Trump’s planned tariff increases are so stupid and wantonly destructive I find it difficult to write about it. Fortunately, plenty of others are sounding alarms about the scale of the pending devastation.
As you probably know, April 2 is when Trump plans to unwrap the details of what amounts to an economic teardown plan on a global scale. It is extremely difficult to fathom what he intends to accomplish save demonstrate the extent of his power. But even ancient archetype of destruction had reasons. The feared Kali, with her necklace of skulls, kept herself busy killing demons other gods had let loose. She apparently also has beautiful manners. The Furies are forces for justice, albeit often implemented brutally. From Wikipedia:
The Erinyes live in Erebus and are more ancient than any of the Olympian deities. Their task is to hear complaints brought by mortals against the insolence of the young to the aged, of children to parents, of hosts to guests, and of householders or city councils to suppliants—and to punish such crimes by hounding culprits relentlessly.
Of course, these two mythical examples are female, and it seems odd that commentators are loath to depict Trump’s extreme emotionality and fickleness at stereotypically feminine.
A much less grand/grandiose image is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, particularly since Trump can be charming. However, in a recent talk on Dialogue Works, John Helmer mentioned that Russian officials have taken note of the parallel…and that in the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Mr. Hyde becomes dominant.
Since we can avert our eyes from the main event only for so long, we’ll start with the Wall Street Journal. When the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a voice of sanity, you know it’s bad. Key bits:
Financial markets have the shakes as President Trump prepares to launch his next big tariff salvo on Wednesday. And nerves are appropriate since Mr. Trump’s chief trade adviser, Peter Navarro, is boasting about what he says will amount to a $6 trillion tax increase from the tariffs….
George Orwell, call your office. In the real economic world, a tariff is a tax. If you raise $600 billion more a year in revenue for the federal government, you are taking that amount away from individuals and businesses in the private economy.
By any definition that is a tax increase, and the $600 billion figure would be one of the largest in U.S. history. It amounts to about 2% of gross domestic product, and it would take the federal tax share of GDP above 19%. The average since 1975 is about 17.3%….
It’s possible Mr. Trump will walk back from this tax ledge…
But what is clear is that the President is going to impose significant tariffs, and do so when the economy is slowing. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDP Now estimate for the first quarter, which ended Monday, has the economy shrinking 0.5%. That volatile number will change as March data arrive, but both consumers and businesses have grown more cautious as they worry about the effect of tariffs.
This is especially worrying because the signs are that Mr. Trump thinks tariffs are worth the economic damage. The latest evidence is his weekend claim that he doesn’t give a hoot if prices rise on foreign cars….
Somehow we doubt American consumers will feel the same at a dealer showroom. Mr. Trump’s 25% tariff on foreign cars, which goes into effect this week, will raise car prices by some amount. Foreign car makers might absorb some of the tariff cost, but some part of the 25% levy is sure to be passed on to American consumers.
Mr. Trump also ignores that U.S. car makers are also likely to raise their prices…over time the U.S firms would be foolish not to raise their prices to increase profits, perhaps by some margin less than the increase on imported cars.
That’s what happened after Mr. Trump raised tariffs on washing machines in his first term. Washer prices rose nearly 12%, according to a 2019 study, and it didn’t matter where the machine was made.
Admittedly, the Journal harps on their favorite dirty word, “tax”. The article also assumes that vehicle components shipped from Canada and Mexico as part of “American cars” will remain exempt, per relief the Administration settled on in early March. The US automaking business is integrated across the three countries, with many border crossings required. It would be an operational as well as financial nightmare to implement tariffs on Canadian and Mexican elements. But the volatile Trump could flip flop again, or threaten to, which would wreak havoc with planning.
From another point in the ideological spectrum, here, the Guardian:
A full-blown trade war between the US and its trading partners could cost $1.4tn, a new report shows.
Economists at Aston Business School have modelled a range of potential scenarios, including the possibility that America it hit by full global retaliation after it announces new tariffs against other countries.
That full-scale trade conflict could result in a $1.4 trillion global welfare loss, Aston has calculated.
The report explains that tariff escalation leads to higher prices, reduced competitiveness, and fragmented supply chains, as we saw in 2018 in the US-China trade war.
It says:
Donald Trump’s 2025 return to power has unleashed a gale of protectionism, reshaping global trade within weeks.
They outline six scenarios, from the first wave of tariffs already announced against Canada, Mexico and China to a full-blown trade war.
Here are the key findings:
US initial tariffs: US prices rise 2.7% and real GPD per capita declines 0.9%. Welfare declines in Canada by 3.2% and Mexico by 5%.
Retaliation by Canada, Mexico and China: US loss deepens to 1.1%, welfare declines in Canada by 5.1% and Mexico by 7.1%.
US imposes 25% tariffs on EU goods: Sharp transatlantic trade contraction, EU production disruptions, US welfare declines 1.5%.
EU retaliates with 25% tariff on US goods: Prices rise across US and EU, mutual welfare losses and intensified negative outcomes for the US. UK experiences modest trade diversion benefits.
US global tariff: Severe global trade contraction and substantial price hikes substantially affect North American welfare and UK trade volumes.
Full global retaliation with reciprocal tariffs: Extensive global disruption and reduced trade flows, severe US welfare losses, $1.4 trillion global welfare loss projected.
The full-blown trade war (scenario 6) would have “profound implications” for interconnected economies like the UK.
The report says:
As a trade-dependent nation navigating post-Brexit realities, the UK stands at a crossroads. Trump’s tariffs disrupt supply chains and exports, yet might open doors for rerouting, with high potential for exporting much more to the U.S.
The dual-edged impacts are stark: fleeting export gains collide with vulnerabilities in critical sectors like automotive and tech, while EU divergence risks, amplified by regulatory misalignment and political distrust, threaten its efforts in resetting the UK-EU relationship.
So while the UK can use its post-Brexit flexibility to mitigate risks and leverage new trade routes, sustained gains depend on rebuilding EU ties and supporting a rules-based international trade order, they add.
The Financial Times presented some granular predictions from the same analysis:
And from the mainstream USA Today:
President Donald Trump’s widening global trade war has clobbered the stock market, raised the odds of a U.S. recession and started to push up inflation for American households with the prospect of much steeper price increases ahead.
Trump says the ultimate prize – spurring more production in the U.S. and reclaiming the nation’s status as a manufacturing stronghold – will be worth the turmoil…
Amid Trump’s tariff threats, a handful of large manufacturers have said they’ll locate factories or new production in the U.S., including Hyundai, Honda and Apple.
