Of Tariffs, Trump, and the Terror of "America First"

[This post should begin with the horror's last update, as seen from my perch: Noon, PDT, the Dow Jones average has freefallen by 1,405 points, the S&P 500 was down by nearly 4%, and Nasdaq, 4.75%.]

***

It seems The New York Times has hired a comedy writer to match in levity Trump's latest slapstick stupidity. To wit, "Analysts were still trying to work out how the tariff levels had been derived, and some said they were confused about the numbers." That has to be the funniest damn thing I've read in weeks. These analysts can't possibly think — can they? — that macroeconomic sobreity played a part in "deriving" what in reality is the tariffs' gigglesome inscrutability. And their confusion "about the numbers" surely springs from Trump's levied percentages which laughably careened every which way in obvious mimicry of Ricky Wild Thing's hilariously shortsighted pitches — landing juuust a bit outside.

Switching moods, on the sobering side is that Trump again went to the well of grievance-filled, empty-promises bullshit with which he could hoodwink America's sizable swath of knuckle-draggers. The divers and destructive new tariffs he slapped on 100+ nations were both obligatory and urgent, insisted Trump, because of a phrasal criticality he now very much enjoys tossing around only to justify whims and satisfy grudges: a national emergency. That, said Trump, was the motivating cause of his deeply benighted — and worse — globally chaotic and entirely needless tariff hikes.

Cornell University's trade specialist Eswar Prasad observes that absentee equitability in such commerce is a real thing, and this unsentimental reality has been unfavorable to us in the U.S. Our "it's-not-personal-it's-strictly-business" trade partners, friends and even allies profit from the unfairness but at the American economy's expense, argues Prasad.

But the key part of the Cornell economist's developed, NYT-quoted commentary is his sensible and (for a professor of his sorcerous discipline) admirably simple contention that 1) Trump could have sought greater fairness in America's international trade via negotiations, since 2) that is the most common, also admirably non-thermonuclear tactic deployed, but 3) Trump isn't one for smarts and minimal collateral damage. "Rather than fixing the rules that many U.S. trading partners admittedly took advantage of to their own benefit," says Prof. Prasad, "Trump has chosen to blow up the system governing international trade."

Yesterday, no-introduction-needed Paul Krugman was anticipatorily bracing for the crushing cascade of "analyses purporting to explain the thinking behind this radical change in U.S. [trade] policy." But, he continued, "such analyses will be a waste of time, 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."

One small but enormously telling demonstration of what Krugman saw/didn't see — a demo centered not on Team Trump but The Great Unthinking One himself — is one very astonishing portion of a post in the Truth Social section labeled "Vacuity or Doubleplusunsound Thoughts by Donald." This:

Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Rand Paul, also of Kentucky, will hopefully get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.

Put aside for the moment that Canada, as widely reported of late, does not and never has hustled "large amounts" of fentanyl into the United States. It's likely you had already put that stupidity aside, since subsequent to it was another, its big, its much, much bigger brother of stupidity: Trump's evident belief that fentanyl should be subject to a U.S. tariff. (Krugman, too, was bemused: "Does he believe that fentanyl smugglers pay tariffs?")

Nevertheless, Donald J. Trump is the alarmingly oblivious-to-even-the-simplest-subjects guy who just constructed a tariff wall around the United States that is deceptively lower by sight — deceptive, for Trump's wall is more highly damaging to U.S. economic interests than the Great Depression's Smoot-Hawley wall ever was.

As Krugman explained, "[Contemporary rates] will be a much bigger shock to the economy [than Smoot-Hawley's]..., especially because imports as a share of the economy are three times what they were in the 1920s."

I'd bet that not one White House trade(?) adviser(?) — and certainly not the boss — knows what Paul Krugman so essentially displayed and explained on his Substack page. If nothing else, why bother? In Trump's government bunker there's no need for professional knowledge about the U.S. economy and its tariff history, for at ground-zero Bedlam neither book-lernin' nor history can compete with what Trump knows — that he's a genius with peerless mental abilities. Just who in that bughouse would ever dare dissent on any topic Trump's psychotic, self-adulating magnificence of transcendent glory and dazzling grandeur?

Before I read Trump's Canada/fentanyl post I was convinced of my finally achieved invulnerability to Trump's superexceptionally painful stupidity. I was mistaken; once again it stung. Yet after my astonishment and impalement faded to black, again I felt what's become inextinguishable — a deep, visceral sadness about an unbowed imbecile and career criminal occupying at democracy's request the office once occupied by the likes of FDR, DDE, JFK-LBJ and BHO.