I’ve never met Donald Trump nor had any dealings with him, and since I don’t watch television, I’d barely paid attention to his antics until his unexpectedly strong run for the White House began attracting heavy media coverage in 2015.
But some time ago I was privately meeting on other matters with one of Trump’s powerful and influential backers when Trump’s name happened to come up. Since I tend to be forthright and speak candidly about most things, I casually described him as an “ignorant buffoon.” I was hardly surprised that my interlocutor failed to reply to that provocative characterization, but I noticed the slightly embarrassed expression on his face and interpreted his silence as an admission that he quietly shared my own appraisal.
I strongly suspect that the worldwide tariff policies recently declared by Trump will soon cause more and more Americans, including erstwhile Trump supporters, to come to that same distressing conclusion.
Tariff policy is part of economics, and I hardly claim any great personal expertise in that discipline. Indeed, quite the contrary.
Back almost a dozen years ago, before my increasingly controversial writings rendered me far too radioactive for such things, I was invited to participate in a televised NYC debate on the economics of immigration policy, with one of my opponents being the prominent libertarian economist Bryan Caplan of George Mason University. The show was syndicated around the country and simulcast on NPR, and early on I boldly admitted my total ignorance of economics, declaring that not only had I never taken a class in that subject, but I had never even opened the pages of a single economics textbook.
However, I also suggested that much of economics constituted basic common sense and perhaps partly as a consequence of that approach, our side won the debate by the widest margin in the history of that series, with one of the opposing team members even shifting towards our position.
Given this history, my negative appraisal of Trump’s new tariff policies should obviously be taken with a large grain of salt but not necessarily completely disregarded.
During his successful 2024 presidential campaign, Trump had often promised to impose heavy tariffs upon those countries that he believed were unfairly benefitting from one-sided trade with America, and reindustrializing our country would be an important element of his plan to “Make America Great Again.” So his personal affinity for tariffs was hardly unexpected.
Indeed, soon after coming into office, he had used what he described as his economic emergency powers to impose heavy new tariffs upon much-demonized China, which was not unexpected. But he also declared that huge tariffs would be imposed upon goods from Canada and Mexico, our closest neighbors and friendly allies. This was a major surprise, not least because during his previous term he had personally negotiated his own USMCA North American free trade agreement with those same two countries.
Now for Trump as our 47th president to denounce and completely repudiate the policies of Trump as our 45th president was at least a little eye-opening.
However, over the next few weeks, his repeated suspensions, reversals, and modifications of these new North American tariffs led to many suspicions that they merely amounted to bluster, being international bargaining ploys aimed at bullying our neighbors and that they would only briefly remain in place. This considerably lessened their perceived impact upon the integrated regional economy that had grown into place since the 1993 enactment of the original NAFTA agreement under President George H.W. Bush.
As a consequence, his announcement last Wednesday of sweeping new tariffs against almost every other country in the world hit like a thunderbolt. On April 2nd, Trump held up his chart showing those new tariff rates, and the figures were so astonishing that many observers probably felt that the plan should better have been issued a day earlier on April Fools’ Day.
For one thing, Trump’s actions were clearly illegal under American law. As many have noted, tariffs are obviously taxes, and according to the American Constitution, all tax bills must originate in the House of Representations and then be passed by both houses of Congress rather than be unilaterally imposed by our executive branch of government.
This has been the system for nearly our 250 year national history, including such notable cases as the notorious Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and Trump 45’s own USMCA agreement signed in 2018.
But now Trump 47 declared that he would impose these new worldwide tariff rates by unilateral executive order, citing the emergency powers that he possessed under a 1977 law.
However, the “emergency” in question was apparently America’s ongoing deindustrialization of the last ninety-odd years. As prominent international economist Prof. Jeffrey Sachs pointed out, an “emergency” that had been taking place for nearly a full century hardly seemed the sort of “emergency” envisioned under that bill.
Yet that minor legalistic technicality barely scraped the surface of the very bizarre tariff rates that Trump had decided to impose against the 150-odd other countries of the world.
For example, our factually-challenged president declared that his new tariff rates were “retaliatory” and indeed the first column of the chart he displayed showed the foreign tariffs that had allegedly provoked his retaliation, but everyone quickly noticed that these figures were total nonsense. Switzerland hardly imposes a 61% tariff on American goods, nor does Vietnam maintain a 90% tariff rate against our products.
