Rake-Stepping Through the Trade War
The president’s plan is apparently just to improvise new tariffs until . . . what?
Last night, JVL fired off a great emergency Triad on the Trump administration’s breathtaking snubbing of the Supreme Court order requiring it to facilitate the return from El Salvador of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. If you haven’t yet, we hope you’ll give it a read. The hour grows late. Happy Monday.
Have You Seen This Man’s Plan?
by Andrew Egger
The tariff whiplash, it seems, will continue until economic morale improves.
Not yet two weeks on from Trump’s “Liberation Day,” we’re already in danger of losing track of the wild new developments as the president tries fruitlessly to ad-lib a trade regime that will satisfy his craving for mega-tariffs without crashing the U.S. economy (too much) in the process. Last week’s major pivot was to refocus the target of the trade war from the whole world to China, with Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs suddenly falling Wednesday to 10 percent on most nations while spiking to 135 percent on Beijing.
Then came another major change on Friday night, quietly rolled out in a notice from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol: Smartphones, computers, semiconductors, and a host of other tech goods would be excluded from the “reciprocal” tariff—a seeming concession to Trump tech allies like Apple’s Tim Cook.
Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick took to the Sunday shows to minimize that carveout, saying it was only a temporary reprieve. “All of those products are going to come under semiconductors, and they are going to have a special, focused kind of tariff,” Lutnick told ABC News. Those comments reportedly sparked confusion even within the White House, as Fox Business’s Charles Gasparino reported, but by Sunday evening Trump was singing the same tune: “There was no Tariff ‘exception’ announced on Friday,” Trump said of his own government’s notice labeled “Reciprocal Tariff Exclusion for Specified Products.” “These products are subject to the existing 20% Fentanyl Tariffs, and they are just moving to a different Tariff ‘bucket.’ The Fake News knows this, but refuses to report it.”
Trump’s rhetoric notwithstanding, a 20 percent tariff on tech products is worlds apart from a 135 percent tariff. Tech importers now face an interesting choice: Do you try to stockpile Chinese imports now like a squirrel preparing for winter, in anticipation that those rates will spike higher later? Or do you hold out hope that Trump will strike some sort of deal and you might get a better price if you can hang tough and wait? That these are the sorts of decision trees our nation’s C-Suiters are currently agonizing over goes a long way to explain why the stock and bond markets are having such a normal and cool time.
Trump’s waffling indecision betrays his weak hand. His sycophants can gurgle about the “art of the deal” all they like—it’s plain these guys are making this all up as they go along.
China, by contrast, has adopted a “speak softly and hit them where it hurts” strategy. One example: Over the weekend, the country choked off its exports of heavy rare earth metals and magnets—crucial components for many kinds of high-tech manufacturing. As the New York Times noted, “rare earth magnets make up a tiny share of China’s overall exports to the United States and elsewhere. So halting shipments causes minimal economic pain in China while holding the potential for big effects in the United States and elsewhere.”
All this continues to unfold against the backdrop of increasingly catastrophic poll numbers for Trump’s trade war back at home. A weekend CBS News/YouGov poll was chock-full of horrible news for the president—as I discussed in depth on video yesterday, if that interests you—but one number from the survey stands out. When asked to evaluate Trump’s tariff goals, the public still gives the president okay marks: 51 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove. But they’re far grimmer when evaluating his approach to the trade war: Only 37 percent approve, while 63 percent disapprove.
This comes, again, less than two weeks past “Liberation Day,” when financial markets have suffered most of the damage from the trade war. The shocks will likely continue to ripple through other parts of the economy: dramatic price hikes, layoffs, the possibility of a true recession. Trump’s negotiating position is weak; his flailing strategy has made it far worse. How long will it take him to realize that—as he would put it—he doesn’t have the cards?
Trust Not in Trump
by William Kristol
Last Friday, asked about a survey showing a precipitous drop in Americans’ consumer confidence, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said: “So, trust in President Trump, he knows what he’s doing. . . . I think the president is asking for Americans—trust in Trump, as I just said.”
Really? My recommendation, contra Ms. Leavitt’s: Don’t trust in Trump.
To be fair, I don’t counsel putting much trust in any of our political leaders. After all, our system is premised on a healthy distrust of power and of people in power. We have representative government, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and much else because we judge those mechanisms to be more reliable in protecting liberty and producing good outcomes than trusting individuals to do the right thing.
Indeed, a few decades ago the constitutional law scholar John Hart Ely wrote a fine book, Democracy and Distrust, arguing that a distrust of power and of people in power was a core principle of our government and a reasonable guide for the courts.
A healthy distrust is at the core of a healthy democratic politics. That doesn’t mean that politicians, like anyone else, can’t earn our trust. But—not to be ungracious or anything—I will point out that Trump has not earned that trust.
Now it’s true that a doctrine of distrust is a bit austere for a nation’s public life. So at times of trial and testing, we’ve wanted to remind ourselves that there is a being in whom we can, if we choose, trust. We can trust in God.
In the fourth stanza of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” we proclaim
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto—“In God is our trust.”
During the Civil War, Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase pressed for the inclusion of “In God We Trust” on our coinage. In fact, the last legislation President Abraham Lincoln signed was a bill passed on March 3, 1865, allowing the director of the mint, subject to the approval of the secretary of the treasury, to place “In God We Trust” on our coins.
Then in 1956, during the Cold War, at the height of the Eisenhower-era embrace of public piety, Congress passed legislation adopting “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the United States.
