Countless pieces have been written diagnosing the Left’s myriad problems in the 2024 presidential election that led to a landslide victory by President Donald Trump. Obviously, running a candidate suffering from severe mental decline, only to replace him with a talentless alternative, did the Democrats no favors. But the Left’s unwillingness to abandon its wildly radical pet social policies unquestionably contributed to its losses in November.
To this day, few Democrats have admitted that the party’s obsession with perverse transgender ideology was an albatross around their neck, but it’s not hard to see why that was undoubtedly the case. Sixty-seven percent of Democrats disagree with the premise of allowing biological men to compete in women’s sports, and nearly 60% of voters oppose allowing the surgical gender transition of children.
Democrats asked the impossible of voters regarding gender ideology. To get on board with the Biden-Harris program on the issue, people were forced to deny reality itself in fealty to the party. Almost no one actually believes that men can become women or that it is fair or moral to allow men to embarrass or even injure women and girls on the field, on the court, or in the ring. Yet, legions of Democrats pretended otherwise, and it alienated the swing voters who decide federal elections.
The Trump administration and the GOP’s recent turn toward protectionism follows this same mold. While not nearly as depraved on a moral level as gender-transitioning children, protectionism doesn’t work, and team Trump is forcing free trade-supporting allies to bend the knee to counterproductive tariff policies while force-feeding bad, 19th-century ideas on a largely economically illiterate public.
Tariffs raise consumer prices while stifling domestic innovation by reducing competition. Trade wars invoke retaliatory measures by foreign governments, such as the 34% tariff China imposed on the United States in response to the Trump administration’s tariff regime. The stated goal of the White House is to bring manufacturing jobs back to America, in particular auto industry jobs, but in protecting certain sectors, trade wars risk massive job losses in sectors that rely on global supply chains.
Trump has insisted that he wants to eliminate the country’s trade deficit with all trading partners, which is as impossible as a biological man giving birth, considering that the U.S. is the richest nation on Earth and not all countries can afford the products in which American companies specialize. Since the dollar is the global reserve currency, the demand for dollars often leads to a trade deficit on paper, but largely not in reality.
WHITE HOUSE TIGHT-LIPPED ON EXTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE ON EVE OF TARIFF IMPLEMENTATION
The messaging from the White House on tariffs has been mixed, to say the least. Certain Trump advisers, namely Peter Navarro, are insisting the tariff regime is permanent, while others, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk, claim tariffs are being used as a negotiation tactic to eliminate tariffs across the board.
Perhaps the latter comes to fruition and we are spared from a prolonged, inflation-causing global trade war. Nevertheless, protectionism is a fool’s errand. Trump successfully negotiated trade deals during his first term and could have simply renegotiated them instead of upending the markets and disrupting supply chains. The laws of economics, like the laws of nature, are undefeated, and attempting to gaslight the American people into believing that the sky is green won’t end any better for Republicans than it did for Democrats.
Brady Leonard (@bradyleonard) is a musician, political strategist, and host of The No Gimmicks Podcast.