Trump Settles Into His Dream

Donald Trump is parading around another “greatest deal ever made,” this one with the European Union. And once again, like his deal of the century with Japan, the trumpeted victory is a permanent (until Trump changes his whim of the month) fifteen percent tariff on most goods from Europe, as though fifteen percent were a great accomplishment because it is only half as high as thirty percent, rather than being a disaster because it is infinitely higher than zero. In short, to state the obvious yet again, Trump simply likes tariffs, and he would like tariffs imposed uniformly against the entire world — protectionist manipulation of the American economy at the expense of the private American consumers and taxpayers who comprise that economy — to be his economic legacy. It likely will be. But Trump, a billionaire grifter who will be dead in a few years, will never have to bear the brunt of what he has done to tens of millions of middle class and poor Americans who will have that much more difficulty making ends meet, let alone improving their financial lots in life, thanks to Trump’s restrictions on trade. All because Trump believes the world is committing a punishable injustice against the U.S. by being less wealthy than the U.S. Not surprisingly, Trump is even a fool in the one area where his fan club would like to believe that he, as a famous businessman, ought to know the most.

I have consistently railed against the political folly of assuming that businessmen understand economics better than anyone else, let alone that they ought to be trusted and deferred to as defenders of a country’s general welfare and the best interests of their fellow citizens. There is absolutely nothing inherent in being a wealthy businessman that indicates a sense for the general welfare or a feeling for the best interests of others. Quite the contrary. The fact that the efforts of a man who has given himself over to excessive self-seeking and an immoderate obsession with material gain might accidentally benefit others, by way of an invisible hand, offers no support for believing that this same man would ever be inclined to intentionally benefit others, in the even-handed and level-headed way that one ought to hold out as the ideal for a statesman. Again, quite the contrary. That Trump is the most extreme parody of this politico-ethical miscalculation does nothing to reduce the general applicability of this truth even to the case of more rational and morally restrained profiteers. It only emblazons a particularly bold streak of highlighter ink across the general truth.