d expect in a “rich country.” He’s a bit like a townie who starts to talk, dress, and act like a mobster after watching The Godfather, because the Corleones seemed so strong, and had so much money. Not an uncommon interpretation of the movie, particularly among unthinking men! But the point is that it misses the point. And Trump isn’t playing dress-up. He’s causing immense damage to the world.
I do think this is part of it. He loves the bling. Look what he’s doing to the White House.
Bleccch…
Beutler points out the one “silver lining” if you want to call it that:
Politically, none of this would be possible without Republican obeisance. This is not how the law giving presidents immense discretion over tariffs was intended to function, and they could change it tomorrow, with veto-proof majorities. But they won’t, at least not until the pain becomes chronic and severe. This is one of the most straightforward cases I can recall where members of Congress will truly own and foot the bill for their president’s recklessness—they have no good answer for the public other than “we have to trust the president,” when they know full well he’s not to be trusted. If there’s a silver lining here, it’ll be watching bad, craven people squirm.
They are literally saying “trust Trump, he’s a genius.” They’re placing a very big bet that his luck will hold and this won’t be as bad as it seems. In fairness, he has managed to slither out of every jam in his life so they’re just letting it ride. But this one is the biggest crazy risk he’s ever taken and they are idiots for going along with it.
After spending years attacking Biden for inflation, Fox Business news now makes it sound like Inflation is perfectly fine amidst Trump's tariffs.
“Listen it’s a roller coaster. You only get hurt if you jump off amid the ride. If you have to pull back from your vacation this year… pic.twitter.com/MZnpPmSs8C
“Listen it’s a roller coaster. You only get hurt if you jump off amid the ride. If you have to pull back from your vacation this year because times are a little tighter, fine. Save, plan and you can’t just be like ‘the sky is falling’ looking at the headlines every day to decide how I’m going to live life.”
Lutnick: "Let Donald Trump run the global economy. He's knows what he's doing. He's been talking about it for 35 years. You gotta trust Donald Trump in the White House … it's broken. Let him fix it … Let Donald Trump fix the American economy."
A surge in federal government job cuts contributed to a near record-setting pace for announced layoffs in March, exceeded only by when the country shut down in 2020 for the Covid pandemic, according to a report Thursday from job placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. Some 280,253 layoffs across 27 agencies in the past two months have been linked to the Elon Musk-led so-called Department of Government Efficiency and its efforts to pare down the federal workforce.
The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million, according to Challenger records going back to 1989. It also was the highest March on record.
The year-to-date tally for federal government announced layoffs represents a 672% increase from the same period in 2024, according to Challenger.
Several members of President Trump’s embattled National Security Council have been fired,a U.S. official and a second source familiar told Axios on Thursday.
The firings come a day after conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office and pressed Trump to fire specific NSC staffers. Axios has not confirmed whether the firings were directly linked to that incident, but the source familiar said they were “being labeled as an anti-neocon move.”
The U.S. official said Loomer was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs, referring to hawkish foreign policy views commonly associated with the Bush administration.
“She went to the White House yesterday and presented them with her research and evidence,” the official said. The NYT first reported on Loomer’s visit. The official suspected that the firings were linked to Loomer’s visit but was not certain.
The U.S. official named two senior NSC members who had been fired, and said it was shaping up to be a “bloodbath.” Axios is seeking additional confirmation before naming those people.
The source familiar said several people were fired, including senior directors. An NSC spokesperson declined to comment.
He’s having a total meltdown.
Will anyone resign? Will any GOP Senator or Rep. even say anything?
I think the scariest result here is that 52% of the American people want to designate large-scale fentanyl trafficking as a weapon of mass destruction. WTF???
Other than that, most people seem to be reasonably sane. Too bad about the government that 49% of them voted for:
They really hate the Trump agenda. I wonder if they know that?
James Fallows has written a great post today about the tariffs. The first part is all about what constitutes good and bad tariffs and when they are useful. You should read it. Then he goes into the history of tariffs in the U.S.
I think it’s useful to think of them in great waves:
The founding. This is the Hamilton era until after the Civil War. The US as a whole “needed” tariffs to develop its industries against more mature and efficient British and European competitors. That is what Hamilton asked for, and got.
From then through the Civil War, the tariff was a hugely divisive issue, second in national political importance only to slavery itself. The lines of division largely paralleled those of slavery: The industrialized North generally favored tariffs, to promote its industries. The agricultural and plantation-based South generally opposed them, since tariffs raised their costs but did not “protect” their output. (The Brits weren’t competing with cotton from Mississippi or Alabama.)
