Become Insufferable
Voters shouldn't go through life without hearing "Trump Tariffs" at least once a day.
Back in March, in my piece titled Schrodinger’s Tariffs I wrote that one of three endings was the only way this game of antagonizing our trading partners would play out. Following in the wake of last week’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, we are squarely in the timeline where Trump goes full bore waging a massive tariff war.
This is what I wrote back then:
Trump Actually Does the Tariffs - This will spark a trade war of retaliatory tariffs. Things that we don’t have the current infrastructure to make in America will get more expensive. Other countries will buy less of our stuff that there isn’t enough of a market for American consumers alone to buy (like corn). People will lose jobs. Farmers will lose the farm. A recession will probably happen.
Blame it on Trump. Blame everything on Trump. Every price increase. Every massive job layoff. Every collapse of an industry. It won’t be hard to connect the dots for people at that point, even if they aren’t the brightest folks out there. It’s a little hard to ignore reality when you start defaulting on your bills.
At the time of writing that, I thought Trump would mostly focus his animus on the usual targets - Canada, Mexico, China, and the EU. That would have been bad enough. Instead, the reality of what he actually did is so much more catastrophic than what even a grim soothsayer like myself would have predicted.
Because Trump didn’t just tariff the countries that are, in his words, “ripping us off.”
Trump never liked the free-trade agreement of NAFTA. Trump loves President Xi for being a guy who “rules his country with an iron fist” and is fine with Chinese businessmen buying up millions of dollars worth of Trump Coin to bribe him, but doesn’t really care for the Chinese people taking American manufacturing jobs because they’re uhh…. you know, Chinese. And I guess Trump hates the Europeans who expect us to import their fine French wines and Italian cheeses but don’t drink PBR or consume Kraft singles in return, or something like that.
So yes, it was an inevitable that Trump would tariff these countries, and maybe throw in some light tariffs on other Southeast Asian manufacturing hubs like Cambodia and Malaysia for good measure.
What was not expected, even by the most pessimistic of doomsayers, was the full extent of what he actually did.
Economic Illiteracy
At this point, it is perhaps unreasonable to assume that Americans are economically literate. Trump spend the entire election bragging about how much he loved tariffs - “the most beautiful word in the English language” - and how he would make America rich again from all the money that other countries would be paying us in tariffs. And yet, for some reason, the people who voted for him because they thought he would fix the economy couldn’t bother to spend two minutes Googling what tariffs are to learn that they are a tax paid by Americans - not the other countries.
I don’t expect people to understand the nuances of tariff policy. Depending on a country’s economic situation, tariffs may or may not benefit their industries. In the course of American history, tariffs against British goods in the early 1800’s helped create incentives to build up our own manufacturing base and achieve a level of industrial independence. By the 20th century, however, the United States had become a global power reliant on other countries for raw material inputs and foreign markets for finished goods exports. The Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930’s limited our ability to conduct trade across the world, lowering the demand for our products and raising the costs of making them as the same time, accelerating the devastation of the Great Depression.
In the present day, developing nations do impose tariffs on foreign goods, much like the US did in our early Industrial Revolution era, particularly around commodities that are a core base of their economies. For example, various countries in Southeast Asia heavily tariff each other’s rice to protect their own rice industries.
Developed, wealthy nations, however, benefit more from free trade agreements. They are able to leverage their wealth to import goods at cheaper cost from developing nations like Vietnam, to acquire exotic food items from foreign lands at prices that even working class people can afford (haters of pineapple pizza should perhaps remember that such a dish would have been considered an extravagant meal when your grandparents were children), and to benefit from their citizens using their savings on these cheap, foreign goods to spur other domestic industries. There is a reason why America was the dominant producer of entertainment culture for over 80 years - we had the money to go to the movies, buy records, etc. and then send the products of those artists overseas for consumption by other countries.
The Trump economic model, however, only sees trade deficits in terms of products arriving on cargo ships. If American movies make billions of dollars overseas, if tech companies sell subscriptions to their services to people in Europe and Asia, if the appeal of American culture lures tourists from around the world to visit places like Disney World and New York City and spend their money here, none of that factors into the “trade deficits” that Trump sees us as the suckers on the losing end of. Because we import more $5 Walmart t-shirts from Vietnam than the Vietnamese buy Ford F-150’s (and really, how are they supposed to? there’s a reason why those shirts are so inexpensive), because 330 million cheese-addicted Americans are buying more Parmigiano Reggiano than 60 million Italians could buy more of… anything… from America, then these countries must be ripping us off!
Myths versus Realities
Trump seems to be pretty committed to staying the course for his lunatic trade policies. You don’t impose tariffs on over 180 countries and then come back the next week saying “We’ve negotiated great deals with all these places, including that one random island out in the Pacific with a population of 2,000 people because they were really ripping us off on seeds for growing tropical plants and not buying Boeing 737’s in return.” In fact, just today he’s threatening even more tariffs, so expect the number of tariffs to go up, not down, in the coming weeks.