Instead these figures were merely calculated using a formula based upon America’s existing trade deficit in goods, which was something entirely different. So if another country sold us more goods than we ourselves bought, that was described as due to a tariff even if no such tariff actually existed. In a perfect example of this absurdity, Trump incorrectly claimed that the penguins of Norfolk Island near Antarctica maintained huge barriers against American products, with his counter-vailing tariff of 29% aimed at punishing those water-fowl for their unfair trading practices.
Obviously, Trump’s claims justifying his new tariff rates were totally ridiculous, but they were actually ridiculous in several different ways.
For example, it’s undeniably true that for decades America has run a horrendous and growing global trade deficit with the rest of the world, most recently totaling $1.2 trillion during 2024.
However, suppose that this weren’t the case, and our trade in goods with the rest of the rest of the world were totally in balance, just as Trump wished it to be. Under those circumstances, we would naturally have trade surpluses with some countries and trade deficits with others, with all of the different figures netting out to zero.
But according to Trump’s framework, those countries with which we had a trade surplus would still be hit with a new 10% tariff while those with which we had a deficit would suffer much larger tariffs, and these would then be jacked up if those countries decided to retaliate. So the apparent goal and endpoint of Trump’s policies would be to sharply reduce or even eliminate all our trade with the rest of the world. Thus, Trump was self-sanctioning America much like he had sought to do against Iran, Russia, North Korea, and all the other countries he and previous administrations had regarded with considerable hostility.
Yet oddly enough Trump seemed to believe that cutting off the global trade of countries he didn’t like would severely hurt them, but cutting off our own trade would strengthen our country and benefit the American people.
His declared tariff methodology was even stranger. I noticed that all his international trade statistics focused only on goods while ignoring services.
So if our trade with some particular foreign nation were in perfect balance, with a deficit in goods exactly matched by a surplus in services, Trump would only consider the former not the latter, and impose large tariffs to reduce that problem.
Back in the 1990s, Paleoconservative trailblazer Pat Buchanan had advocated a sweeping set of controversial economic and political policies that greatly outraged our reigning intellectual establishment, with higher tariff rates among them. These positions led the Donald Trump of that era to harshly denounce Buchanan as “a Hitler lover.” But with the sole exception of Buchanan’s sharp criticism of Israel and its powerful American lobby, our mercurial current president seemed to have now fervently adopted nearly all of Buchanan’s ideas, but apparently attempted to implement them with an IQ that seems 30-40 points lower.
I’ve only casually explored Trump’s bizarre tariff proposal and given my self-proclaimed ignorance of economics, perhaps I even misunderstood some of its elements. But according to media reports, his proposal raises average American tariffs on goods more than ten-fold, from around about 2% to 24%. This will surely constitute a gigantic shock to our economic system.
American businesses and the investors who own them seemed see that shock in very negative terms, with our stock markets suffering their sharpest declines since the unprecedented collapse caused by the Covid epidemic of Trump’s previous term.
I’ve long suspected that our stocks were heavily over-valued, and Trump’s tariff announcement may have finally punctured that huge bubble, perhaps with financial consequences greater than he expected or intended.
For example, I’ve been rather surprised that high-profile tech companies that spent years annually losing billions of dollars have continued to maintain and even grow their market valuations, and perhaps these will now finally come to earth, even with a gigantic thump. I had also thought that the release of China’s inexpensive and open source DeepSeek AI system would have a greater impact upon the American AI companies burning through so many billions of dollars each year, and maybe that will now happen.
Just a few days before the very sharp drop in American stocks, the Wall Street Journal had run a major article noting that over the last dozen years or so, the outsize returns in our stocks had drawn in unprecedented amounts of foreign investment. This inflow of funds might be reversed if stocks heavily fall, which would obviously magnify that effect.
Perhaps after their extremely sharp drops on Thursday and Friday, American stocks will stabilize themselves this week or even regain some of their lost ground. But perhaps the decline will still continue or accelerate.
The self-proclaimed goal of all of Trump’s wild tariff plans is the reindustrialization of American society, achieved by persuading major corporations to increase their domestic investment and relocate their factories back to our shores. But as numerous critics have pointed out, his policies seem rather unlikely to achieve that result.
Creating a major factory along with its associated sub-contractors and supply-chains is a very lengthy and expensive undertaking, likely to involve years and billions of dollars. So planning such major investment decisions requires a great deal of certainty that the factors responsible for the shift will remain in place for many years to come, thereby justifying such long-term capital expenditures. Uncertainty in the business climate will lead to the postponement of business investments.
