Trump has engineered something like a sanctions regime targeting Americans.
Trump has engineered something like a sanctions regime targeting Americans.
‘S ometimes,” the architect and author Robert A. M. Stern once speculated, “I think the United States embarked on urban renewal out of some kind of elaborate guilt trip over bombing so many places in the course of the Second World War in Europe.”
The insight shouldn’t be dispensed with offhand. By the mid-20th century, America’s major metros did succumb to an elite suspicion that the organic city was a mistake. It must be razed and its people deracinated, the generational links that bound them severed. It should be replaced with a sprawling, soulless contrivance. Urban renewal was an act of contempt for the gifts bequeathed to us by posterity, and all in service to the fashionable notion that the ignorant public doesn’t know what’s in their own best interest.
Perhaps something similar can be said of those who have abandoned prudence, rationality, and centuries of accumulated economic wisdom in the effort to talk themselves into believing that the global economy and America’s role in it must be destroyed. Maybe in some unacknowledged corner of their own minds, supporters of this heedless mania got tired of living in the wealthiest nation on earth and tending to its attendant obligations. Deep down, perhaps they agonize over America’s ability, all but alone in the world, to mete out economic pain to the planet’s bad actors. Maybe, like devastated postwar Europe, they admire the extent to which the targets of America’s sanctions regimes retreat from the modern global economy and its artificial rules to recreate feudal structures bound together by honor codes — a sub rosa syndicalism that is more natural to human evolutionary psychology.
Surely, just as the Le Corbusier devotees against whom Stern inveighed thought they were remaking the urban scene in ways that would one day prove salutary, fans of “liberation day” believe they are engaged in a great work destined to be vindicated by future historians. But their methods are the same as the urban planners. Just as anti-“blight” enthusiasts would fabricate elaborate procedural methods designed to establish a pseudoscientific rationale justifying what they were going to do anyway — clearing out the “slums” and their inconvenient residents — the president and his acolytes are grasping for the nearest weapons at hand to muscle their one big idea into effect.
“This is going to be much bigger than Smoot-Hawley,” said Dartmouth College economic historian Douglas Irwin, an expert on the subject of the tariff regime which — anyone? — contributed mightily to the prolonged malaise over which Franklin Roosevelt presided in the 1930s. But because “imports are a much greater share of GDP now than they were back in the early 1930s by a long shot,” Irwin continued, the hardship these tariffs invite will be more acutely felt.
By the Trump administration’s own admission, the formula it used to arrive at the conclusion that global economic integration must be dismantled is entirely pretextual. “The numbers [for tariffs by country] have been calculated by the Council of Economic Advisers,” an administration aide told reporters, “based on the concept that the trade deficit we have with any given country is the sum of all trade practices, the sum of all cheating.”
In other words, the rationale retailed for weeks by Trump officials that the tariffs the president envisioned would only match the tariffs foreign nations impose on American goods was a bald-faced lie. These are not “reciprocal” tariffs. They are a penalty applied to the conduct of foreign trade. They are, therefore, a tax. What’s more, they are a tax justified by no legislation, secured in the absence of representation, and justified by the unilateral declaration that some kind of emergency abroad compels the president to engage in the kind of abuses that would have made King George III blush. That lie is compounded with another lie: the notion that the tariff threat is a mere “negotiating tactic” that would be withdrawn if foreign nations did the same. It was all and only a campaign of deliberate and disgraceful misdirection.
Congress exercises few of its constitutional prerogatives these days, but it clings to none more desperately than its right to do nothing at all. The thing is, nonaction is itself a choice, and that choice conveys intentionality. If Congress has, in its lethargy, delegated its power to set U.S. trade policy to the president and it fails to object to this foolhardy attack on the fundaments of American prosperity, we can assume that it likes what it is seeing. Voters will internalize that unavoidable conclusion, and they will vote accordingly.
Congressional Republicans occasionally slough off their cowed complacency. Last night, a whopping four GOP senators joined Democrats to put an end to the nonsensical notion that a state of emergency exists between the United States and Canada that compels the administration to decouple our economies. The House is not expected to even bring the motion up lest they convey something other than zeal for the errant thoughts that frequently escape the president’s mouth. But sometimes, a sufficient level of dissent from Trump’s congressional allies can derail his most addlebrained schemes, as they did in 2019 when Trump flirted with declaring a national emergency to impose tariffs on Mexico and move unappropriated funds toward the construction of his border wall. In sum, gelded though they may be, Republicans can save Trump from himself without martyring themselves in the process.
That is what Congress must — not should, not ought to, but must — do if it is to prevent the second-order consequences that will follow from this spectacularly ill-conceived act of economic self-harm. What will flow from this program isn’t just domestic economic pain, reduced consumer purchasing power, reduced growth, augmenting the power of the state to reward favored constituencies and punish the unfashionable, and inviting the imminent prospect of recession. These tariffs will induce our partners abroad in Southeast Asia, who had invested mightily in their manufacturing capacity to compete with China, to bandwagon with the largest consumer market in their region. They will compel Europe, the largest purchaser of U.S. goods, to do the same. They have humiliated America’s would-be allies, some of whom were guilty only of being naïve enough to believe the administration’s rhetoric, and they’ve empowered America’s critics and skeptics. In sum, the tariff schedule Trump imagines will not just make America poorer; it will make America more isolated and less safe.
In much the same way that Stern speculated that America leveled its own cities out of guilt and with the misplaced belief that strategic bombing gave way to glorious promenades that “go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders,” Trump has engineered something like an American sanctions regime targeting his fellow Americans. David Harsanyi calls it Munchausen syndrome by tariff. Whatever we choose to call it, we cannot endure it.
Most individual lawmakers care little for the electorate as a whole. Their career trajectory depends on the fealty of a small cast of primary voters, many of whom defer reflexively to Trump’s judgment. But Trump’s judgment has proven woefully and objectively deficient. Congress doesn’t just have the ability to restore sanity to America’s trade regime by stripping emergency tariff power from its dangerously mercurial president — it has that mandate. If the Republican-led Congress doesn’t use that power, voters will elect a Congress that will.
And when they do, Republicans will have secured for themselves a reputation as reckless dogmatists whose grip on reality is too tenuous to trust with power so robust that it can ruin whole families, towns, and industries. They will be remembered as we remember the urban planners — effete and self-infatuated dilettantes, whose decrepit and unloved works serve as a bitter reminder of how little economic planners “know about what they imagine they can design.”