President Donald Trump’s newly announced tariffs have sent shockwaves through the financial markets, the business community, and the international community. They risk a near-term recession and major, sustained upheavals to jobs and supply chains. Totally contradicting Trump’s promises of a glorious renaissance, domestic car manufacturers such as Stellantis have already started cutting jobs.
The basic truth?
Trump’s actions will make the vast majority of Americans and citizens of other nations poorer. These tariffs will also provide a critical, if indirect, boost to the Chinese Communist Party’s hegemonic aspirations. The reason tariffs of this scale haven’t been attempted for a century is not, as Trump suggests, because all his recent predecessors were idiots. Rather, it is because these tariffs are themselves idiotic.
Trump’s motives for returning jobs to America might be moral. Still, the cartoonish glee with which the president regaled us with his plucked-out-of-thin-air tariff cardboard assessments on Wednesday showed a deep unseriousness of executive leadership, as does Trump’s plan to tariff an island occupied by penguins, and tariff at 29% a tiny Australian island that doesn’t appear to even export anything to America. There is a callous disdain for credibility here that cannot go unnoticed by the rest of the world. Take the dispute as to whether these tariffs will target Taiwanese semiconductor chip exports, for example. Whatever the reality here, the very fact that this question is in dispute shows how utterly unserious this policy is. Those chips are the lifeblood of American tech dominance and the artificial intelligence revolution.
At the political level, Trump has handed his opponents an easy chance to restore some semblance of organization and purpose to their otherwise divided ranks. Democrats will surely have an array of potent soundbites to deliver over the next few weeks. Just think of the opportunities: “#Checkyour401K?,” “MAPA/Make America Poorer Again,” or “#Trumpcanceledmyvacation.” Republicans on Capitol Hill will soon have to choose between risking Trump’s ire and entertaining their own political evisceration in the 2026 midterm elections.
They will have to choose because Trump has pulled the rug from under the feet of American prosperity. The president has immolated the key propellant behind decades of U.S. economic success: the general sense of investors and consumers at home and abroad that America offers a safe, predictable market that provides a high probability of sustained, significant returns on investment. Trump’s utter ignorance of that concern underlines his broader arrogance here.
Indeed, his tariffs are built around numerous delusions.
Emulating socialist command economists, Trump and his cohort believe they know what is better for Americans than Americans believe is best for themselves. Consider that these tariffs will likely, in the longer term, boost the production of U.S. goods such as cars, electronics, white goods, et cetera. The problem is that the marginal cost of those goods will also increase even as the quality of these goods and choices of which ones are affordable decline. Protected industries need not invest in innovation and consumer concerns when they need not fear competition.
In both the immediate and longer term, Trump’s tariffs are a recipe for impoverishing family savings and the associated pursuit of happiness. Are the creation of a few million new jobs worth the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of citizens having to pay more for cars, refrigerators, vacuums, furniture, food, and healthcare products? Are those few million jobs worth the lost pursuit of happiness for hundreds of millions of middle-income people who sometimes like to treat themselves to foreign products because doing so makes them happy?
Trump’s bluster of his own innate brilliance also belies the reality that the rest of the world will retaliate to these tariffs. Domestic companies that sell high-value products abroad will face their products suddenly becoming more expensive for consumers from Europe to Australia. At least some of the well-paying jobs those goods support will perish with their lost foreign consumption, as will the hundreds of billions of dollars in economic production these exports provide annually to the U.S. economy. Will Trump simply tell aeronautical machinists and engineers to make T-shirts instead? And how will they like the lost income that goes with that choice?
Trump’s action will also make the nation and world less safe.
The broadly sustained peace and unparalleled prosperity that has defined the international order since 1945 has been sustained by the American guarantee of general democratic cooperation and free trade. The record is imperfect. Recent protectionism, such as that being offered by the European Union against U.S. tech firms, is a serious concern, for example — perhaps even deserving of limited U.S. tariff retaliation, as is allies freeloading off the back of the U.S. military.
Nevertheless, Americans, our allies, and people just about everywhere have all assumed unprecedented wealth via America’s leadership in enabling our best businesses to compete freely. The mutual benefits accrued here have extended to the political domain. They have led foreign governments to follow America’s lead against enemies, including Russia, Al Qaeda, and China.
Now, however, Trump has gifted China with the most priceless gift. China is the one tariff target that deserves everything it is getting. After all, China is America’s most determined, capable adversary. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s regime is responsible for hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S. intellectual property theft each year. In turn, U.S. policy should seek to weaken China. The problem is that while these tariffs will hurt China regarding its U.S. exports, they will also greatly strengthen China in terms of its influence over U.S. allies.
Seeking to offset the painful loss of access to the U.S. market, long-standing U.S. allies in Europe and the Pacific will become far more open to making political concessions to Beijing in return for boosted access to its vast market. Only American influence has stopped even the closest allies from doing so until now. These allies will now move further away from Taiwan. They will now increasingly reject U.S. concerns over Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft. And they will now increasingly refuse to join U.S. efforts to counter China’s global coercion. The leaders of these nations will do so because they will face elections by voters who will be desperate for economic improvement and voters who will now blame America for their reduced prosperity. China’s gambit has long been clear: Don’t challenge us politically, and we will shower you with investment. In contrast, America’s gambit begins and ends with whatever Trump learns from daily visits to his magic mirror on the wall.
For just one example of the long-term consequences, ask yourself whether these voters will now be more or less likely to support their governments’ joining U.S. military action to defend Taiwan.
IS TRUMP FINALLY WAKING UP TO PUTIN’S MANIPULATION GAME?
In essence, then, Trump is putting his ideological fixation on tariffs and the interests of a few million Americans before the interests of hundreds of millions of Americans and before the security interests of all Americans.
Tell me more about Making America Great Again.