Riddle Me This

 

"Liberation Day" has revealed how ill equipped all of our institutions are to deal with the second Trump administration. So many different rationales have been given for the imposition of our new tariff regime that it is impossible to formulate a coherent picture of why this policy is happening and what we can expect moving forward. Are the tariffs permanent? Are they a negotiating tactic?  Is the goal to return manufacturing to the United States? To pay for tax cuts? To reduce the deficit? No one can say for sure, and the administration is making no effort to clarify the matter. Quite the contrary.

 Despite this atmosphere of pervasive confusion, pundits and officials cannot resist the impulse to try and make sense of the morass. Statements by Trump or some combination of his advisors are sifted through for clues.  Accusations of "Trump Derangement Syndrome" will no doubt rain down fast and thick. 

Any debate over the policy logic or goals of "Liberation Day" is wasted effort, perhaps deliberately so. It is much easier, as is virtually always the case with Trump, to examine the political logic behind this newest campaign. In some respects the political logic of the new tariff regime falls in line with what we have seen from Trump past. Polarization is his game, and the new tariff regime is nothing if not polarizing.

But in important respects "Liberation Day" has launched Trump into new political waters. He has very frequently lied or contradicted himself, but he has not completely reversed himself rhetorically in so grandiose a fashion. After spending three years on the campaign trail promising that he will bring prices down, he has now instituted an intensely aggressive program which by his own admission is certain to bring prices up.  After almost a decade of promising to make his followers rich and so sick of "winning" that they will beg him to stop, his tune is now that there will have to be pain. 

This is strange, and it gets stranger when one examines the raw political dynamics at play. This raft of policies, even if they prove temporary, will fundamentally restructure the global economy. The effects will rebound to the detriment of tens of millions of Americans on all levels of the wealth scale, but will be especially punishing (at least in the short and medium term, should the tariffs remain permanent) to those with the lowest incomes. 

What will the electoral impact of these policies be? We just saw the Democrats lose an election because the price of eggs was too high. What will happen as the price of everything rises? What kind of work would an administration have to do in preparation of launching such a policy, how many months or years of careful messaging and consensus building would be necessary to avoid electoral disaster? How much of that legwork has been done in this case?

It is difficult if not impossible to make any political sense of "Liberation Day." No White House which set out to enact this set of policies in this way could possibly expect that they would be sustainable at the polls. Nor does Trump's status as a "lame duck" explain away the dissonance. The execution of "Liberation Day" is virtually guaranteed to arouse such ire in voters that the policies themselves will be eradicated and reversed at the ballot box. 

If we can't make political sense of Liberation Day (and we can't), then we must search for its logic outside of politics, or at least outside of the purview of politics-as-usual. One place where all this might make sense is in Trump's own imagination. He gives every appearance of being impulsive and driven by ego. He might not care what the specific impact of this policy will be, except that it will affect millions and be remembered. 

Another possibility is jarring but simple: Trump has pushed ahead with this policy without any regard for its disastrous electoral consequences because he does not believe it will ever be tested at the ballot box. If the electoral system broke down or were suspended, Trump and his supporters would not have to worry about paying a political price for driving up the cost of living and causing the American economy to contract. Indeed, if one's goal was to end democratic elections, the new tariff regime might be just what the doctor ordered. The economic and social chaos it is likely to cause would foster conditions in which the POTUS would have a pretext for declaring martial law. 

 It is important to note that these two scenarios are not mutually exclusive. Trump may have been driven to this folly purely by a fantasy of power, but as the political blowback becomes clear, he might feel forced to neuter our democratic institutions as an act of self-preservation. There are many enablers around him who will urge him to antidemocratic expediencies to "save the nation" and rescue the project of "making America great again," and virtually no one who will hold him accountable to his oath of office, least of all himself.

 Whatever its underlying motives or the power dynamic that conditions the evolving shape of the tariff regime, Democrats would be well advised to refrain from engaging Trump and his minions in debate on MAGA's own terms. The MAGA crowd would love to debate the wisdom of using tariffs to do any one of three or four things that they claim this policy was designed to accomplish, but that is, to quote our last president, "malarkey." No policy that is going to cause this much pain should ever have been imposed so unilaterally, so rashly, and with so little attempt to raise public support or build consensus. Undertaking this gambit with so little forethought, effort, or political preparation is impeachable malpractice, and is patently indefensible.