Incoherence and dictatorial ignorance

The Atlantic's Derek Thompson ventures that Hollywood screenwriter William Goldman's aphorism of "Nobody knows anything" is the best summarized foundation of Trump & Co.'s tariff — I'll be charitable — planning. "If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy," writes Thompson, "it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why."

The difference between Trump's "economic plan" of tariffing hither and yon and 19th-century protectionism is that the latter made sense in terms of its real-world implications. With the exception of President Lincoln's briefly imposed income tax, taxes on imported trade were then the principal source of the U.S. government's revenue, hence political battles over the extent of those revenues just naturally erupted.

The industrializing North was of course in favor of protectionism, while the South's agrarian economy felt only pain from the taxes its citizens had to pay for certain European goods. My father once recalled that as a border-state child he would hear two very elderly family members still engaged in raging arguments over tariffs, pro and con. Such disputes were as fundamental to 19th-century politics as pro- and anti-Trump disputes are today.

Today's tariffs, on the other hand, make no sense at all; even among its proponents there's immense incoherence, notes Thompson.

Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro claims the tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next 10 years, "making it the largest tax increase in American history." But then Trump's Silicon techie people claim that his bruising tariffs will soon lead to a glorious free-trade world. And then there's the third school of thought, brought to us by Trump's Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Stephen Miran, who says "the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States." Three views, three mammoth incompatibilities.

On what Trump cruelly labeled America's "Liberation Day," he again sputtered that for a half-century the U.S. has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far," and that all this ripping off of America has to stop.

Economist Noah Smith has attempted to enlighten the regrettably ineducable troops of tariffying TrumpThink, writing that "when I buy a washing machine from Target with my credit card, I’m writing an IOU and I’m getting a tangible thing in return. Does using your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target mean that Target has ripped you off? No. Does it make you poorer when you use your credit card to buy a washing machine from Target? Nope. You now have less money, but you have more stuff." Nice try, Noah, but even the simplest analogies will never puncture even more simplistic Trumpism.

A Wall Street Journal editorial, observes The Bulwark's Mona Charen, described Trump's tariff maneuvers as the "dumbest trade war in history." Along that line, Charen further observes that while it is perhaps easy to overrate the ordinary person's intelligence, "Trump is no ordinary man. His stubborn strain of stupidity belongs on a list of deadly sins" — a towering stupidity and stunning "weak-mindedness" which are now hurlng the globe into economic chaos. "Trump," she writes, "has an obsession with trade. He always has, and his views are wrong historically, economically, and even morally."

Charen's most poignant analysis of Trumpian stupidity pings on all three counts of its wrongness — history, economics, morality — and it's also her most fitting analysis. Only in the past, she notes, can one find parallels to Trump's enormous bumblings, and that is the past of "dictatorial regimes." Charen reflects on the 1930s' Stalinist regime in which "the ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko gained acceptance not because they were true but because Stalin wanted them to be true."

You've probably read of Lysenko. He replaced scientific agronomy with Marxist-Leninist ideology, shoveled it onto the U.S.S.R.'s farming fields while Stalin promised that Lysenko's "new biology" would yield vastly larger harvests. That didn't work out, thus "millions of men, women, and children starved to death because a leader was able to impose his fantasies on a whole society."

It's too easy to ask, Sound familiar? More to the point, its dictatorial familiarity is scary and, for too long, inextinguishable. Narrowing that larger issue back down to this dictatorial regime's tariffs, Derek Thompson suggests that their ghastliness "most likely represent[s] little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy."

And so again we can say how fitting, since throughout history all dictators, from little tinpot generalissimos to superpower autocrats, have seen grandiosity as the only strategy.