- Heather Cox Richardson on reactions to Trump’s tariffs, including Canada’s reaction and how Republicans hope this will somehow all work out;
- Jonathan Chait on how Trump has already botched his plan by suggested he might negotiate;
- Aside about my motivation for posting all this stuff;
- Another item about the crazy math behind those tariffs;
- How the GOP has an Orwellian solution to pay for Trump’s tax cuts;
- And how a right-wing conspiracy theorist seems to be dictated Trump’s NSA decisions.
Heather’s Perspective
Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson: April 3, 2025
She begins with Trump’s full-caps pronouncement about the “operation” being over, and so on. Then summarizes the market reactions. Then this:
Today, former treasury secretary Lawrence Summers posted: “It’s now clear that the [Trump] Administration computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data. This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science. The Trump tariff policy makes little sense EVEN if you believe in protectionist mercantilist economics.”
Recall that Nancy Reagan had, and followed the advice of, an astrologer.
Another reaction:
Editor of The American Prospect David Dayen … writes that Trump’s tariffs are essentially sanctions on the rest of the world. His behavior is, Dayen says, “no different from a mob boss moving into town and sending his thugs to every business on Main Street, roughing up the proprietors and asking for protection money so they don’t get pushed out of business.”
Some historical perspective:
Trump is overturning the past 80 years of global trade cooperation in order to concentrate power in his own hands. Congress began to take down the tariff walls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when it passed the 1934 Reciprocal Tariff Act enabling the president to lower the high tariff rates Republicans had established with the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff. That tariff had worsened the Great Depression.
And then that news about Canada.
“The global economy is fundamentally different today than it was yesterday,” Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney said today. “The system of global trade anchored on the United States…is over. Our old relationship of steadily deepening integration with the United States is over. The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services is over. While this is a tragedy, it is also the new reality.”
Long column that goes on about closures of more government offices, a kerfuffle with the governor of Maine, the unpopularity of Project 2025, and of Elon Musk.
My partner keeps asking me why the Democrats don’t *do* something. My response is, why don’t the Republicans *do* something? Heather ends:
Republican members of Congress could stop Trump at any time. In the case of tariffs, they could simply reassert their constitutional power to manage tariffs. If they choose not to and the economy doesn’t recover and thrive as Trump keeps promising, voters can be expected to hold them, as well as him, to account.
Right now Republican leaders appear to be hoping that Trump’s attempt to extort other countries will work and the tariffs will be short lived. But their enthusiasm for that strategy seems to be well under control.
Today, Bill Ackman resorted to defending the tariffs by posting: “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side you are crazy.”
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But then there’s this. Trump isn’t a stable genius; he’s an unstable moron.
The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait, 4 Apr 2025: Trump Has Already Botched His Own Bad Tariff Plan, subtitled “Once you’ve said you might negotiate, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mind and say you’ll never negotiate.”
It’s there in the subtitle, but I’ll quote the opening.
Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported.
Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over.
The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place. (They’re probably not going to do it anyway, in part because they don’t know who will be president in four years, but the point is that confidence in durable tariffs is a necessary condition.)
Trump claimed on Truth Social that his policies would never change, then
[P]recisely two hours and 17 minutes after insisting that his policies would never change, Trump returned to Truth Social to announce excitedly that the policies were going to change: “Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S. I thanked him on behalf of our Country, and said I look forward to a meeting in the near future.”
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My motivation by writing this kind of stuff up, as always, is to understand what these incidents reveal about human nature, and in turn what they suggest about the future of humanity (taking my science fictional perspective). On the one hand, humanity has advanced greatly in recent centuries, if by advancing you mean greater understanding of the world and universe, and greater health and longevity of people. On the other hand, the tribal mentality keeps re-asserting itself, tearing down anything that threatens tribal solidarity. Is this an endless cycle? Well, it may seem so, yet humanity has in fact progressed. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t all fall to ashes.
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Perhaps I belabor this. For now, a couple more links.
Salon, Quinn Sental, 3 Apr 2025: “This is bananas”: Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs rely on “indescribably crazy” math, subtitled “Trump admin ‘computed reciprocal tariffs without using tariff data,’ ex-Treasury Secretary says”
(Humanity’s advances have come from those who can do legitimate math.)
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Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 4 Apr 2025: The GOP has an Orwellian solution to pay for Trump’s tax cuts, subtitled “Extending them will cost trillions of dollars? No problem.”
Evoking Orwell, and “two and two made five.”
Senate Republicans on Wednesday decided their party alone would control how math works. This is a pressing legislative question at present, because pretzeling budgetary outcomes into prettier shapes and sizes will determine whether Republicans can pass President Donald Trump’s promised tax cuts.
Those cuts are very expensive. Not only do they include extensions of the 2017 tax law provisions (set to expire this year), but they also lower corporate rates as well as carveouts for tips, auto loan payments and other goodies. In total, Trump’s preferred tax agenda could cost between $5 trillion and $11 trillion over the next decade.
This is inconvenient. Republicans like to pretend they’re fiscal conservatives (at least some of the time). They would prefer not to acknowledge the hefty price tag, and they also don’t want to fully offset it with unpopular spending cuts.
So, they’ve devised a cheat. Rather than admitting how much their tax agenda would cost, they are simply asserting that they get their first $4 trillion — free!
Here’s how: Republicans say that because some (expiring) tax cuts have been in place since 2017, extending them shouldn’t be recorded as costing anything, because they wouldn’t feel different. This is … not how budgets work. As I’ve explained before, it’s like saying even though your car lease has ended, leasing another car should count as “free” because you got used to the convenience of having a vehicle around.
And,
“I have the authority to determine baseline numbers for spending and revenue,” [Lindsey] Graham said in a statement. Under that authority, he said, he can use the special book-cooking math — a “current policy baseline” — that grants his party $4 trillion in freebies.
In other words: 2+2=5, if Republicans decree it so.
Some of us want to live in reality; Republicans seem to want to create their own reality. But actual reality will catch up with them eventually.
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One more, without comment.
Vox, Patrick Reis, 4 Apr 2025: A conspiracy theorist convinced Trump to fire the NSA director, subtitled “Laura Loomer, a 9/11 truther, apparently gets input into the president’s national security decisions.”
