Trump's economic war on the world is based on a new Big Lie
Unable to confront the economic challenges his own party has helped create, the president proposes nonsense solutions to punish MAGA's enemies
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
President Trump’s ongoing, erratic deployment of tariffs is exerting a destabilizing influence on the U.S. and world economies, raising questions beyond the basic one of whether it’s worth risking a global recession or worse in pursuit of badly-articulated and likely fictional goals. Some commentators have pointed to the recent troubles in the bond markets as showing that the United States might do permanent damage to its foundational role in the world economy, and that the trust in American stability (both political and economic) that has undergirded its central position will be difficult if not impossible to regain in the future. Trump is trying to use U.S. economic power to bully other nations into accepting terms of trade that by his own admission must advantage the American side, but there is no guaranty that other countries will play ball as opposed to, for instance, forming trade alliances that simply exclude the United States.
It’s flabbergasting that Donald Trump is poised to potentially run the country into economic ruination based on what appears to be a new Big Lie: The idea that the United States is in terrible economic shape because the rest of the world has been ripping us off. This economic Big Lie requires putting aside that the United States trades with other countries under rules that the U.S. itself has propounded over decades; it also requires putting aside Trump’s deranged idea that trade deficits are somehow prima facie evidence that the United States is getting a raw trade deal; and likewise ignoring that the U.S. economy has in fact been growing steadily over decades of free trade arrangements that Trump claims have destroyed America.
Rather, I’d argue that our main socioeconomic challenge has been growing inequality — as the U.S. has become richer, more and more of that wealth has gone to a smaller and smaller group of people. While some fraction of this is due to de-industrialization of some industries that can be related to free trade agreements, hardly all of it can be. A more holistic and accurate view would look at the decimation of labor unions and inadequate minimum wage laws; the astronomical cost of higher education that hinders workers from finding higher-wage employment; underfunded public school systems that don’t give all American kids the world-class education they deserve; a tax system that favors the ultra-wealthy over the working poor, and passive wealth over earned income; and the continuing inadequacy of a health care system that undercuts public health, and by extension the productivity of American workers.
Donald Trump is offering a simplistic, self-destructive solution to complex economic challenges whose improvement would require something far different than slapping crazy tariffs on allies and enemies alike in a frantic, doomed effort to bring the rest of the world to heel. In addition to his failure to consider real-world challenges to the U.S. economy, he also naturally sidesteps a key factor that has long prevented the U.S. from addressing those issues: the Republican Party. The GOP has long played a malevolent role in keeping the U.S. economy constrained and increasingly unequal. It’s a party that chronically chooses tax cuts over public investment; a party that, if given a choice, would eliminate the existence of unions in the U.S. (save, perhaps, for police unions); a party that opposes the funding of public education at all levels, even though this would support not only further growth of a high-knowledge, high-tech economy, but could help the country reach the levels of critical service jobs (in health, in education, in energy, in environmental protection) that would also make us a more civilized society; a party that puts its thumb on the scale for the richest Americans and biggest corporations at every opportunity; a party that for decades has sawed away at our democratic mechanisms for making the economy prosper for everyone.
The Trump administration’s declaration that the world is to blame for our ills sidesteps these basic questions of political economy — questions whose debate and resolution rightly require the full participation not only of Congress but of a citizenry that is made aware of the challenges, the stakes, and the range of possible solutions — and instead substitutes a one-size-fits-all solution; a solution that, not coincidentally, is centered on the president’s monomaniacal obsession with tariffs. It’s an obsession, we should note, that tracks perfectly with Donald Trump’s desire to rule like a dictator (he alone wields the tariff power, not the U.S. Congress, even though the latter has delegated his “emergency” tariff powers to him) and, equally importantly, to make economic policy by screwing over others (in this case, other countries) — as many have noted, it’s the same basic model as his multiple-bankruptcy business career. We would not be wrong in assuming that the Trump administration arrived at its current economic and trade policies not through any sort of deliberation, but because it is the only one Trump can conceive of — and one that, crucially, allows him to corruptly grant exceptions to tariffs in exchange for favors from those given relief.
Con man that he is, the focus on tariffs is a massive act of misdirection, distracting the country from the complicated welter of issues that keep Americans underpaid and increasingly stratified — issues whose improvement would require confronting the plutocratic supporters of his own party, and the GOP’s implacably anti-worker, anti-education, anti-science bias. It’s worth noting that another key plank of his economic plans is massive tax cuts that would train firehoses of money on the wealthiest among us, while requiring cuts to programs that literally keep Americans alive and children with food in their bellies. Even before this assault on the common good has been passed, the illegal DOGE initiative has already shown us that Trump’s agenda is in many ways the traditional Republican one, but on steroids — cutting back cancer research, hacking away grants to universities, disabling the Department of Education, and generally acting in ways that undercut the U.S.’s ability to create a dynamic and equitable economy. And with the economy near full employment, Trump’s mass deportation of immigrants threatens to deprive the country of workers who, rather than stealing American jobs, perform challenging labor that many Americans consider themselves above doing.
With the official pro-tariff cover story of “re-industrializing” the U.S. (even if the industries are of 19th century vintage) and ignoring the public investments that would in fact allow a modern economy to thrive and many more to participate and benefit, we can see a disparagement of education, science, and services. But in Trump and conservatives’ wish to make war on the so-called “professional managerial class” — government bureaucrats, professors, scientists, journalists and others whose work typically requires advanced education — we can also discern another explanation for the assault on a technologically advanced economy that relies on a more educated workforce. The generally direct correlation between higher education and a propensity to vote Democratic makes educated Americans a clear target for retribution due to their political beliefs and collective political power. If taking them down takes down America, then perhaps the price is still worth it.
But I wonder if another, more sinister motivation is also at play. If Donald Trump is the avatar of a reactionary nationalism that privileges white Americans, then how to understand a politico-economic project that actually seeks to target some white Americans? It’s not just their generally more liberal politics that are in the crosshairs — I think it has something to do with perceptions that they are more racially tolerant, living in cosmopolitan areas where they are in close contact with non-white Americans, and indeed non-white immigrants and workers as well. At a basic level, Trump and conservatives see these parts of the country as engaging in a sort of racial treachery — not only by rejecting the white nationalism of MAGA, but in working with minorities to build economies that seem to leave rural areas and other disproportionately white regions in the dust. (There is also, of course, the desire to deter non-white Americans from trying to climb the socioeconomic ladder).
In other words, I don’t think the vision of a re-industrialized, poorer America is simply about Trump pretending to care about working-class Americans. Arguably more important is a desire to punish the enemies of MAGA (i.e., fellow citizens) who might dare to vote against them. There are elements of a class war against blue America, but interwoven is also an urge to punish fellow white people who defy the white supremacist vision, and who have shown that prosperity not based on racial repression can exist, however imperfectly, in the United States.