Yet uncertainty is surely the watchword of Trump’s mercurial economic policies, with the recent announcements of crippling tariffs against Canada and Mexico having been repeatedly restricted, reversed, or delayed from day to day and week to week. Nobody had expected the sweeping worldwide tariffs announced last week, and given the ongoing collapse in global stock markets, nobody can say whether those tariffs—or even the president who issued them—will still be around in a few months’ time. Only a particularly foolish corporation would initiate long-term investment plans until the situation becomes much more clear.
So although Trump intended to promote a huge wave of new industrial business investment in America, the actual results seem much more likely to be the exact opposite.
Leaving aside my own lack of economic expertise, it’s been noteworthy that virtually every practitioner of the dismal science—-whether left, right, or center—had denounced Trump’s policies as idiotic. This was the position of a moderate, mainstream economist such as Prof. Sachs, but the notorious editorial page of the Wall Street Journal did the same. And the reaction of leftist economists with deep Marxian roots such as Michael Hudson and Richard D. Wolff was just as scathing.
In that lengthy discussion of several days ago, Prof. Hudson argued that political leaders were expected to act in the best interests of their own countries, or at least in the interests of the wealthy corporate elites that owned America, but that Trump’s tariffs would almost certainly have the opposite impact. Meanwhile, Prof. Wolff burnished his leftist credentials by including a few random and totally irrelevant denunciations of “White Supremacy,” but otherwise came to the same mystified conclusions.
Interestingly enough, Prof. Sachs saw a silver lining to Trump’s irrational behavior, suggesting that he might be successfully fostering international cooperation by uniting the entire world against our own country.
For example, China, Japan, and South Korea have often had unfriendly relations with each other, but the bizarre tariffs that Trump had now imposed against all three of those neighbors led them to quickly hold mutual talks aimed at working out a common response to the looming economic challenge. Similarly, all the major European countries may begin to work together, and also mend their frayed relations with China, with India doing the same. Trump has sometimes declared himself a uniter rather than a divider, and he may have now proven that claim on a global level though not exactly in the sense that he personally intended.
The U.S. does still possess the world’s second largest economy after that of China, and also the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal after that of Russia. So we must not take lightly the bizarre trade wars that Trump has now unleashed against the rest of the world, nor his repeated threats of a hot war against Iran and China and the continuation of the Ukrainian proxy war against Russia. These certainly threaten the peace, prosperity, and stability of the global system.
Perhaps Trump and his loyalists will be proven entirely correct, with his new tariff policies wildly successful and all the many economists condemning them totally mistaken. If so, American industry will once again rise from its ashes and dominate world production much as it had done during the early postwar era. But I very much doubt this.
So instead let us consider the other possibility, that Trump’s proposals will be just as totally disastrous for our country—and to a much lesser extent the rest of the world—as his multitude of current critics allege. What would be a reasonable historical analogy?
I think it is extremely rare that a major country falls into the hands of a leader both so bold and so powerful as to push through such a totally self-destructive economic plan, and the best analogy that comes to my mind was the agricultural policy imposed by China’s Chairman Mao during the years 1958-1962, generally known as the Great Leap Forward.
ORDER IT NOW
Though estimates vary, a few years ago I read Tombstone, a hefty volume published in 2008 by Yan Jinsheng, a former high-ranking Chinese journalist, and it seemed quite persuasive to me. According to Yan, the official estimate of merely 18 million deaths reported by China’s own government was a severe underestimate, and the true body-count of excess fatalities from starvation, malnutrition, and illness probably totaled around 35-40 million.
In more recent years, many pro-China activists have denied the reality of that striking event, but official population pyramid published a couple of decades later by the Chinese Census Bureau certainly shows a gigantic hole from those years, reflecting the huge rise in infant mortality and drop in fertility rates caused by that gigantic famine:
One reason that the Chinese famine produced by Mao’s wrong-headed policies became so severe was that most of the Great Helmsman’s eager subordinates were unwilling to admit that they weren’t working, and instead falsely reported its hugely inflated successes and concealed its disastrous failures. When China’s defense minister raised concerns about the terrible starvation that he had seen with his own eyes, he was swiftly purged.
All of this seems somewhat similar to what may transpire in the sycophantic Trump Administration and its media echo-chamber.
Obviously, America is hardly balanced on the knife’s-edge of food shortage as was the China of sixty-odd years ago. But the consequences to our economic well-being of Trump’s strange tariff scheme may follow a similar trajectory.
