How can anyone, after April 9’s U-turn on tariffs, argue that President Donald Trump is following some brilliant strategy? The readiness of conservative commentators and politicians, almost all of them free traders before Trump altered their career incentives, to pretend to see genius in the president’s repeated contradictions is starting to scare me.
Trump is forever pulling the rug from under his apologists. No sooner have they come up with some sophist explanation for what he is doing than he reverses direction. But it never dents their sycophancy.
I am not talking here of the online numbskulls who, having contracted out their opinions to him, fulminate against anyone who hasn’t. No, I am talking about columnists and congressmen — though, frankly, they increasingly resemble the online numbskulls.
A popular meme has been circulating for a couple of weeks, parodying MAGA zealots. Whenever Trump announces tariffs, they declare, “This will create jobs,” and whenever he suspends them, they declare, “Art of the Deal.” On April 10, the White House press secretary brought the meme to life, telling journalists, without a hint of self-awareness: “Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal, you clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”
Hmm. What he is doing here? If his goal is to put pressure on China, it would make sense to bring other countries onto America’s side rather than threatening trade wars against all of them simultaneously. If it is to alter America’s terms of trade with the world, squandering the trust that the United States has built up over decades is an odd way to begin. And if it is about persuading foreign companies to move to the U.S., it has already failed — no one will invest in a climate of chaos and uncertainty.
There is no master plan. No one is flying the plane. Trump is, if anything, even more unpresidential and unpredictable than during his first term. The only constant is his neediness, his readiness to determine foreign policy around personal flattery. As he gloated in his speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee, “These countries are calling up, kissing my a**.”
As Trump’s behavior becomes more erratic, his critics say nothing. In his first term, some Republicans stood by their principles. They defended open societies against Putinite autocracies, free enterprise against state intervention, and constitutional propriety against one-man rule. This time, even as Trump’s spokesmen claim that growth is overrated, they have fallen into a frightened silence.
Frightened. Something that astonished me in Washington last week was the tone that conservatives would adopt when disagreeing with — not even criticizing, simply disagreeing with — the president. They would glance around and lower their voices, the way dissidents used to do in the Soviet bloc.
And not just politicos. A teenage friend arrived in Philadelphia last week on a school exchange. Before he left, the hosting school warned him not to have anti-Trump material on his phone, because he might be searched at immigration.
Something similar has happened to corporate America. After 2016, companies such as Nike, Heineken, and Airbnb were openly hostile to the president. This time, one by one, big corporations have fallen into line, dismissing not just their diversity, equity, and inclusion advisers, but anyone too critical of the regime. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the end of the DEI racket. But it should worry us to see firms obeying politicians for fear of repercussions. This is America, for heaven’s sake, not Bolivia.
Sadly, that difference, too, is becoming blurred. The threats to lock up opposition politicians, the mass pardon for people who tried to overthrow the previous regime, the territorial claims against neighboring states, and the caudillismo around one man — again and again, we see the U.S. becoming just one more Latin American country.
Until now, what distinguished the U.S. from its southern neighbors was its fidelity to its constitution. In the rest of the Western hemisphere, leaders would set aside constitutional restraints. Lots of Latin American presidents exceeded their term limits.
TRUMP’S TRADE WAR: THE WORLD WILL GET POORER — AND THE US ESPECIALLY
Ten years ago, the idea of a president defying the constitutional two-term limit was almost unthinkable. Now, Trump says that he is “not joking” about doing so. Of course, senior Republicans tell themselves, and the rest of us, that he is joking, really. Seriously not literally and all that. But, after deranged tariff policy, how can they be sure? And, if he really did seek to overturn the limit, what makes you think that the proper constitutional safeguards would hold?
I know that I will be accused of Trump Derangement Syndrome. And TDS is real enough. But so is Trump derangement. I know which is the more immediate problem.
