Extremist tariff regime is the latest phase of Trump's war on America
The president is sociopathically indifferent to the potential for mass suffering, so long as the end result is more power for him
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
For years, my main framework for viewing and understanding Donald Trump has been to see him as an authoritarian at the head of a broad reactionary movement that seeks to impose a backwards vision on America: white supremacist, Christian nationalist, misogynistic, and anti-democratic, with a strong tilt towards empowering the wealthiest at the expense of others. It’s a complementary arrangement, in which Trump advances these reactionary goals, even as these reactionary forces support his quest for unchallenged personal power.
The political and cultural forces propelling Trump remain tremendously powerful, and we can see how they’ve been further unleashed since his re-election: all manner of white supremacist and misogynist madness has been put forward via the lame cover of “anti-DEI” initiatives, from the Pentagon to public education. Meanwhile, a supposed war against government waste and for “efficiency,” generaled by Elon Musk, has gutted government departments and agencies that protect public health, restrain exploitative business interests, and guard civil rights.
But the Trump alliance with the MAGA movement hasn’t just been about rational ends. A mutual desire for revenge, or retribution, as Trump so often says, has also bound Trump to his supporters, and his supporters to Trump. It is not just about “making American great again.” It is about punishing perceived enemies. Here, again, Trump’s personal desires have seemed to synchronize with those of his supporters. Just as Trump has felt looked down on by those wealthier or more socially prestigious than himself, so have millions of his supported felt dismissed by a supposedly arrogant liberal elite, or enraged by those who worship, or love, or simply look the “wrong” way. They have shared a mutual interest in smiting their common enemies.
Yet these convergences between Trump and his supporters across the MAGA coalition are deceptive, for Trump’s ultimate loyalty is not to any set of values, or set of people, but to himself. When push comes to shove, he is not aggrandizing power for the sake of a vast reactionary movement — he is doing it for himself. He is not seeking retribution on their behalf — he is doing it for himself. And while until now this may have been a distinction without a difference, I think we are seeing undeniable tensions breaking to the surface, as it is becoming clearer by the day that Trump’s goals of unfettered personal power are in fact increasingly at odds with major interests of much of his coalition.
Indeed, viewing the carnage of his first couple months in office, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has made the startling observation that, “It is hard to describe Trump’s first month and a half in office as something other than a retribution campaign against the American people,” as he goes on to enumerate the many harms inflicted on citizens across the political spectrum:
Under the cover of an audit, he has empowered Elon Musk, his de facto co-president, to take an ax to any and every program that helps ordinary Americans. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has stripped funds or personnel or both from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the National Park Service, the National Weather Service, FEMA, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, among others. It has degraded the federal government’s ability to deliver critical services to tens of millions of Americans and is endangering direct payments to millions more. There is no apparent rhyme or reason to these cuts, only a nihilistic drive to cause as much damage and to make it as irreparable as possible.
Bouie’s proposition — that Donald Trump is focused on retribution not just against a subset of Americans but literally against the United States and all its population — still startles me, even after sitting with it for weeks. Yet in recent days we have received, if not final proof, then deeply damning evidence of its basic truth, via the enormous, apparently semi-random tariffs Trump has now imposed on imports from nearly every nation on the planet. Consumer confidence, already hitting recent lows, is sure to drop still more; the prospect of recession has risen significantly, as has the specter of hard-to-resolve stagflation. The bottom line is that, contrary to Trump’s lies, such massive tariffs will constitute a de facto consumption tax on Americans, disproportionately hurting those lower on the income ladder. Ordinary people will have to work harder just to stay in place, economically speaking; others will be pulled down into poverty.