Things are going to get more expensive. The type of raw materials that we can only get from foreign countries will cost more. The idea that other products can just be “Made in America” overnight is also a myth. It takes years to develop new production facilities, and companies can’t just turn those old abandoned factories in the Rust Belt into modern manufacturing plants in the span of a few weeks, if at all. Nike isn’t going to move their sneaker factories back to the States, particularly when the infamously whimsical Trump could end the tariffs on any day, upending all the massive expense of relocating here. There’s a much lower financial risk for these brands to leave production where it is and just pay the tariffs and raise prices, rather than trying to guess what the White House is going to be declaring on a day-to-day basis.
Even items that are “Made in America” will cost more. As consumers stop buying things like food produce and hardware tools from foreign countries because of the excessively high tariff costs, their demand might move to American products. Many would say that this is a good thing - the brilliant 4D Chess move that Trump is doing to boost domestic industries. But a sudden rush of demand towards a limited supply does not create new supply overnight - it takes years to develop vineyards for making wine, for example, and as long as the Trump administration is intent on deporting immigrants who are here on legal visas in addition to the undocumented ones, good luck trying to find the Hispanic workers who do most of the labor for harvesting the tomatoes and other items that wind up in the grocery store.
In the coming months, we will see massive shifts in the cost of living. Everyday purchases will get more expensive. People will pull back spending, and move their business to less expensive vendors . Costco might experience a surge in business, but your local deli is going to start to struggle, and businesses dealing in non-essential transactions - like entertainment venues, nail salons, boutique shops, etc. are going to see a noticeable drop-off in customers. As these places lose business, they will have to lay off workers, which will lead to the unemployed spending even less money in an attempt to save what they have. This is the vicious cycle called Recession.
The Key Phrase is “Trump Tariffs”
One of the thing that Republicans have always been better about than Democrats, at least in recent decades, has been branding, particularly coming up with simple phrases to weaponize against their opponents:
People like the “Affordable Care Act” but “Obamacare” is the scary socialist boogeyman and epitome of evil big government.
“Hillary’s Emails” were the catchall phrase to capture whatever legitimate or conspiratorial reasons people had for distrusting her,
Why simply describe the border as a policy crisis when you can get everyone talking about “Migrants Caravans” like they are an invading army?
How many times last year did we hear people talk about “The Cost of Eggs” as the most important metric of the economy?
All of these were the types of things you couldn’t help but overhear getting brought up in conversation, even by people who don’t really follow the news. But they were simple phrases that captured a certain sentiment on some matter that was so dominant in the cultural zeitgeist that even the lowest common denominator was at least vaguely aware of them.
I think the tariffs are like that too. Most people don’t really follow the stock markets, but when the Dow Jones starts to look like this, folks are aware of it, and they talk about it. It becomes a topic of conversation, from the office cooler to the coffee shop.
Even more than the stock market is the conversations that people will be having when the receipts at Walmart and Aldi start to look a lot bigger. When you’re tariffing everything at rates upwards of 45% (or more!), “The Price of Eggs” starts to become “The Price of Tomatoes… and Bananas… and Coffee… and School Supplies… and Clothes... and Cars… and Housing… and” well, you get where this is going. If 8-10% inflation was bad enough in 2022 for people to be complaining about it all the time, you can only imagine what those conversations are going to sound like now.
But we need a word to describe it. A phrase to capture this sense of frustration. A simple trigger that when you say it, it conjures all sorts of fears and emotions.
And fortunately, we have it. “Trump Tariffs” aren’t just a boogeyman like “Obamacare” masquerading as something it’s not - they actually are the root cause of the suffering, with no deception or convoluted logic needed to connect the dots. And Trump loves to brag about tariffs, so it’s not like there’s any denying that Tariff Man doesn’t have anything to do with the tariffs.
And so, every time you hear people complaining about the cost of things or about job layoffs or their business suffering. Blame it on the Trump Tariffs. The Trump Tariffs are so extensive there isn’t a single industry they won’t effect. However directly or indirectly any individual case may be, it will have something to do with the tariffs:
Latte at a Starbucks costs $10? Well, yeah duh. It’s the Trump Tariffs on the coffee beans from South America.
A t-shirt at Walmart costs $30? It’s the Trump Tariffs, dude.
Lost your job at the bourbon distillery? Well, you can’t be surprised that the Trump Tariffs on Italian wine would be reciprocated by the Europeans on American booze, and now no one else is buying our liquor.
Folks aren’t patronizing your restaurant? Well everything else costs so much thanks to the Trump Tariffs, it’s no wonder families aren’t dining out anymore.
See how easy it is?
Now, granted. You need to study up a bit yourself, so that when people get pissed and say that “You’re just blaming everything on Trump” you can connect the dots for them on why, actually, it is the tariffs that make X more expensive or difficult to conduct business with. But you don’t need to be some sort of finance genius to do this - a basic understanding of economics is enough to follow the downstream effects of tariffs.
Folks are going to get annoyed with you constantly bringing up the Trump Tariffs. That’s fine. Become insufferable. Deep down, they know that’s the reason things cost more too; they just don’t want to admit it. Pessimism is contagious, and the goal right now is to make people as pessimistic as possible about Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. If folks constantly complaining about the “cost of eggs” put Trump back in the White House, then constantly complaining about the Trump Tariffs might be enough take him and his sycophantic GOP enablers in Congress out of office too.