Expressing trust in God is in the American tradition. But that trust is to be understood in contrast with excessive trust in our fellow men. It’s also understood as a check on excessive fear of our fellow men. Psalm 56 teaches: “In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid what man can do unto me.” And Psalm 146 reminds us: “Put not your trust in princes.”
So stick with the Psalmist, not Ms. Leavitt. Do not fear Trump. And do not trust Trump.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Can Be Stopped… Here’s How. SARAH LONGWELL joined BILL KRISTOL for The Bulwark on Sunday.
Bukele, Abrego Garcia, and Red Lines… In an emergency weekend Triad, JVL wonders: Are we now a country of political prisoners and gulags?
Neera Tanden Unplugged… In The Opposition, LAUREN EGAN interviews the Center for American Progress president, who says we’re in “an existential moment” for both the Democratic party and the country.
Jon Corzine Breaks Down Trump’s Economic Wreckage… On How to Fix It, the former New Jersey governor joins JOHN AVLON to unpack the devastating consequences of Trump’s chaotic trade policies.
Quick Hits
DOGE CHEWS ONWARD: We noted on Friday that DOGE has fallen off the front page a bit—a reasonable consequence of economy-melting trade wars, White House defiance of Supreme Court rulings, and the like. As Sam Stein noted Saturday, though, just because people are paying comparatively less attention doesn’t mean Musk and co. have stopped their government-wide rampage.
At the Department of Homeland Security, DOGE engineers have been “providing the technical infrastructure for a sweeping set of actions aimed at revoking parole, terminating visas, and later on, reengineering the asylum adjudication process,” Politico reported last week. Their effort to automate deportation processes is being implemented with DOGE’s signature care and attention to detail, judging by reports of U.S. citizens and green-card holders who received threatening emails saying their “parole” had been terminated and that “it is time for you to leave the United States.”
DOGE employees have also wedged themselves into the government’s grantmaking process, the Washington Post reported Friday, “which will allow DOGE to review and approve proposed grant opportunities across the federal government,” threatening to “further delay or even halt billions of dollars that agencies usually make in federal awards.”
“Agency officials have been told that the grants.gov site has been under systems maintenance,” the Post continued. “They have been instructed to email their planned grant notices to grantreview@hhs.gov, an inbox at the Department of Health and Human Services that is being monitored by DOGE.”
The meddling is classic DOGE: Rather than shrinking government spending as a matter of law, DOGE is seemingly trying to “save” money by making congressionally appropriated funds less accessible to their would-be recipients.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE: As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has found herself occasionally siding with the court’s liberals—most recently in a case concerning the deportations of Venezuelans under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—she’s become a target for more and more right-wing fire.
Would it surprise you that some of this flak (even from women) has been overtly misogynistic? Or that it included racist swipes—from Ann Coulter, among others—about Barrett’s adoption of two Haitian kids? In a “humorous” twist, the satirical Babylon Bee ran a snarky item about Barrett adopting a rapist/murderer from the MS-13 gang “as a show of support for the much maligned community of violent illegal aliens”—with the heavily tattooed killer photoshopped into a picture of Barrett with her family. (Reminder: The Bee is theoretically a Christian site.)
The irony is especially thick because during Barrett’s contentious confirmation in 2020, conservatives in the Senate and in the media vigorously, and sometimes correctly, decried sexist attacks on Barrett from the left, including gibes about her large family and interracial adoptions. Now that Barrett has shown that she’s not the meek MAGA lapdog her progressive detractors (and, apparently, many of her fans) expected her to be, the ugliness is coming from her own “side.”
—Cathy Young
Cheap Shots
The idea that democracy can be preserved through polite distrust feels like the final delusion of the republic. It’s the placebo we swallow while authoritarian rot eats through the walls. “Don’t trust Trump,” as if the problem is belief. As if we’re still in a world where ideas matter more than force.
This isn’t 2015. This isn’t a debate. It’s not about norms, or manners, or constitutional bedtime stories. This is the seizure of our lives in broad daylight. The judiciary is compromised. The legislature is a coward’s parade. The executive is a throne occupied by a convicted felon promising vengeance. And your strategy is distrust?
Distrust is a posture, not a defense.
You don’t “distrust” a man who promises to dismantle the rule of law and then starts doing it on day one. You prepare for the fact that he’s not looking to win arguments—he’s looking to punish disobedience.
“Put not your trust in princes,” We are not governed by scripture. We are governed by a machinery that has already been hijacked. By a man who doesn’t want to be trusted, he wants to be obeyed.
The Constitution doesn’t enforce itself. It never did. It relied on good faith actors and shared delusions. Those are gone. What remains is spectacle, democracy as branding exercise, as performance art. The MAGA base doesn’t care if it’s legal. They care if it’s loud. If it hurts the right people. If it feels like winning.
This is not a call to despair, it’s a call to get serious.
Distrust isn’t a strategy. It’s the sound you make while you’re being overtaken. It’s the muttering at the edge of the fire, just before the house collapses.
So no, don't trust Trump.
But don't mistake your lack of trust for resistance. Because while you're scribbling warnings in the margins, he's burning the book, and the time for skepticism ended the moment he picked up the match.
Trump’s reversal on the tariffs for the iPhones etc. was a temper tantrum to the response from China. Let’s be honest, his tariff bravado was laughed at by China and Trump’s ego was bruised so he did what he knows best - lashed out ineptly. He’s a fckng child destroying our economic futures.