The best defense of Trump is that he is causing pain in the service of future benefits, that the tariffs will work to somehow stop the exploitation of America that our trading partners have supposedly engaged in. After all, his economic advisors do seem to have a cockamamie plan for re-industrializing the United States via tariffs and hard-ball negotiating tactics with other nations — though, as has been dissected elsewhere, such a plan depends on deranged assumptions, and would almost certainly leave the United States poorer than before (Josh Marshall and Eric Levitz) have both written illuminating analyses of the rationale and mistaken assumptions of the tariff strategy). To look at the haphazard roll-out (including the targeting of uninhabited territories) and bizarre calculations of specific tariff rates is to see the illusion of a plan, not an actual one; more of a gamble based on the president’s long-held, long-discredited ideas about the magical power of tariffs.
Moreover, as Josh Marshall points out, Trump’s heavy-handed tactics are almost guaranteed to short-circuit the emergence of any stable new trading system, while the re-industrialization that’s supposedly his goal would take years to come to fruition — a time scale far beyond Trump’s normal short-term focus. I also think there is more than a grain of truth to Max Fisher’s observation that Trump is reacting to Joe Biden’s successful efforts to revitalize and grown manufacturing in the U.S., efforts which would increasingly be evident in the coming years; in Trump’s zero-sum mindset, success attributable to his predecessor can only mean defeat for himself.
But the main point I am trying to make is that whether Trump’s advisors have a plan is separate from the question of whether Trump actually cares about helping the U.S. economy and the American people. Trump is incapable of caring about either; his first and only concern is to serve his own desire for domination and retribution. Let’s get real: Donald Trump is not attracted to ultra-high tariffs because he has a steel-trap mind for economic theory and a zest for redeeming America, but because it feels good to feel like he’s screwing over other countries. And, if our theory is correct, it also feels pretty good to screw over all those ungrateful Americans who (as Bouie puts it) failed to re-elect him in 2020. I mean, what an amazing coincidence that the plan to save America is ultimately indistinguishable from a plan to weaken and impoverish America in the “short term”!
Likewise, it is almost a certainty that Trump sees limitless room for personal enrichment via his power to remove tariffs for individual companies and parties; essentially, any company or corporate leader who wishes not to be hurt by Trump’s insane tariff regime has an incentive to strike arrangements with the president that will corruptly enhance his power, while eroding the orderly functioning of markets and subverting the public good. And it is well worth noting that Trump is so obsessed with inflicting pain and enhancing his own power that he is very likely breaking the law under which he claims to be acting, a point elaborated by Greg Sargent as he describes how the statute is supposed to be used for emergency situations, not to make policy wholesale.
Admittedly, we will never be able to definitively prove Trump’s motivations in taking such broad and concerted steps to fuck over ordinary Americans across the political spectrum. Maybe he’s just sociopathically indifferent to the toll as he seeks to make all Americans dependent on his strongman rule by immiserating the population and subjugating all competing power centers, and doesn’t actively hate them (though his obsessive, vocalized focus on retribution argues otherwise). But here’s the thing — such (best case) indifference is in practice indistinguishable from hatred of America and Americans. Indeed, it is well within our rights to characterize Donald Trump’s behavior as we wish, based on the evidence before us. When Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 election result because he rejected the will of the voters and wished to hold onto power, he did not have to declare (or even literally think to himself) that he hated America; rather, his actions spoke for him. He showed pure contempt for America’s voters for making the “wrong” choice, and complete disregard for our traditions of democracy and the rule of law, according to which he was a loser and no longer entitled to hold power (much less the absolute power that he so obviously craves).
I think that some gut realization of Trump’s indifference to the American people shuddered through the body politic last week, as evidenced superficially via the stock market’s graceless swan dive and more substantively through a gut-check sense that the bottom might drop out of the economy for no good reason. You don’t have to be an economics professor to understand that tariffs will drive up prices and inflation, or to remark on Trump’s apparent glee in announcing them — an attitude deeply at odds with the anxiety that most people felt upon hearing the news. The same goes for statements by Trump and high-ranking administration officials about the supposedly short-term economic “pain” Americans may feel — particularly when the Richie-riches of the Trump administration will be feeling none of this apparently desirable pain themselves. Presidents who love their country don’t talk about having to destroy the nation in order to save it.