Reconstruction through McKinley. I doubt that Donald Trump could pick a photo of a young William McKinley (below) out of a lineup, or recite anything about his life, his Civil War record, or his death. But Trump has seized upon the idea that McKinley’s tariffs were the greatest thing about him, “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
According to most people other than Trump, the McKinley-era tariffs (especially the main act of 1890, which raised the average tariff on imports to 50% !!!) were one more part of Gilded Age expansion-and-corruption. Useful to favored industries. Not useful to the country as a whole. Like many of today’s policies, they enriched the rich, and raised prices for everyone else.
Bring on Smoot-Hawley. Enough said. Let’s skip through the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s and all it wrought. No one who has looked into Smoot-Hawley has said, “Let’s do that again!” Until today.
The Cold-War Era and GATT. In its role as Western World hegemon after World War II, the US was aware of two trading realities. One was that on an “open competition” basis its industries would easily out-compete those in practically any other country. So it could afford to lower tariffs. The other is that it was in Western and US interests to have industries and economies develop in the non-Soviet world. Thus it should lower tariffs, and take other measures to help potentially allied countries to recover. (GATT is General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.)
Clinton, WTO, and NAFTA. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton’s administration lowered tariffs and trade barriers across the board. Bringing China into the World Trade Organization. Connecting the US, Canadian, and Mexican economies through NAFTA. Judge it a success or failure as you will. For now I’m just noting it as an era.
Biden and the return of ‘Industrial Policy.’ This is the era that I think will get more attention in the long run, but that in the by-wash of Biden’s re-election catastrophe is under-appreciated now.
Biden mostly kept the Trump I-era tariffs against China. But unlike Trump, I or II, he connected them to an “industrial policy” for long-term development of US alternatives. The focus was on exactly the areas most “left-behind” and hollowed-out by Chinese and other competition from Clinton-era changes. (As William Janeway described here.) I’ll have more references about the Biden policies below. For the moment I’m mentioning them as prelude to phase 7, which we’re just now entering.
Insane Clown Posse: Trump at the helm. Effective tariffs are long-term. They are precise, rather than splatter-shot. They come from the left brain (rational) rather than the right brain (impulse). They take careful account of larger strategic interests—for example, with the US’s neighbors, Canada and Mexico. They are informed by thinking, “If we do this, will the other side do that?” They show the same care a responsible general, squadron commander, or police chief would use.
What we appear to have, instead, from Trump is trade-policy-as-MAGA-rally. He is mad and wants to flex. He hasn’t thought through to what might happen next.
This is where we stand today. It’s “Blind Into Baghdad” without the Humvees. And it will do at least as much damage.
I would just amend that to say that Trump can’t think through what will happen next. He lives in a delusional fog, ignorant of anything but his base instincts and the people around him are either deluded as well, thinking that he’s a magic man, or they see opportunities in his madness.
Fallows also shared some very useful links. We might as well dive in. It looks like we’re in for a long trip:
Here are a number of articles, reports, books, and other cites I have found worthwhile.
From the WSJ (!), Phil Gramm (!!) and Donald Boudreaux on why the person most upset by Trump’s incoherent trade policy would be … the sainted William McKinley himself.
From two days ago, a PBS NewsHour Paul Solman assessment of how tariffs would affect US manufacturing.
From the WaPo this week, a Heather Long column on how tariffs could bring back the 1970s nightmare of “stagflation.”
From Brookings this year, a David Wessel and Elijah Asdourian an explainer on how tariffs work—and don’t.
From Robert Litan this week, a big-picture perspective on how Trump’s impulses match the larger history of trade.
From Foreign Affairs last month, Douglas Irwin and Chad Bown on why tariffs will backfire not just for the country as a whole but also for Trump’s own goals (to the extent they are knowable).
From Henry Farrell, an assessment of the tensions in right-wing politics revealed by the tariff proposals.
From Barron’s this week, Matt Peterson on how Trump’s tariffs may move the US into “developing country” status.
From Foreign Affairs this week, Michael Froman on how incoherent US trade policy has put China in the driver’s seat.
BARTIROMO: Are we now gonna see egg prices move back higher because of the tariffs?
BROOKE ROLLINS: All to be determined. The president has said that we'll have a little bit of uncertainty in the coming weeks, perhaps a month or two. I'm not gonna sit here and say everything is… pic.twitter.com/8PU1oIqpKX
BARTIROMO: Are we now gonna see egg prices move back higher because of the tariffs?
BROOKE ROLLINS: All to be determined. The president has said that we’ll have a little bit of uncertainty in the coming weeks, perhaps a month or two. I’m not gonna sit here and say everything is gonna be perfect and the prices are gonna come down tomorrow because this is an uncertain time, but that is the president’s genius in all this … God bless him.
Bartiromo, formerly known as “the money honey” knows very well what’s going on. Brooke Rollins is the Secretary of Agriculture.
The markets crashing is all part of Trump’s genius plan. Here’s more of that Wharton School genius:
It didn’t take long before someone cracked the code on how the White House decided to overturn the global trade order.
The White House claimed to base its decision on tariff rates and nontariff barriers, but economic journalist James Surowiecki reckons it was all just a back-of-the-envelope calculation. “Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” the former financial columnist for The New Yorker posted on X. “What extraordinary nonsense this is.”
That approach meant Trump and his advisers simply took the U.S. trade deficit with the European Union — $235.6 billion in 2024 — and divided it by the bloc’s exports to the U.S., which totaled $605.8 billion.
The result was 39 percent, which the administration interpreted as the “unfair” trade advantage the EU holds over the U.S. From there, the White House proposed a 20 percent tariff, framing it as a corrective measure to level the playing field.
Trump, speaking in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday, said he was being “kind” by cutting the tariff rate almost in half.
[…]
The White House responded with a formula featuring Greek letters and six research references to underscore the credibility of its momentous economic decision. Incidentally, that formula describes the same calculation detailed by Surowiecki in his analysis.
Washington claimed its reciprocal tariffs, masterminded by the Council of Economic Advisers, were based on a formula accounting for trade barriers, import elasticities and tariff pass-through rates — aiming to set tariffs high enough to eliminate bilateral trade deficits. It also considered value-added tax as a trade barrier — even though this is paid on products and services sold in a country regardless of where the company selling them is from.
“It’s like [Donald] Trump is stuck in the 80s — his music, his clothing, his thinking. He has been on this tariff thing forever,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Wednesday. Hayes invited Walz to react to Trump’s bonkers tariffs announcement. Trump wants to get back at … the world (except Russia).
Hayes queried the border-state Democrat about Minnesotans’ attitudes toward their neighbors just to the north.
“Have you ever encountered in the wild,” Hayes began, “out of the mouth of someone at a doorstep or diner, ‘I hate those Canadians who are ripping us off. We gotta get back at them’?”
Walz burst out laughing.
“Never. Never,” Walz replied.
It was very satisfying, both the obvious question and the candid response from Walz. Hayes asked a question reporters should regularly ask all elected officials. It would drive home the absurdity and help immunize the public to Trump’s “ripping us off” nonsense. That’s even if Republicans’ answer will be to parrot Trump or utter some version of “many people say.”
Diego Garcia is an island in the Indian Ocean and home to a highly restricted UK-US military base. (BBC)
A sad and twisted man is Donald Trump. And an idiot. President idiot, okay. Heir to his father’s real estate empire, the man surrounds himself with idiots and yes-men. Degreed, ass-kissing idiots. Connected idiots. Rich idiots. But idiots.
The pathologically insecure Trump has complained for decades that “they” are laughing at “us” (meaning him). They are ripping off the United States (meaning him), says the man convicted of falsifying business records, stripped of his fraudulent charity, and assessed $25 million in penalties for cheating students of his fraudulent university. The man has spent a lifetime trying to prove to the world and to himself that he is the smartest person in any room, not an idiot, and not laughable.
At a White House Rose Garden event on Wednesday, dubbed “Liberation Day,” Donald Trump again proved the opposite.
Seals and Penguins
Trump slapped tariffs on “virtually the entire world,” including Australia’s volcanic Heard and McDonald Islands inhabited by seals and penguins, and on other tiny islands with no exports. His list includes the British Indian Ocean Territory of Diego Garcia, the island home of a highly restricted UK-US military base. (Trump likely thinks Diego Garcia belongs to Tren de Aragua (TdA) and should be disappeared to El Salvador.)
The president announced sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs against all those nations, friend and foe, who’ve “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered” America. He extolled the virtues of a tariff regime for making America great again as it was in the Robber Baron era. The U.S. was once a tariff-backed nation, he declard, before it foolishly adopted an income tax over a hundred years ago.
Look, Trump argued. Look at how they are ripping off us. He displayed a chart of the tariffs lesser countries dare levy against the United States of America. (Trump takes that as a personal insult.)
Non-idiots may ask where those weird numbers came from. Indeed, the chart left experts scratching their heads and asking the same thing. The numbers seemed to be pulled from Trump’s copious ass. Pretty much.
Author James Surowiecki was among the first to unravel their provenance:
Just brilliant. Because Indonesia has a high tax on coffee imports, Trump’s going to put a 32% tax on coffee imports from Indonesia – even though the US exports no coffee to Indonesia (or most anywhere else). He literally does not understand the concept of comparative advantage.
It’s also important to understand that the tariff rates that foreign countries are supposedly charging us are just made-up numbers. South Korea, with which we have a trade agreement, is not charging a 50% tariff on U.S. exports. Nor is the EU charging a 39% tariff.
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.
So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.
Rich idiots
“How in God’s name did [Secretary of the Treasury] Scott Bessent agree to sign off on this?” asks Surowiecki. Perhaps Bessent is deliberately sabotaging Trump. Or Bessent (worth at least $500 million) is another of those ass-kissing, rich idiots.
But it was Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (worth between $2 and $4 billion) who presented Trump with the chart. Politico reported in advance of the rollout:
Lutnick spends a lot of time in the Oval Office, hyping the president on his tariff strategy and ‘giving him bad advice — pushing more aggressive tariffs,’ says one person familiar with the situation.
“By contrast, Bessent remains a ‘measured voice’ pushing for targeted tariffs. And while tariff-loving trade adviser Peter Navarro is a known quantity, Lutnick is ‘a new voice at the table pushing crazy shit,’ the person says. ‘I don’t know anyone that isn’t pissed off at him.’”
Axios was quick to note that one nation led by an ass Trump himself is kissing escaped the tariff list: Russia.
A shockingly straightforward headline from CNN: www.cnn.com/business/liv…
Of course, it will not be any of those nations and uninhabited islands filling the U.S. treasury. It will be you. Paul Krugman dismantled Trump’s tariff incoherence on Wednesday at his substack. Analyses are pointless, he writes, “because there’s nothing to explain. I’m not saying that the Trump team’s thinking is unsound. I don’t see any thinking at all.”
Futures on the S&P 500, which allow investors to trade the index outside normal trading hours, slumped more than 3 percent. Asian and European stock markets fell sharply, with benchmark indexes dropping more than 3 percent in Japan, and nearly 2 percent in Hong Kong, South Korea, Germany and France.
The value of the U.S. dollar against a basket of other major currencies dropped more than 1 percent.
[…]
“The numbers are shockingly high compared to what people were expecting and it is inexplicable in many ways,” said Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities. “I think it’s a disaster.”
No, November 5 was the disaster. Wednesday was just another aftershock.
I sat with my parents in early 2016 and declared Donald Trump mentally unbalanced. Yet nine years later, the press corps still attempts to report Trump 2.0 as serious policy. Trump’s well-heeled sycophant entourage in the Rose Garden sits politely smiling and nodding at his ignorant blather as if he is not raving about the purity of his essence.
I’ve long said that the proper rejoinder to a rich asshole’s asking, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” is “If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?”
A numberof Xusers have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency. The Verge tested this with the phrasing used in those posts, as well as a question based more closely on the government’s language, asking chatbots for “an easy way for the US to calculate tariffs that should be imposed on other countries to balance bilateral trade deficits between the US and each of its trading partners, with the goal of driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.” All four platforms gave us the same fundamental suggestion.
Josh Marshall wrote this on Bluesky and I think it explains what’s going on with HHS as well as I’ve seen it anywhere:
It’s getting a lot of attn today. But even before today most of the country had very little idea of what has happened at NIH or through it the entire ecosystem of biomedical research in the US. Simply put, Musk, Kennedy & Trump exploded a bomb right in the middle of cancer cure research in the US.
On purpose. For many cancers, research has been put back years or decades. Alzheimers treatment and cure research similar story. If you know people who are survivors of these diseases and fear recurrence or have genetic dispositions or are just like everyone else and know they are liable to these and other diseases potential cures are now less likely to be there when you need them. You have to ask: what is the goal when you pull the plug on the whole ecosystem of cancer cure research? What’s the agenda? The answers are so dark and twisted most people struggle to believe it could be real.
But it is real. And it’s happened so quickly, most of the country doesn’t know it yet. Indeed, I got some key indications over the weekend that even people in the biomedical research world outside of NIH don’t get yet what’s happened. So the bomb has gone off but most people don’t realize it yet. It’s like Bobby Kennedy and Elon and Trump just drove a big semi full of fertilizer Tim McVeigh-style up in front of the national labs and detonated it.
The prospect of more life saving cures and treatments already got much bleaker. If you think you or a loved one might one day get one of these cancers, or Alzheimers, or various other dread diseases 10, 20, 30 years from now your chances have already dimmed because of what’s happened just in the last two months.
And now they’ve decided to up the pace and make it far worse because of a mix of difficult to fully comprehend pathological motives tied to political extremism, belief that AI will supplant medical research & that destroying the current research world will add to their wealth and political power and cement their hold over what was the American republic.
It will take a determined, smart, relentless and implacable counterattack to begin to undo the damage.
There are so many atrocities coming from this administration that it’s hard to decide the worst of it. But when it comes to the most harm to the most people in short, medium and long term, I think this might be it. The U.S. has been one of the most prolific leaders in medical research for a very long time and we’re giving it up because Trump wanted to cover up his support for vaccines during the pandemic — and stick it to the people who made him feel stupid about it. No one can tell him anything so he’s letting Bobby Jr play. Many people will die needlessly.
Let’s hope that we can put this Humpty Dumpty together again but the damage is already severe and it will take a massive effort. It’s heartbreaking.
