There is a point in football games when a team staring defeat in the face gets desperate and starts trying trick plays and throwing Hail Mary passes.
It has no option but to resort to long bombs and onside kicks because they might snatch a surprise win, and nothing else has managed to do so thus far. But the very outlandish boldness of such moves bespeaks alarm rather than confidence.
Some supporters of President Donald Trump have reached that point after a week of shocking tariff policy, trade war, and the upending of the world economy. These interconnected cataclysms have produced something near panic at home and abroad.
Financial markets are in turmoil, popular anger is rising to a boil because of vaporized retirement savings, overseas allies are looking askance at an administration sacrificing America’s international goodwill, and enemies who want nothing more than to end our global leadership are pinching themselves to make sure they’re not dreaming.
Intelligent commentators who want Trump to succeed — there are many others, of course, panting for his failure — are therefore suggesting outlandish plays that point toward the possibility of the president emerging triumphant from the present debacle.
Economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore wrote of a “win-win exit strategy” for Trump in the Wall Street Journal, suggesting he should make a TV speech in which he offers the rest of the world a zero-zero tariff agreement. America would drop all barriers to trade with any and every nation that agreed to do the same.
It would, they say, be “the greatest Art of the Deal negotiation in world history … restore a free, fair and unfettered global trading system … everyone would get richer … the American economy would be great again … and Trump would win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.”
All true perhaps, and wouldn’t it be lovely?
If Trump did such a thing, if he threw that Hail Mary, it might produce the wonders described. It wouldn’t be a bad idea, either; indeed, it would be a good one. But it was surely not part of the president’s initial game plan, though it might now be necessary.
And it does not have the ring of plausibility, does it? It seems to emanate not from a judgment of what is likely or planned but merely from two eminent economic analysts’ frantic hope that good news might ultimately emerge from a landscape afflicted by chaos and destruction.
Trump and his team do not, in any case, suggest they want a nontariff world. They sometimes say belligerence on tariffs is a negotiating tactic to make others drop unfair barriers, and they recently let it be known that 50 to 70 countries have contacted them to negotiate deals.
But they also posit a future in which tariffs sluice trillions of dollars of revenue into the Treasury, replace the income tax, and reshore old-fashioned widget manufacturing in the United States. This suggests a permanent new arrangement rather than a temporary maneuver to achieve free trade. Does Trump even want free trade? It’s an odd way to get it. One consistent policy idea of his over decades in the public eye is that tariffs are a good thing.
There are other smart takes on the 3D chess that Trump is supposedly playing. Park MacDougald at Tablet magazine backs the tariff-shock-as-negotiating-tactic theory and suggests “it’s about China, stupid,” including getting ready for a People’s Liberation Army invasion of Taiwan in 2027. Certainly, the 104% tariff Trump slapped on Chinese goods on April 8 suggests this is possible.
The idea is to isolate the threatening dragon while making it clear to the rest of the world that “you cannot rely on our defense umbrella while protecting your markets from our goods and helping to enrich China … for those who are ready to take a seat at the table and recognize that they will no longer be able to mistreat America, please come join us.”
TRUMP’S LEFTIST THINKING ON TARIFFS
Perhaps this is true. One certainly hopes so. But if the idea is to isolate China, it seems a stretch to suggest that alienating all our allies and friendly trading partners was a necessary part of the plan. The rhetoric coming from around the world makes it seem that America is the nation becoming more isolated. And if isolating China was part of Trump’s thinking, why did he pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership as one of his first acts upon entering the Oval Office in 2017?
It is still possible to reverse the damage being done to America’s reputation and economy and to pull the world back from the brink of a trade war that could plunge us all into a Depression. But you have to be a Panglossian optimist, or perhaps a pledged partisan, to think that what we’re watching now is an administration proceeding according to a well-laid plan along a cleverly discerned path toward a brilliant victory.