But trade experts and economists say it’s unlikely a significant share of makers with overseas factories will move established supply chains halfway around the world under the threat of on-again, off-again tariffs whose duration is uncertain in a tumultuous economic climate. Those that do would have to grapple with severe shortages of skilled workers.
Even if a sizeable share relocated to the U.S., the number of jobs created would be relatively small and more than offset by those wiped out in a recession, economists say.
Further comments from the peanut gallery, um, Twitter:
Holy shit. Trump just lost Fox News:
The S&P 500 just dropped more than 1%, sliding to its lowest level since September due to Trump's dangerous tariffs. Nasdaq dropped 1.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.3% — and Big Tech is down across the board. pic.twitter.com/0wsdtlPESn
— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) March 31, 2025
NEW: China, Japan, and South Korea agree to “closely cooperate” in response to U.S. tariffs
Anyone with half a brain & a basic understanding of the world could see that Trump’s relentless attacks on our allies will only isolate America & strengthen China
pic.twitter.com/BS3ppL6BTz— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 31, 2025
Note economists generally do not see the US Great Depression as caused by Smoot Hawley, although many will agree that the trade restrictions made matters worse. Nevertheless:
The economic damage from the 2025 tariffs could be so much more devastating than Smoot-Hawley.
Back in 1930, imports were 3% of GDP.
Today imports are 15% of GDP.
The economy is 5x more exposed to tariffs today than it was 100 years ago when we learned our lesson against… pic.twitter.com/duwuEKtFAH
— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) April 1, 2025
As Lambert was wont to say, this is an overly dynamic situation. Stay tuned.
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So the right wing publishing / propaganda complex built as outlined by the Powell Memo has produced a leadership class that believes the propaganda without understanding the underlying realities the propaganda was designed to bend to the benefit of Capitalists.
Per Kalecki, ” One of the important functions of fascism, as typified by the Nazi system, was to remove capitalist objections to full employment. The dislike of government spending policy as such is overcome under fascism by the fact that the state machinery is under the direct control of a partnership of big business with fascism. The necessity for the myth of ‘sound finance’, which served to prevent the government from offsetting a confidence crisis by spending, is removed. In a democracy, one does not know what the next government will be like. Under fascism there is no next government,” Trump appears to get the political intent, but without understanding “functional finance” first he seems hell bent on destroying productive capacity at scale and to devastating effect.
I suppose this is fine with the Nerd Reich as they want to implement some form of universal basic income and think that will keep perpetual rents flowing to them. Like economists “assume a can opener”, these ideologues assume an economy, the “invisible hand” (AI in their version) will fix everything.
I think that they will find that the “invisible hand” is going to give them a very visible finger.
Heh heh heh, thanks. It’s a less offensive finger because it’s just a reproduction.
The “invisible/visible finger” can also be painful, even to those who pretend not to see it.
Yes, thank you for the chuckles Rev. Always have to maintain humor in dese times.
The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.
https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-4417639
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tEgzTS6oH8
Jsn, how does, for example, the economic rise of China fit into your own underlying assumptions? It seems to me that your present ideological orientation no longer captures many contemporary configurations of wealth and power.
Wasn’t there supposed to be a forever classical opposition between market and command economies?
It seems that Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, and China are excellent examples of economic situations where, at a minimum, state and corporate entities are intimately intertwined.
Aren’t we presently in an era where mergers between the state and capital challenge misleading dualisms like “state versus market or public versus private or democratic vs authoritarian?
Just maybe your own assumption of forever opposition between left and right is out of date. To me, it looks more and more to be the case that ideological perspectives that pit state against capital or economic individualism against collectivism are quite misleading.
Do present right populists really assume that the “invisible hand” will fix everything or is this conclusion largely a consequence of your own ideological bias?
“Wasn’t there supposed to be a forever classical opposition between market and command economies?” No.
If you try to sort out what happened from history rather than fit narratives to ideology, at least from my reading, mixed systems have had the best results. Markets, like money, are political creations. To the extent that politics embodying popular values manage markets, market based economies have out performed. The Hamiltonian development of the US, the New Deal and the post Mao administration of China are all cases in point.
Per the Kalecki quote above, Fascism works, for a while… The only firm “ideological” belief I have is that change is constant, so no such system will last without continually re-organizing. Not that that helps much if you’re caught in it, change can come in intervals longer than your life and from an individual perspective less coercion is better than more. Maybe we can all agree on that. And coercion is an expensive governing tool: to the extent it succeeds in the near term it kills itself with costs, economic and human, in the long term. Collapse of the USSR and the current charming situation here would be recent case studies, with Romania and East Germany as subsets of the former for local color.
You have imputed a bunch of ideas to me not in evidence in what I wrote. Complex systems work the way they work. They can be studied and understood. To then talk about them without writing book length texts simplifies. I quoted Kalecki who summarized very concisely a macro economics based on functional finance and the dynamics of capitalist power. While there are more layers now, I don’t think the basic economics or humanity of the issues has materially changed. What has is the environment which is being physically burned by this system as it loses it’s coherence in the face of ignorant mal-administration.
All the libertarians I know do “assume an economy” as if nature provides it. The technologists have replaced that faith with a faith in AI which I expect to be more promptly harmful. The underlying problem to my eye is that we’ve converted, Buckley vs Valeo to Citizens United, a corrupt Republic into a bastard political marketplace where policy goes to the highest bidder. This has resulted in an Oligarchic smash and grab that promises to seriously degrade the productive capacity of the underlying real economy at an accelerating rate until someone who understands how these systems actually function starts putting things back together from whatever lower plateau we’ve landed on where they can pick up the pieces. As P. K. Dick said, “reality is what’s left even when you don’t believe in it” (I probably misquoted there from memory).
a pdf of Kalecki can be found here
it holds up well today
‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’
Trump is going to put the economy into a terrible mess and not only in the US but around the world as well. So maybe a general recession? Thing is, it has only taken him a few weeks to do all this but I think that he will still be dealing with the fallout for what he is doing right up to his last day in office. And that is only the economic problems. There will be geopolitical fallout as well as many countries will reflect that the BRICS countries don’t do stuff like this to them, especially China. And countries are getting sick and tired of the constant threats and punishments. So maybe some countries will conclude that maybe trading with the US is not all that great a deal and maybe it would be better to find other, more reliable partners.