I normally buy my toilet paper in large packages from Costco every several months, and had luckily done so just before the 2020 supply-chain disruptions of the early Covid epidemic removed that necessary product from our market shelves. But a few days ago a headline in my local Palo Alto newspaper mentioned that toilet paper is manufactured from the soft Canadian lumber that we import, and its supply might be severely disrupted by Trump’s heavy new tariffs, so when I visited Costco a couple of days later, I purchased another pack a month or so earlier than I otherwise would have done. The New York Times just ran an article about such possible panic-buying, and although the reporter found no such current indications, I wonder if things might change in the next few weeks.
Five years ago, under Trump 45 our country experienced supply-chain interruptions that no one had ever previously seen, and these might soon recur under Trump 47.
One central policy of Maoist China sharply repudiated over the last half-century had been the preference for “Red versus Expert,” the notion that ideological and personal considerations should outweigh technical expertise in selecting individuals for important administrative positions. Based upon recent events, Trump seems to strongly favor the Maoist line.
For example, at the end of last week he abruptly fired the top general in charge of the NSA, apparently doing so because some notoriously eccentric 31-year-old right-wing activist named Laura Loomer had denounced the officer as “disloyal.” A number of his other senior National Security Council staffers were also removed on similar grounds.
Or take our current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. An Iraq War veteran and gung-ho FoxNews pundit known for his “tats” and multiple marriages, Hegseth had no experience running a large organization when Trump nominated him to control our $800 billion Pentagon, and had been fired for mismanagement by both of small non-profits he had led. Moreover, it quickly came out that he was known for his violent drunkenness, and he was plausibly accused of having committed rape during one of those sprees.
Placing a totally unqualified drunken rapist in control of the American military seemed a bridge too far even for party loyalists and it was widely assumed that the nomination would be withdrawn. But Trump stuck to his guns, and agitated Trumpists sufficiently intimidated wavering Republican senators that Hegseth was very narrowly confirmed.
As I discussed in my previous article, the entire month of March was filled with a harsh ideological crackdown upon Columbia, Harvard, and many of America’s other greatest centers of higher education, with these enforcement actions being taken by Linda McMahon, the wrestler-lady, whom Trump had named to run his educational policy.
Mao’s similar destruction of Chinese higher education took a generation to repair, and I wonder what might happen in our own country.
Just before that, teams of very young Trump supporters organized by Elon Musk’s DOGE project had invaded the premises and computer systems of the huge agencies of our federal government. They promised to purge many tens or even hundreds of thousands of the experienced civil servants whom they despised, much like Mao’s equally youthful Red Guards had done during his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
This especially got my personal attention when a media expose revealed that one of the most prominent of those zealous Trump Guards had actually drawn his inspiration from my original American Pravda article, which he seemed to almost regard as the Little Red Book of his anti-establishment movement.
I was recently interviewed by a right-wing British podcaster named Mark Collett, and although the primary topic of our conversation was the JFK Assassination, other issues did come up.
He suggested that the personnel policies of the Trump Administration reminded him of those followed by the Emperor Caligula, who might be so pleased at the wine-serving abilities of one of his slaves that he would immediately elevate the fellow to running an imperial province or commanding a large army, before growing dissatisfied with him a few days later and ordering his summary execution.
Collett noted that some right-wing Trumpist pundit named Dan Bongino had acquired a wide following on Rumble, and our new president had suddenly elevated him to become the second-ranking figure at the FBI.
Generations of heavy media conditioning have indoctrinated empty-headed Republican boomers into regarding blacks as the god-like exemplars of American society, whose heroic exploits as sportsballers and gangsta rappers represent the twin cultural peaks of Western Civilization. This becomes a problem when the latter are surprised to discover that other countries are much less forgiving of their violent crime and rampant drug-dealing, so during his first term Trump moved heaven-and-earth to free the rapper A$AP Rocky from the Swedish prison-cell he occupied for his violent crimes.
Perhaps something similar helps to explain Trump’s demand that all federal corruption charges be dropped against Mayor Eric Adams of New York City.
A few years ago there was a popular joke going around on Chinese social media in which Chairman Mao came back to life with all sorts of questions about the modern world. Given the current antics of President Donald Trump, I expect it may soon be revived in modified form, incorporating Trump’s sudden decision to isolate the U.S. from the economies of the rest of the world.
Related Reading:
