President Trump is having a grand time playing chicken with the U.S. economy, risking our prosperity to force other countries to submit to his protectionist diktats. It’s put him right where he wants to be — at the center of world attention.
But his vendetta against trade is alarming U.S. consumers, businesses and investors, and reawakening public doubts that he knows what he’s doing.
Most Americans don’t see the point in picking fights with friendly trade partners like Canada. Private sector leaders are aghast at Trump’s on-again, off-again threats to impose suffocating “reciprocal” duties on all imported goods.
While pausing those tariffs to stop the U.S. bond market from melting down, Trump has imposed an equally arbitrary 10 percent tariff on most of our trading partners. He’s also gone nuclear on China, raising tariffs to an absurd 245 percent and goading Beijing into levying massive retaliatory duties on U.S. exports.
Working families who took Trump seriously when he promised to focus on bringing down the cost of everyday goods have been played for fools. Tariffs are pushing prices up and may shove the economy into recession.
They also make it more expensive for U.S. companies to make things that require parts and materials from abroad — everything from costume jewelry to spacecraft. U.S. exporters large and small, including America’s farmers, again, are losing sales as foreign markets close in a tit-for-tat reaction to Trump’s tariffs.
The stock market slump has wiped out trillions of wealth and is eating away at seniors’ retirement savings. Disintegrating international confidence in U.S. economic stability will make it harder to finance our swollen national debt and maintain the dollar’s status as the world’s main reserve currency.
Even his closest advisors don’t seem to know what Trump hopes to achieve by throttling world trade. Is it to negotiate fairer trade deals or bring back manufacturing jobs? If trade is so bad, why is he carving out exemptions for smartphones, computers and other popular imports?
In normal times, lawmakers in the president’s party would demand a say in making trade and economic policy, which, after all, is their job. But today’s Republican-controlled Congress is a sorry collection of political invertebrates terrified of crossing Trump, lest the MAGA faithful kick them to the curb.
The president’s shifting rationales for tariffs evoke bad memories of his erratic first-term performance, especially his bungling of the COVID pandemic. His own pollster admitted that it cost him reelection in 2020.
With a big assist from President Biden, he clawed his way back into the White House. Trump’s remarkable political resilience, however, owes more to his force of personality than popular enthusiasm for his specific governing ideas.
In focus groups commissioned by my organization, Progressive Policy Institute, before last year’s election, working-class voters told us that through the fog of Trumpian bluster and chaos, they see a strong figure who fights for them. Asked what kind of car Trump and Kamala Harris reminded them of, a Nevada man compared Trump to “a dump truck, strong, big, fierce.” A Midwestern woman likened Harris to “a small car, a Kia, something weak.”
Trump as a dump truck is an arresting metaphor that captures his implacable will to power. But it also underscores his potential for destruction. In trying to foist his perverse view of trade as exploitation on the entire world, Trump looks out of control, like a runaway dump truck.
It’s not just his throwback protectionism. Equally as wrongheaded and reckless is Trump’s embrace of America First isolationism, which was born in opposition to U.S aid to a beleaguered Great Britain at the outset of World War II.
Similarly, Trump wants Ukraine to concede defeat, yield territory to Russia and grant Washington mining rights for critical minerals. That’s causing a rupture with our European allies, who know that rewarding Vladimir Putin’s aggression will only feed his appetite for expansion and democratic subversion.
Here again, the problem is Trump’s inability to conceive of U.S. relations with other countries in anything other than zero-sum terms. In his misanthropic mind, just as trade agreements allow other nations to steal our jobs, security alliances enable so-called friends to pick our pockets.
Trump wants to dispense with all the sentimental humbug about America standing up for freedom, democracy and self-determination and throw our weight around as belligerently as other autocrats do theirs.
He’s bullying Denmark, a NATO ally, to cede Greenland to the United States, taunting Canadian leaders about annexation, threatening to seize control of the Panama Canal and proposing to turn the Gaza strip into a Club Med-style resort.
It's tempting to dismiss all this as performative jingoism. But Trump really means it and will keep scheming and gaslighting until someone stops him. Fortunately, he seems to be losing the battle of public opinion.
According to the Pew Research Center, Americans oppose a U.S. takeover of Greenland and Gaza by more than 2 to 1. They’re also skeptical of his approach to Ukraine; 43 percent say Trump favors Russia too much, while 31 percent think he’s striking the right balance.
Nor do they share Trump’s crabbed view that working with other countries to tackle humanity’s common problems undercuts U.S. sovereignty. More oppose than support his decision to kill most U.S. foreign aid programs and exit the World Health Organization and the Paris climate accords.
Americans seem to be recoiling from Trump’s hubris; his manic attempts to single-handedly restructure global trade, undermine collective security and destroy checks on presidential power at home.
That’s encouraging, but it may take an economic crisis or the next election to stop the runaway dump truck that is Trump II.
Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute.
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