>his last day in office
Ya mean 20 years from now, at the ripe old age of 98, just after he hands the scepter to Baron?
Very unlikely. Better odds of a US civil war or a loose federation of former US states.
If Trump was doing amazing things that actually “Made America Great”, he might have a hope in hell of pulling of a coup for a third term.
But not now.
>>>>Mr. Trump’s 25% tariff on foreign cars, which goes into effect this week, will raise car prices by some amount.
Cripes, even the WSJ ed. board has a competency crsis and/or never walks in a car showroom, lol.
Take a Chevy Tahoe (SUV), or any full-size “American” truck…while assembled in the US, only 1/3 of a Tahoe’s parts are of US origin.
GM, Ford, Stellantis (the old Chrysler) are masters of merely assembling carsi n the US while sourcing parts ex-US (Mexico-China) as much as politically viable. The Germans are the same way w/outourcing parts production to E. Europe and Mexico, too
Ironically (not really) the Asians have taken the long-term view and most Toyotas are “more American” than a random Chevy.
https://www.cars.com/american-made-index/
The irony is that a 4.5% tariff would have much of the same effect without shock therapy. But Trump loves the American tropes of “Go big or go home” and, I guess,”Go ugly early”
For Team Rabid-Anti-Trump, you are best off by just staying on the sidelines and grabbing popcorn.
But for those of us on Team Rabid-Anti-Tech Bro, sitting on the sidelines is not good enough. The Tech Bro Industrial Complex has to be destroyed. As in exterminated. But how?
Whatever it takes to destroy, exterminate and annihilate Big TechBro from existence, it won’t involve staying on the sidelines and grabbing popcorn.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Is commenting on a niche blog sufficiently hidden from the panopticon’s gaze? Should there be a resurgence in CB radio use, or some more modern form of air-gapped communication network? Put a megaphone on the roof of your car and scream through it, like Alex Jones in Waking Life?
Thang you fur your innarest in mah komment. Ah am aw-ways happee to here from yew. Pleez lead mi no iff yew half enny furder kommentz.
Just a few observations – on the assumptions that these tariffs are ‘for real’ and not just an attempt to create general chaos to pressure allies to ‘get in line’ with whatever Trumps real agenda might be.
1. Its often forgotten that the US had a positive balance of trade in 1930 when the Smoot-Hawley Act was passed. The US was the Germany/Japan of the day – an advanced country that had persuaded everyone that its trade surplus was due to the superiority of its products and not due to domestic demand suppression or active support for exporters. This was just one reason why the Act was particularly stupid – if there is a law of trade wars, it is that countries that run a surplus are likely to be the losers. It was a classic bullet to the foot moment for the US. The situation is reversed now, so whatever the impact will be, it won’t be the same as in 1930.
2. From what I can see, the analyses produced so far are quite crude in that they assume bilateral trade relations, which in reality is not how modern trade works. Supply chains are very complex and the ‘losers’ or ‘gainers’ of a tariff may well be third countries. I suspect the big losers from these tariffs won’t be the big exporters like China or Japan, but developing countries, particularly in Asia, who will find it hard to deal with a combination higher import costs plus a wave of cheap Chinese surpluses trying to find a home. This could devastate nascent industries in countries like Indonesia and Vietnam, unless they play the game carefully.
3. US exports are generally quite tariff resistant – the biggest sectors are oil, agricultural products, base chemicals and ‘base’ industrial products like bulk textiles. This makes it very hard for countries to retaliate as responding tariffs will damage their own industries. And cancelling big weapons orders isn’t as easy as it looks.
4. Brad Setser was noting on twitter yesterday that it seems likely that Saudi Arabia now needs £90 a barrel to prevent a slide into debt. One wonders what their reaction will be to what they will see as a deliberate attempt to suppress demand and along with it world oil prices. A war with Iran might well be their best option.
5. If you live outside the US and you like bourbon or zinfandel, stock up now.
‘A war with Iran might well be their best option.’
Not when all those Iranian missiles can turn all the Saudi oil infrastructure to ash it isn’t.
Very optimistic outlook, but yeah, the complex supply chains will have knock-on effects and have very negative potential. War with Iran will not be very rosy, also unintended consequences.
And in the US, as long as one can afford to pay what I call extortion (monopoly/oligopoly price gouge) and can afford to have private security, this will be relatively painless. For the vast majority of the US public, not so much. The US public can be sacrificed, there is no democratic accountability.
@JonnyJames at 11:49 am
The top 10% of households, those making $250,000+ yearly will be unaffected. They account for 50% of consumption. The remaining 90% are mostly docile and without political representation. They don’t matter to the people running the US.
Is there nothing legal that we of the bottom 90% can do to ” reach up and touch someone”?
At least let the best minds of the bottom 90% think about that.
Is there nothing we can do to shrink the economy from the top down? To shrink-wrap the economy around the head and neck of the top 10%? To cut off their financial air supply? Or at least reduce it?
After all, the top 10% get every bit of their money-for-consumption from the bottom 90% Is there nothing we can do in additive multi-personal aggregate to degrade and attrit that upward redistribution of our wealth and money?
I appreciate these questions; I can only offer that I have the same kind of thoughts. I will watch this space.
Thank you for the kind words. I hope there are answers, even if only partial. They won’t have a great effect but they might have some small effect. And people pursuing them might also grow into an ongoing community of looking for real things to do in a real way for real effect.
One way of looking at tariffs is that they are a tax on consumers in favour of domestic manufacturing interests. This is why they are so effective for developing countries lacking capital to industrialise rapidly. Since poor people spend a higher proportion of their income on goods than the rich, it is proportionately a bigger tax on them (although you can argue that the tariffs hit discretionary spending more than non-discretionary, which could be said to be a progressive form of taxation).
The big question is to what extent it causes a switch in spending and how this affects peoples incomes. For example, a high tariff on cars might cause people to postpone expenditure on changing their car in favour of, say, home improvements, or going eating out more often. Bad news for GM, maybe good news for local businesses (which could well be part of the thinking in the Trump camp, assuming there is some ‘thinking’ going on).
But one thing to note – all the focus is on the economic effect of the tariffs, but not the impact of a dropping dollar, if that is the intended (and actual) effect. A big dollar devaluation could have a bigger impact on what people can spend money on that any amount of tariffs.
Our entire economy is a money pump for the oligarchy!
All votes in the USA, are really votes for oligarchy…!
We can’t vote for change.
