It used to be common knowledge — not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history — that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase “beggar thy neighbor” meant something to regular people, as did the names of Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.
Until Donald Trump. 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.
What else isn’t going to end well, at least for the administration? Let’s make a list.
The Department of Government Efficiency won’t end well. It is neither a department nor efficient — and “government efficiency” is, by Madisonian design, an oxymoron. 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. High-profile eliminations of wasteful spending (some real, others not) won’t make a dent in federal spending. They’ll mask the untouchable drivers of our $36 trillion debt: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and defense.
The threats to our allies won’t end well. It might seem sophomorically funny, sort of, to troll Justin Trudeau, just once, as “governor” of “the great state of Canada.” It’s grotesque, horrifying and idiotic to contrive phony pretexts to embark on a relentless trade war against our friendliest neighbor — not least because it has suddenly boosted the political fortunes of Trudeau’s successor, Mark Carney, at the expense of the Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre.
It is reasonable to try to push Chinese companies out of the Panama Canal. But threatening to overturn a Senate-ratified treaty to reclaim the canal by force is bound to seed permanent distrust of the United States. It’s intriguing to contemplate the lawful and voluntary purchase of Greenland. It is Putinesque to threaten, in an address to Congress, to take Greenland “one way or the other,” thereby threatening the NATO ally that is the territory’s sovereign.
The outreach to the European far-right won’t end well. Not least among the problems with parties like Germany’s AfD or France’s National Rally is that they are haters of all things American: our vulgar culture, revolting fast food, rapacious capitalism and imperial pretensions. Perhaps the greatest single achievement of the 20th century was the destruction, both physical and spiritual, of German militarism and the threat it posed to Germany’s many neighbors.
But an America that walks away from NATO while empowering those anti-American parties won’t achieve greater security for anyone, including ourselves. It will lead to a Germany once again led by fascists and willing to arm itself with nuclear weapons.
The Ukraine negotiations won’t end well. If the Trump administration wants to bring about a lasting end to the war, it would do everything it can publicly to support Kyiv, including a friendly meeting with Ukraine’s president,Volodymyr Zelensky, more rapid delivery of arms, negotiations over a long-term U.S. security guarantee and membership in the European Union. It would also do everything it can to oppose Moscow, including by seizing Russia’s frozen assets to fund Ukraine’s military purchases. Then it would use that leverage to get Zelensky to accept a settlement that involves the loss of Ukrainian territory.
What team Trump has achieved is the opposite: A Russia that sees even less reason to settle, a Europe that sees more reason to go its own way, a China that believes America will eventually fold and a once-again betrayed Ukraine that will have even less reason to trust international guarantees of its security.
There’s more of this: Sunday’s arrest and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder and pro-Palestinian activist at Columbia, may even get pro-Israel civil libertarians to defend his rights while making a martyr of him on the far-left. But the pattern is clear. Ignoring the political corollary to Newton’s Third Law of Motion — that every action has an equal and opposite reaction — the administration will now reap precisely what it should avoid.
Trump’s critics are always quick to see the sinister sides of his actions and declarations. An even greater danger may lie in the shambolic nature of his policymaking. Democracy may die in darkness. It may die in despotism. Under Trump, it’s just as liable to die in dumbness.
