You remember the doomsday clock, which warns us how close we are to nuclearized extinction?
It still exists, but, let’s face it, who has time these days to worry about world-destroying nukes?
What we need is a Trump doomsday clock, and if it’s set for anything less than four years — we’ll worry about a possible eight years later — we are, as another president famously said, in deep doodoo.
Neck-deep doodoo, I’d add, brought to us, in part, by Trump’s “Liberation Day” trade war — which, for those keeping score at home, has slammed the U.S. stock market to the tune of a two-day-record wipeout of $6.4 trillion. It beat the old record from COVID times in 2020 by a mere $2 trillion.
Many have wondered just what we’re being liberated from by these tariffs, but I’d guess that it’s never having to bother yourself again about making a retirement plan. It’s not too alarmist to think there won’t be any more retirement.
If you believe, as Trump/Musk do, that America is not much better off than the “shithole” countries he refers to, you might believe that the years of post-World War II Pax America have been a disaster. In that time, Trump warns, the U.S. — despite having by far the world’s largest economy — has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far.” That may be delusionary — of course, it’s delusionary — but that doesn’t mean Trump won’t engage in some raping and looting of his own.
It’s all of a piece.
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SUBSCRIBETrump has already at least metaphorically set the Constitution on fire, the one that has protected our liberties and freedoms for close to 250 years. I wonder if he can get the original document — presently housed at the National Archives Building, if it still exists — moved to the Oval Office so the president can use his own Trump-branded, gold-plated, crypto-currencied matches to do the ceremonial lighting for reals.
He ignores judges’ orders — let’s see what he does with Friday’s court order demanding that the U.S. return court-protected Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the notorious El Salvador prison — threatens to withdraw from NATO, extorts universities and law firms, and fires federal employees at will, among many other Trump/Musk productions.
Still, there is some actual method to some of his madness. He wants to be a dictator. (Elon Musk already thinks he is one.) Trump is simply following the authoritarian rulebook in derailing constitutional guardrails that his pals Putin and Orban and others helpfully provided for him.
But the tariffs?
They’re a different story — one that each of us who has a disrupted 401(k) plan or IRA plan or no plan at all needs to understand. The tariffs are about ego and chaos and arrogance and Trump’s mine’s-bigger-than-yours theory of foreign policy. And if you listen to virtually any economist, Trump also has a longstanding, deep-seated ignorance of how economies function. The successful ones are not based primarily on tariffs, which Trump calls the “most beautiful word” in the dictionary, surprising many that he’d made it all the way to the T’s.
They’re about Trump’s belief that there was no better economic time in America than during the late mercantile 19th century. If you simply do the Google, you’ll understand why the Wharton School doesn’t like to claim him as its own.
Even Ted Cruz, the wildly sycophantic Texas senator who slavishly follows Trump on all things great and small, has questioned the wisdom behind Trump’s worldwide terrorist-tariff campaign, saying the tariffs might lead to a Republican “bloodbath” in the 2026 midterms.
He added: “If we’re in a scenario 30 days from now, 60 days from now, 90 days from now, with massive American tariffs and massive tariffs on American goods and every other country on earth, that is a terrible outcome,” he said.
In that scenario, “This is the biggest tax increase we have seen in a long, long time.”
Or you can find actual experts, like those cited by, say, the Economist editorial board, which wrote that so-called Liberation Day was actually much closer to “Ruination Day.”
Trump doesn’t seem to understand that tariffs are, in fact, a tax on American consumers. And naturally those at the bottom income rung are hit the hardest as a percentage. What Trump apparently believes is that raising tariffs will provide enough money to the U.S. treasury to pay for extending his expansive tax cuts, which mostly benefit the rich.
And it’s not just the stupidity of an economy based on tariffs — China’s vow to retaliate with 34% tariffs on American goods is what set off the markets on Friday — but the stupidity of Trump’s tariffs in particular.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the penguins by now, in which Trump has placed 10% tariffs on two islands that have more penguins than people. We know that for sure because there are some penguins and zero people on those islands.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Trump math used to determine the percentage rate for each country’s tariffs — which, and I may not have this entirely right, is something like the percentage of America’s trade deficit with each country divided by the percentage of orangitude Trump reaches each day.
You may have heard about Lesotho, the African nation about which Derek Thompson writes in the Atlantic. The average citizen there earns approximately $5 a day, and yet Trump has imposed a 50% tariff rate on one of the poorest countries in the world. Here’s how the crazy math really works, as Thompson explains. Let’s begin by saying that it has nothing to do with reciprocal tariffs, as Trump has claimed. The rate is, in fact, calculated by dividing our trade deficit with a given country by the number representing how much the U.S. imports from it. We buy $237 million in diamonds each year from Lesotho, which is basically too poor to buy many American goods.
How does putting a tariff on Lesotho help anyone? Would someone please get back to me on that?
I have a theory, which is hardly mine alone, but which I’m pretty sure is right. If the American economy were not as strong as it is, then Trump couldn’t actually take this big swing at the entire global economy (somehow, excepting Russia, which didn’t get any new tariffs imposed).
He has the power because he has the economy.
Trump expects the world to come crawling to him, country by country, to beg for a new trade deal. He wants the leaders of these countries, including the democratic ones he despises, to crawl to him.
He wants to hear them say, on their knees, “Sir, if we give you Canada, or maybe Greenland, won’t you please stop with the tariffs? We beg of you.”
Or maybe they’ll hand over the Panama Canal. Or an ethnically cleansed Gaza where Trump can build casinos, presumably for him to eventually bankrupt.
That may not be how sovereign nations, say those in the European Union, actually react.
My theory could be wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. But I doubt it’s as wrong as the Wall Street geniuses who didn’t believe Trump when he said during his campaign he was going to place tariffs anywhere and everywhere. Or for that matter, as wrong as half of the American voters, who were once so worried about the price of eggs that they thought they’d bring back the guy who threatens our democracy because he might help with groceries, even though he hasn’t.
In a Bulwark piece entitled “The American Age Is Over,” Jonathan V. Last quotes Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on the end of American global leadership.
☀️ MORE FROM MIKE LITTWIN
Littwin: U.S. mistakenly deported a court-protected migrant to El Salvador prison. But it shamefully says there’s nothing to be done about it.
3:05 AM MDT on Apr 2, 20254:00 PM MDT on Apr 1, 2025Littwin: Snatch-and-grab arrests, official prison propaganda videos: Is it too late for Americans to be the good guys again?
3:05 AM MDT on Mar 30, 20255:32 PM MDT on Mar 28, 2025Littwin: While I was on spring break, Trump and Musk were busy breaking everything in sight
3:05 AM MDT on Mar 26, 20254:27 PM MDT on Mar 25, 2025“The system of global trade anchored in the United States, that Canada has relied on since the end of the Second World War — a system that, while not perfect, has helped to deliver prosperity for our country for decades — is over…
“The eighty-year period when the United States … forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect, and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services — is over.
“While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
I don’t know if this really is the end. It could be, at long last, the wake-up call we so desperately need. It could be a further warning of the electoral bloodbath some Republicans now fear. It could be the time for Democrats to actually rise up, in a way Cory Booker helped start with his quasi-filibuster. I’m writing this on Friday afternoon and waiting to see the size of the Saturday protests.
It could be all of that. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fully understand just how much damage Trump has done in his first 70-some days in office or wonder how many more days like them we can hope to survive.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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