I was thinking on the balance of services, which i guess cannot be subject to tariffs. Could a commercial war extend to services sectors? May be selective VAT increases?
From this site we see the current situation in US:
The graph shows a more than notable spike on the on US goods deficit in January 2025 (we cannot blame Trump for that) yet i wonder why such January jump. 134billion $ deficit in a single month is quite a thing. Now that we are talking about historical precedents i don’t know if in previous commercial wars tariffs were raised at a scale comparable to that what Trump is trying, at a bigger or lower scale. There might be effects associated with very sudden changes and possibly very difficult to predict. I, for instance, don’t give 5cents for the predictions cited by the Guardian and the FT.
IGNACIO wrote: “….a more than notable spike on the on US goods deficit in January 2025 (we cannot blame Trump for that) yet i wonder why such January jump.”
Actually, you can blame the Career Criminal for that. When the threat of new 25% taxes (er, tariffs) became clear, there was a large jump in the number of packages in the mailroom here at Retirement City. People were loading up with shoes, socks, clothing and what not from places like TEMU (spelling ?) or wherever in China it was coming from.
Thank you old ghost. More imports on provision of tariffs. That might indeed be the exact explanation. Now i feel somehow silly for non having figured it out. Not very problematic for me, mind you. One can be silly at least twice a day without any remorse as long as one comes to the realisation and can stand corrected.
Services are always subject to more subtle means of trade warfare. A simple example would be putting obstacles in the way of service providers by tweaking rules on the recognition of professional qualifications, or indemnity requirements, or even language rules (the Irish legal profession keeps British legal firms out by the simple means of imposing an Irish language obligation on barristers). Some Asian countries – South Korea and Japan being prominent examples – are past masters of using ‘unofficial’ rules to keep foreign retailers and construction contractors out of their local markets.
It doesn’t have to be official – in pretty much every country you’ll find a constant low level battle whereby local service providers in line with offficialdom at too sorts of levels put up a myriad or rules in order to make life difficult for outside competition. It even happens of course within countries, not least in the US (i.e. State permits for all sorts of service businesses).
But there are services which are monopolies (or nearly) like Facebook, Google, Amazon… that would require specialized attention.
It’s harder to hit those countries, as the units you would be tariffing can be based in Europe (or elsewhere). So it all gets legally complicated.
South Korea is the one country outside China/Russia that has successfully challenged US social media companies – they just shut them out in order to develop domestic alternatives like Naver and Kakao. They even refused to allow Google to use their mapping vehicles. They could only really achieve that by having strong control of software too.
Yes, i think that of SK is the only viable approach actually.
There is a pretty good explainer here on how the complexities of international tax law may come into play as a ‘counter’ to tariffs, specifically those on intellectual property rights.
While Trump may hope to force companies, in particular in the pharm and software sector to reshore to avoid tariffs, most countries have a variety of exit tax set ups that will punish companies that attempt to do this arbitrarily.
In Canada, people are quietly pissed at Trump.
Many are boycotting American goods in their grocery stores.
The stores have taken to labeling Canadian goods.
Some distributors are placing labels to obscure their origin (e.g. Orange Juice being labeled “Product d’Ici” and putting the word “Canada” near but in a different font/colour.)
Trump may be putting in place “emotional trade barriers” which could impose real costs but are not captured by the raw tariff numbers.
Unsure about the quiet part. :)
But Canadian MAGA’s have definitely gone quiet.
It’s the one thing being done that is actually different in the current economic global order.
I just say buckle up and see what shakes out.
The ways of Big Don are indeed mysterious but, as the Prophet said “don’t criticize what you can’t understand”. A deep study of theology provides us with a clue to the Don’s Franciscan insights and his profound need to increase prosperity for all the people in the the world – even if it means a degree of sacrifice on the part of his fellow Americans, their European partners and an untold number of Palestinians.
His insight that, because of the weaknesses of the US economy, BRICS is becoming an evermore attractive proposition to its members, associates, partners and other as every day passes, and that the biggest players, including Iran and Saudi Arabia, will work towards helping other developing countries to protect and grow their infant industries to become bigger markets with which to trade both as importers and exporters, and every action taken by the US should underline that fact.
This is obviously the key to the Don’s Grand Strategy to Make America Good Again and bring the world in line with his deep sense of Christian commitment to human welfare and egalitarian imperative and we should respect him for it and open our hearts to allow his nobility to warm our very souls.
And the poor are having a little chuckle at all the hullabaloo.
“Oh, so life might get hard huh? Tell me about things getting hard for you :)”
The poors voted for a table flip and this is certainly that, innit? Not very far to go when you’re already at the bottom. I imagine the medium-rich MAGAs are going to feel a bit duped, hah!
Are they? “Vote the bums out” is what I recall. And no, there will be little buyers remorse amongst the MAGA crowd. They are just as subject to brand loyalty over common sense as the act blue crowd.
Hard core MAGA, yes, but those people didn’t/can’t elect Trump or his successor alone; they need defectors from the (fraying, granted) D coalition: working class Rust Belt whites in 2016 (whose votes for Trump declined in 2020) and culturally conservative Latinos and other naturalized immigrants in 2024.
Case in point: an in-law’s close relative, a lower middle class Colombian immigrant who is a naturalized citizen, and lives in the Bronx Belt Belt. These are communities mostly but not entirely in the South Bronx with large numbers of Evangelicals, and who have traditionally voted Democratic (though for conservative local candidates). These are people ignored by the academic and activist imbeciles who gave us Latinx (ah, remember that “legacy” of the High IdPol Era? Good times!)
These communities, my in-law’s relative among them, made a yuge shift toward Trump in 2024, even among those naturalized citizens with undocumented friends and family (which is to say, virtually all of them). Those people are now freaking out and having serious buyer’s remorse, as their undocumented loved one’s are living in terror of getting swept up by Kristy Noem’s masked Disappearance Squads.
I imagine there are other groups that were part of the 2024 Trump Coalition that are likewise feeling vulnerable, and we’re less than 100 days in with these characters: when tariffs, layoffs, stock declines, cuts to Special Ed etc. really set in, Trump and the Repugs will lose support. How that loss of political support for Trump manifests, and how he responds to it, it’s hard to say… but manifest it will.
I agree.. I don’t believe electing successors is relevant, because I believe we’ve seen our last presidential election, barring a near term coup with reasonable intentions, which is a long shot for sure.
Perhaps – I’m skeptical of that in the short term – but even then the lack of an election doesn’t mean the end of politics; dissatisfaction will manifest, however crudely or incoherently.
“Those people are now freaking out and having serious buyer’s remorse….”
And yet, every poll I see shows Trump near all time highs, over both terms. Whatever backlash there will be — and how could there not be — is still in the future.
No Making Shit Up. That is NOT what polls say. He has already slid into serious net disapproval:
brand loyalty….in the us: a signature consequence if its aversion to public enlightenment
Yes. I also see it as an aversion to owning up to being wrong.
Not at the bottom yet. There’s always “sleeping rough” and an early death to look forward to eh. I could make a Soylent Green joke, but: “…that joke isn’t funny anymore, it’s too close to home, and too near the bone…”
I’ve seen this happen in other people’s lives, now it’s happening in mine
Let us be unsmothered by time’s tide. Thanks. Just the song foe the monent.
Great lyrical reply, cheers!
Thanks for this roundup, Yves. Could any of this lead to a forced economic self-sufficiency, autarky in other words, and could that be the goal? The US is becoming an axis of evil in its support of Israel and genocide and other things, so could the aim here be to preposition the US to be immune to sanctions, to have limited trade dependency, domestic production national focus, resource self-sufficiency, etc.?
(Despite that Wall Street does not want this, wants offshoring of production, as per various NC comments in the last few days.)
We do not make our own cars. Parts come from many may places
We have “raw earths” as actually many places do, but no longer can process them, which is a nasty messy process.
We do not make our own pharmaceuticals. Over 90% come from China or India.
We do not make our own ascorbic acid (essential for many things). It all comes from China.
We barely make any shoes.
We cannot produce heavy crude which is needed in refineries for certain grades of fuel and for petroleum products like asphalt.
I am sure readers can add to this list.
Biomedical research reagents and supplies, and basic medical supplies. A lot of it is imported or bits and pieces of a final product are.
Well, we’ve decided against research so we don’t need those supplies. Double win!!! Trump & Elon are playing 3D chess. Possibly with Pogs.
Have a glance at this figure https://www.bostonfed.org/-/media/Images/2025/02/06/14/34/20/cpp-feb2025-tariffs-figure-2-v2.jpg The chart is from the Boston Fed’s 2025 report “The Impact of Tariffs on Inflation” which is here: https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/current-policy-perspectives/2025/the-impact-of-tariffs-on-inflation.aspx
It shows that a little over 90% of “personal consumption expenditure” in the category “Pharmaceutical and other medical products” is on directly imported goods (75% of expenditures) or on domestic production dependent on imports as inputs(15-18% of expenditures). What the chart tells us, I think, is that medicine is the sector of the US economy that is most dependent on imports. Notice that in addition to “Pharmaceuticals etc.” there are several other medical categories near the top of the chart, with high dependencies on domestic production dependent on imported goods.
Yves, are you saying it’s not possible for the US to become an autarky, therefore it’s not a reasonable question whether that’s the goal with this seemingly self-destructive economic behaviour?
This is all blind application of ideology. There’s no logic here. This is not about creating an autarky. Trump is using tariffs because it’s a weapon he can use against other countries without having to go to Congress.
If it were, DOGE would not be destroying the Federal government. We’d need a more muscular and competent Federal government to implement industrial policy and get us closer to self-sufficient. But we can’t solve the heavy crude issue. We export a lot of our pollution to China (see rare earths as an example), so we’d have to bring that home. We’d need even better higher education and science. We’d have to build pharma manufacturing. Those are bare starters. See anything like that happening?
Ideology always drives the “logic”. We all understand it to be stupid, but war is also stupid, capitalism is stupid, the economy is stupid, and yet we understand the rationales given for these. Is radical isolationism and protectionism the goal, and does it fit the method (tariffs, self-destruction of relationships, destruction of international commerce, destruction of the market, tanking the economy, etc)? Despite the interdependency of US production lines, do wanton infliction of tariffs have a good chance of perhaps very slightly rejigging the US economy toward this?
No. Not at all.
If it were part of a plan it would look like this.
It isn’t, so it looks like this.
Thank you jsn, both very neatly address my question (and also, I’m following Ian Welsh from here on).
This would be a fun, crowd-sourced game……here is a very important, but unsexy, one: magnets.
whether industrial or consumer grade.
@Yves Smith at 11:21 am
I am now starting to think the tariffs are about building up US industry for the coming war with China. The US couldn’t win a war with China today given its current industrial configuration, including dependence on China itself for many important industrial inputs and all kinds of other things.
The example of Russia is instructive. A country with a minute GDP compared to the West has prevailed handily in its proxy war against the West, and surprisingly easily not least to the Russians themselves. But Russia still had its manufacturing industry which it could mobilise for war.
Bringing industry back to the US via tariffs is the first step. Will the US be able to effectively mobilise its industry for war with a peer? I have my doubts. US war industries operate on an inefficient cost-plus, for profit basis. Russian war industries were nationalised and operate to defend the motherland from a foreign threat. Not the same thing at all.
China is preparing for war with the US. I don’t know how its war industries operate. But at the very least the war will have the advantage for China of being close to home, presumably around Taiwan which ironically is recognised internationally as being part of China.
Notwithstanding that GDP is a poor indicator of the actual size and capability of an economy, I’ve seen some good arguments stating that the FIRE sector should be reduced from the GDP, since it doesn’t produce any goods or services for the money it sucks out of the productive sectors.
GDP: quite so. Michael Hudson argues finance should be subtracted from GDP since it is a cost that produces nothing. Another example: half of US healthcare expenditures should be subtracted due to the remarkable inefficiency of that sector.
Emmanuel Todd has a page in his book “La defaite de l’occident (The Defeat of the West”) where he deflates US GDP to what it should be, about 40% smaller than what it is claimed to be if I remember correctly. Amusingly he claims, tongue in cheek, he should receive the “Nobel Prize” in economics for his work which couldn’t have taken him more than an hour. And yes I know there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics, that’s probably part of his joke.
The book is definitely worth a read if you read french. Don’t expect an english translation though. Todd says he assumes none will be done because the CIA won’t allow it.
https://annas-archive.org/md5/4c9713b6cd334e013ae9f4af62571763
Oh! A Google translate version in English! What do you know.
Translation software usually requires some tweeking to make the translation sound right. I wonder if someone did that. (I’ve used Google and DeepL)
Nope. Minimal copy editing, if any :-(.
Cool, thanks for that resource in general.
If Italian is easier for you than French, there’s also an edition for you with an updated and fairly extensive author’s preface:
https://www.lafeltrinelli.it/sconfitta-dell-occidente-libro-emmanuel-todd/e/9791259676375/recensioni
I’m about 70% through and find it very interesting. I am not enthralled with Todd’s approach of attributing our general social/economic/cultural decline to the “zero”ing out of the Protestant ethic, but it’s hard to argue with the ample quantitative evidence he cites.
Definitely worth reading, even if you reject his primary causal argument (and he might say it’s only intended as correlative).
I am astonished and scandalized that this has not been published in the Anglophone world. I can think of no more convincing evidence that our mass media are as effectively censored as in any classic dictatorship.
Russia’s the fourth largest economy, and is not saddled by the a lot of very expensive and rent extracting service industries, like the US and other western countries are. Russian GDP/PPP is more reflective of real world than that of the West. Same for China.
There was a clip circulating with a Chinese fully automated missile factory able to churn, allegedly, loads of missiles per day…
Yes PPP is useful but it only accounts for purchasing power and does not correct for vast parts of the economy that are an actual negative but still count as positive GDP. The US healthcare sector is a good example. In GDP terms it accounts for 18% of the economy but since it is both grotesquely overpriced and inefficient its contribution should be cut in half to approximate what it would be in comparable countries where non-profit healthcare dominates.
Yes, I would want all economic rents subtracted from any metric designed to evaluate relative productive capacity between nations — especially one calculating warmaking capacity.
Exactly. I am in the specialty food and spice business. Think about something like coffee and demand for it in the US. What, are we going to turn all of Hawaii into a coffee plantation? Still wouldn’t be able to meet demand. Raw sugars? We could never meet that demand either. What about all the spices that make our food good and delicious and interesting? A lot of them can only grow in the tropics and the sub tropics. I think people don’t really think through and visualize the scope of trade. There is no ‘autarky’ or whatever without an impossibly gargantuan reconfiguration of life here.
The HVAC industry has announced price increases from 10% to 25% on equipment – much of which is made off shore, particularly Mexico. Many water heaters are going up in price as well. Hopefully nobody needs either of those for the next 5 years while new factories get built (odds the prices will drop when made in the US — nil, but America will be great again).
Thanks for this write-up. The crazy is off the charts, but what’s to be done? Is the libertarian utopia eating cold beans from the can while trying to stay out of the weather, because that’s looking like a near term reality for many. An exponential increase in the “unhoused” is on the way, and it’s not going to be pretty. Good times.
Make America Agrarian Again!
Drop those tools! Come out of the woods with your arms up!
It’s the Morgenthau Plan coming home to roost
That almost cost me a mouthful of decent single malt!
“…When the Wall Street Journal editorial board is a voice of sanity, you know it’s bad…” Yeah, gotta laugh to keep from crying.
In general, the political and economic situation in the US has only worsened in my memory. Infrastructure crumbling, consolidation/monopolization, perverse income and wealth inequality increasing, quality of life decreasing, health indicators the worst in the OECD etc.
The DT2 regime appears to be hastening the Decline and Fall of the US Empire, and conditions may start to worsen at an even faster pace than before. With a mentally unstable moron in charge, other countries will quicken their search for alternative trade partners and agreements.
In this environment, who would want to invest in repatriating industries to the US? The uncertainty and risk alone seem like a deterrent. The infrastructure is a joke, it would take many years to rebuild manufacturing capacity, and policy could change on a whim from the unhinged emperor. On top of that, as Michael Hudson and others have pointed out: the US has the highest health care overhead in the world, very high transportation, insurance, and housing costs etc. Even in the third-world like environments in low-wage states, the overhead costs are too high. In short, this is a reckless and foolish endeavor that will expedite the Decline.
As I noted before the so-called elections, the DT will be an even more honest and transparent face of the US empire than the previous regime. Arrogant, full of hubris, ignorant, sadistic, mendacious, desperate, and extremely reckless. I think these disparaging descriptions are accurate and well-deserved, not political rhetoric.
Good comment, thanks. Nobody wants to hear that we’ve been on this path for a long, long time. This is merely the latest episode (the finale?) of a story about a nation that loves freedom, no, scratch that, loves robber barons and the idea of free money.
Thanks mrsyk. Even now, many still believe in the fairy-tale of US democracy. My corrupt D representative cynically exploits the situation: he tells everyone to “vote” D and everything will be fine. What a cruel joke, the lies and hypocrisy are so deep, I need hip waders, or even a hazmat suit.
@JonnyJames at 11:21 am
I agree the US is declining in the way you say and increasingly becoming a toxic mess, but it doesn’t matter to the people that count. The top 10% live very well. I know a few in the top 20% and they live well also. So the fact the bottom, say, 50% are in serious trouble is irrelevant to the people making the decisions.
The oligarchs at the top, and their servants, want to “make America great again” meaning recapturing its dominance of the world. Medium term that means building up war industries located securely at home (following the Russian example, see my comment above). Short term, sure there’ll be disruption but a number of important industries are already relocating to the US and this is only after a couple of months of threats of tariffs.
Longer term rivals will either submit or be attacked.
I hope Larry Johnson is wrong when he says he fears US warmongering will only end once the country lies in ruins following a war.
the US arms industry is notoriously inefficient (not to mention fraudulent) and has failed to produce weaponry to match Russia, for example. Simply put, the institutional corruption in both the private and public sectors in the US, prevents the US from producing cutting-edge weaponry, let alone efficiently.
Johnson has a point of course. Interesting that desperate politicians in Europe, countries who have experienced widespread devastation from wars, are willing to do it all over again. Even if this is empty bluster, it speaks volumes when looking at the broad historical context.
It also could be that the US will not stop until the financial house of cards comes crashing down. Without the “exorbitant privilege” of the USD, US ability to project power abroad will evaporate
I don’t expect a financial crash to lead to disruption in US warmongering. “The financial house of cards” already came crashing down in 2008-9. The fed saved the banks, etc. and the economic system. Sadly the Obama administration failed to do enough to help the rest of USians.
But it’s not the people who personally were affected by the widespread devastation in Europe, is it?. It’s their grandchildren who are in charge now.
For the grandchildren, 80 years and 100 years ago are ancient history. And the devastation only happened because their grandparents weren’t as smart as they are. That is the way of the world, we always know we are smarter than our parents and grandparents.
