You really have to read these two pieces in Tuesday’s New York Times by Bret Stephens (who I generally either ignore or disagree with, but not this time) and Tom Friedman (also who I’ve ignored on many occasion, but not this time). Because quite honestly I can’t find fault in anything either one is saying.
Your mileage may vary. But be warned, their message is brutal.
Stephens starts with the tariffs, noting that every president since the Great Depression has correctly concluded that the ensuing economic crisis and World War that followed that calamity was attributable in large part to the notorious 1930 Smoot Hawley Tariffs.
That is, until the current occupant of the Oval.
As Stephens writes:
Until him, no U.S. president has been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president has been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice.
That’s a conclusion that stock markets seem to have drawn as they plunged following the Trump triple whammy: first, tariff threats against our largest trading partners, spelling much higher costs; second, twice-repeated monthlong reprieves on some of those tariffs, meaning a zero-predictability business environment; finally, his tacit admission, to Maria Bartiromo of Fox News, that the United States could go into recession this year, and that it’s a price he’s willing to pay to do what he calls a “big thing.”
In short, a willful, erratic and heedless president is prepared to risk both the U.S. and global economy to make his ideological point. This won’t end well, especially in a no-guardrails administration staffed by a how-high team of enablers and toadies.
But Stephens goes further than simply castigating these pointless and destructive tariffs that Trump has taken such a pathological shine to. He explains how the fancifully created “Department of Governmental Efficiency, (“DOGE”) would be more aptly characterized as an engine of wholesale destruction. Because nothing Musk is doing is about “efficiency.”
As Stephens writes, “A gutted I.R.S. work force won’t lower your taxes: It will delay your refund. Mass firings of thousands of federal employees won’t result in a more productive work force. It will mean a decade of litigation and billions of dollars in legal fees.”
He points out the sheer insanity of antagonizing Canada, our closest friend and geopolitical neighbor, for no reason other than a weird desire for brinkmanship, and alienating the entire Western alliance and endangering their populations, seemingly to the benefit of no one but Vladimir Putin.
All of these actions without coherent purpose or thinking other than belligerent and counterproductive chest-beating have sent Mr. Stephens into a state of despair, and rightly so. The comments to his piece correctly point out that it’s his own damn fault for not objecting to Trump more strenuously over the years, so he’s hardly one to complain. But that point notwithstanding, pretty much everything he says here is correct.
Friedman generally reiterates Stephens’ reaction, but more from an economic perspective.
In Trump, Friedman writes:
What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.
[***]
The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.
Friedman’s prognostication is terse: The country cannot survive four years of this. It just can’t.
As he writes:
You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.
As enunciated by Michael Corleone in Godfather Part II, the key to being a successful mob boss is to understand and anticipate what the people around you are thinking. The unspoken corollary to that formulation is that those same people have the power to unite and destroy you if they wish.
But Trump is not a mob boss. He is playacting the mob boss, without regard to this most crucial point. Our former allies are swiftly learning to hate us. And when they realize that they can collectively affect our course or even our existence by cooperating with each other — or soliciting the assistance of our enemies --they will.
To his credit, Friedman also points out Trump’s biggest lie, the one that Fox News is flogging even as we speak.
He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.
No, we didn’t. None of this was necessary, a fact that we all need to keep reminding ourselves as we suffer the constant spigot of disinformation hawked by Trump’s people and their media enablers. There was nothing going on in the U.S. economy when Trump took over that would have warranted this. Nothing. The reality, as Friedman explains, was that “Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were on the low side, unemployment was around only 4 percent, consumer spending was rising and G.D.P. growth was around 2 percent.” In short, the economy was well on its way of recuperating after the massive and disruptive shock of a global pandemic (and the stock market, which Friedman doesn’t mention, was doing just fine).
Biden left Trump a promising economy and Trump is now proceeding to destroy it. And not just our current economy, but the one that has sustained the country and by association, much of the developed, free world, through pitfalls and progress, for eight decades since the end of WW II. The reason, as Friedman explains, “that the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.”
But we are no longer that nation. And if Trump continues on this course, it doesn’t look like we will ever be again.