A devastation that you read about in books and hear about(maybe) from doddery old people is quite different to a devastation that blows up your own house, kills some of your family, and leaves you destitute.
Hubris is inversely proportional to personal hardship.
A rather late number of those grandchildren in charge had Nazi grandfathers.
The handful of Europeans I have talked to about this (only superficially, I admit) have tended to think they’re under serious threat from a Russian invasion. (That’s what their media keep telling them, I guess?) So they don’t think they are initiating a devastating war, but that they are forced to respond to an imminent threat, whether they like it or not. Who knows what the politicians actually think, as opposed to what they say.
The Polish Lithuanian commonwealth fell because the oligarchy could’t renounce some of its privileges and wouldn’t agree on anything.
The Byzantium’s decline started with big land owners, very big ones, stopped paying taxes and supporting the imperial coffers to protect with military against foreign attacks.
Hungary dissapeared in 1526 after Mohach because in 1514 they destroyed a mass revolt started by ahungarian speaking peasants in Transylvania and there wasn’t a popular support for the monarchy any longer. The Sekely that revolted were the tip of the spear against Ottoman Turks, always joining Wallachian or Moldovan princes in their fight against the Turk.
French aristocracy fell for economic reasons as well.
And so many other similar examples from all over the world…
Sometimes I entertain the wild and crazy notion that no monarchy has fallen until they are all gone – in every form or fashion.
People say they are just symbolic this and symbolic that. But imagine them being kept around in a glass cage with a hidden “break in case of emergency” sign.
JonnyJames: it would take many years to rebuild manufacturing capacity … as Michael Hudson and others have pointed out: the US has the highest health care overhead in the world, very high transportation, insurance, and housing costs etc.
It’s 2025. Hudson is arguably wrong about those high rentier costs that the US population endures — housing, transportation, insurance, all the rest — being an insuperable barrier to bringing manufacturing back to the US.
That’s because in 2025, if factories returned to the USA, they’d be automated.
Look at videos of China’s factories and the figures on numbers of people they employ. Globally, manufacturing employment, jobs, and salaries are going the way they did in agriculture. In some modern factories, they don’t even waste money on lights inside them and they’re kept dark, since there are only machines in there.
In theory, then, Trump’s Federal government could simply issue edicts to build such factories in the US. (The expertise and technology is to a large extent Japanese and Northern European.). So too could someplace like, say, the UK even.
In practice, however, that would do nothing — zilch, zero, nada — to bring manufacturing employment back to the US. To the contrary: it’d be extremely capital intensive and it’s hard to see how the companies building the factories would recoup their expenses in many cases, especially as overheads rise and — people would need to have salaries to buy the products these factories produce, after all — the ranks of the US unemployed grow.
There’s a definite black comedy to it all.
I see your point, but Hudson’s point is still valid: the debt overhead and rentier costs are not only on the “little people” it is a claim on the entire productive economy, automated or not. He writes at length about it.
Although more AI and automation is in the cards, I don’t see human workers being made redundant altogether.
Who is going to invest all the capital in the capital intensive projects, plus improving the dismal infrastructure etc.? The inefficiency in the US applies also to infrastructure. It looks like that would take years and trillions. More likely the plan is to further assets-strip the US
No matter, it is a dark comedy indeed.
Bill McBride has a construction post up today showing that manufacturing construction has stalled already in the US. Once the money from the Inflation Reduction Act ran out the steam went out of it. Nobody is willing to use their own money only other people’s money.
Long term planning is not possible with Mr Trump at the helm. Would be better for the gov. to take equity positions in these things rather than grants and loans. They can sell the winners to their donors after the runs are on the board.
As Yves always says, “cui bono?” This is a windfall for American business owners who will use the tariffs to increase profits. The same as they did with “inflation,” they will increase prices above and beyond the cost of the tariffs to increase their profit margins. Just look at the current price of eggs and the obscene profit growth of Cal-Maine Foods ($50 million of EBITDA in 2021 to $1.1 billion in 2023 and $883 million for the last 12 months). Some of those profits will work their way back to Trump and his cronies as campaign contributions.
Look at me! Look at me
If Judge Juan Merchan had an ounce of gumption he would have jailed Donald Trump pending his sentencing and ordered a psychological evaluation that very likely would have found him to be a psychopath with sociopathic and narcissistic tendencies.
People with odd and conflicted parental relationships seem to rise to the top in our superficial society: Reagan (alcoholic father), Clinton (deceased father; alcoholic step-father), Obama (absent father), and Biden (depressed father/business failure) come immediately to mind, but Trump’s relationship with his mother was astoundingly bad.
Trump’s Outer Hebridean immigrant mother Mary Anne née MacLoed was absent after she nearly died during the birth of his younger brother during a critical developmental stage (ages 2-4). He became pure id and no ego. Mary later convinced Donald’s father to send him away to military school at the age of 13 due to his out-of-control behavior, while his 4 siblings remained in the family home. She is said to have told Ivana during her messy and public divorce: “What kind of son have I created?” https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/03/mary-macleod-trump-donald-trump-mother-biography-mom-immigrant-scotland-215779/
Psychopaths make terrific entertainers and that’s all that matters in our screwed-up culture. There is zero accountability. The recent NYT story of U.S. generals selecting and targeting American weapons on Russian soldiers and pretending that they’re not making war in blatant violation of U.S. and international law because “Ukrainians” pulled the trigger is astounding evidence of this.
I could not agree more that the destruction of American manufacturing was a disaster, but the roots of this were sown during the period when basic American enterprise abandoned innovation in favor of “clean” industries like aerospace and its spawn tech. Burdening the global economy with massive tariffs is not some magic wand that can simply be waved over the greenfields left in the wake of American manufacturing’s departure.
The man and the sycophants surrounding him are delusional.
You’re right, they are delusional, and vicious.
But I also have to say it’s also delusional to think that jailing Trump for the Stormy Daniels “crime” – a conviction that had a high likelihood of reversal upon appeal, for legitimate reasons, and even if legally strong was politically imbecilic – was ever feasible or desirable.
If you’re going to fight Hitler and everything that put him in place, then be serious, ie don’t think you can lead off a Lawfare campaign against him with the accounting fraud equivalent of jaywalking. It discredits you and the institutions you claim to be protecting, and strengthens Trumpismo… which is exactly what happened.
Putting aside the armchair analysis, I believe that a different case can be made that if the Democrats were not so intent on punishing Trump into convincing him not to run, AND that useful idiots like Merchan and Bragg hadn’t run clearly blatant show trials, Donald might have faded into a similar oblivion as Hillary. And we could have had an election where all the candidates were on the same page. (I would put the January 6th fiasco in the same bucket. Strategy is not the Democrats/Beltway regulars strong suit). The trials gave Trump an irresistible media presence, made him a victim and yes, depended on the media not doing what they do – putting aside everything for ratings. It KEPT him viable. And gave him every reason to run for his life, because he was. It was literally the only way he was going to escape dying in prison. The ill thought out assassination attempt was a massive Hail Mary failure that turned into a Trump touch down, but it also probably drove the point home to him that his life was on the line.
The real problem is not Trump and his cronies, it is all the cronies who long ago did not have, as you say, accountability. And in the process their profits uber alles have meant a huge destruction to America. All of which is now being deeply threatened by Trump’s game of tariff chicken. There has not been a sensible, what’s good for the common will be good for the rich in the long run political power in dogs years. So while Trump may end up being the final pitch, the psychopaths that have come before him in Congress and the White House and the donors who have bought them played the first 8 innings to get us to this point.
Just a side note along with all our Presidential mental nightmares, you might want to turn your analysis on Pelosi, McConnell, Schumer, O’Neill, Haysbert, Reid, Daschle, Lott, Baker, Gingrich, Boehner, Johnson, Rayburn….And follow it up with the wealthiest Americans from every decade.
Alvin Bragg only picked up the ball because AG Merrick Garland wasted years kicking the ball into the bushes so that he wouldn’t have to explain why he wasn’t going after the even worse behavior of the Biden Crime Family. Another sad legacy of Obama and the “Holder Doctrine” designed to shield their funders from prosecution.
This is why Bragg’s righteous fraud case gets dismissed as mere lawfare. Russiagate was never anything but a bad-faith hoax. It also undermined our faith in the integrity of our government. In France the prosecutors and courts have followed through on Marine Le Pen’s blatant multi-million Euro embezzlement from the European Parliament, unlike the American “Too Big to Jail” mentality.
In France the prosecutors and courts have followed through on Marine Le Pen’s blatant multi-million Euro embezzlement from the European Parliament.
The problem with this is that they started and ended with Le Pen…
Seems to me that ex-Président de la République Nicolas Sarkozy recently served a couple of prison terms on house-arrest for campaign finance and corruption violations. They did not start with Le Pen; hopefully the French courts will not end with her either.
Unlike France, in America the law protects the elites but does not bind them. It binds the People but it does not protect them.
When you see a country that resorts to jailing its popular opposition leaders on recent ‘fraud’ charges….
You are looking at a country where the law is being used by more powerful interests (military or wealthy or both) to rid itself of inconvenient voices.
And they can get away with it now because the people no longer have a say, elections or not.
We have an autocrat in France who ignores elections, an intelligence dupe in the UK who is turning it into 1984, a Blackrock safe pair of hands in Germany, and the EU uber alles (see Romanian elections).
The US escaped by the skin of its teeth this last election because the irritant to the ruling bloc was a billionaire himself and could fight fire with fire. But the new ruling bloc looks to be getting mighty settled.
There were brownfields left in the wake of American manufacturing’s departure, not greenfields. And there is great cost involved in rehabilitating such brownfields. Think Superfund sites and then start multiplying…
Out here in western NC, I see a lot of foreign cars, of the lower end variety. This is definitely going to hit home out here. Oh course out here, with the tourists, I see a not insignificant number of mid range and high end luxury cars as well, and those people perhaps won’t care so much. Quite a few hugeish SUVs as well, the bigger, the better. They’ll care about stocks going down, though, probably.
So the EU-tards are crushing their own economies and Trump the US-economy + possible collateral damage.
Pure evil? They really want to push people into poverty, it seems.
Time to watch DYI guilloutine videos?
There’s been discussion here of a Promote Crash >> Pillage the Remains strategy. Is that relevant to this topic? With the advent of Trump, who seems indifferent to maintaining economic alliances, I’ve been remind of Tooze’s emphasis on the role of the Fed in bailing out peers during the GFC. Could the goal be a rerun of the GFC, but without Fed support, or available only with heavy costs to the central banks receiving it?
More of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism perhaps?
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1237300.The_Shock_Doctrine
Um.
Does anyone know what Trump will do with the money that is collected on the tariffs?
If you could point me somewhere that would be appreciated.
Not to worry. I’m sure DOGE will be all over that money.
The Gold(en) Dome?!
Tax cuts, allegedly.
Strategic Bitcoin Reserves + filling the giant hole left by cutting billionaires’ taxes.
As Donella Meadows (and others) have pointed out from empirical observation, anytime you have people directly handling the levers of complex systems two results are almost certain:
1) They push too hard and 2) Achieve the opposite of what they think they are doing leading to Chernobyl like outcomes. Whatever it is Trump hopes comes out of this, my guess is it isn’t going to make him look better.
“As lambert was wont to say”. Sigh, past tense.
The “Invisible Hand” is wearing a calving glove, BOHICA.
On average, Trump sued somebody every 10 days for 30 years before assuming the Presidency the first time…
Are these tariffs a way of ‘suing’ the world?
For the US to be salvaged, the rest of the world would have to unite and sanction the US the way Russia was sanctioned. Then that ‘impulse’ might cause a ‘reaction’ in the US to rise to the occasion and to start actually trying to become self sufficient instead of relying on loans (debt) and theft (appropriating foreign resources).
Blaming the entire world for the US addictions of avarice and debt is not very far sighted.
Trump is, interestingly enough, actually doing something about a systemic US problem.
Since Reagan every government has had to lower taxes in some way or another, frequently through underhanded means. This of course means that the US will eventually go broke as it’s running a war economy without a hot war. Empires are costly and they *always* impoverish the centre.
So Trump is raising taxes to pay for it, he’s just doing it in the usual underhanded way to make sure his donor factions do not bear the brunt of them. The Tariffs as everyone has said right from the beginning will punish ordinary Americans, that’s the whole point.
Trump does not care about US industry, US citizens, homelessness, drug crises or anything else. He wants money and his donor factions give him money if he can balance the books while not making them pay. He has persuaded his ‘base’, the humorous US term for half of people that can be bothered to vote for a system that punishes them, that this will lead to prosperity, security and dignity. Well it won’t but that’s not the point.