Friday News Roundup
Trump Self-Inflicted Stupidity on Tariffs
Donald Trump’s announcement of massive worldwide tariffs, which he dubbed “Liberation Day,” has already caused an over 1400 point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average upon the opening of the stock market today on Friday. This was preceded by another 1600 point drop in the Dow Jones yesterday.
The tariff was so comprehensively and irrationally applied that the Trump administration actually imposed a 10% tariff on two uninhabited islands off the coast of Antarctica. Take that globalist penguins!
According to the government’s own website on tariff calculations, the Trump Administration rationale for calculating the tariff rates it announced is to meet the goal of resetting the balance of trade between the United States and every other country in the world to zero. This is absolute madness that flies in the face of the economic theory of comparative advantage that has been a basic building block of economics since the early 19th century. For example, no amount of tariffs is going to make the United States a net agricultural exporter of coffee or bananas, but if we didn’t have Trump tariffs, we could have coffee and banana-producing buying U.S. goods instead.
Unfortunately, I don’t believe that Donald Trump has the cognitive capacity to understand how economies can mutually benefit each other through trade. On a deep cognitive level, Donald Trump is an authoritarian, not just in terms of his ideology but in terms of how he thinks and what his cognitive biases are. Donald Trump has a zero-sum mindset, in which the world is divided into dominators and the dominated. He cannot conceive of a win-win situation that leaves both parties to a transaction better off.
Democracy vs. Autocracy: Worldwide Edition
Authoritarian learning is a relatively new concept that academics have cooked up, but I think it needs to be adopted by the general public. The danger that Trump represents is not limited to the damage he does by himself, but by how much he learns from other authoritarian leaders all over the world & how much those authoritarian leaders learn from him.
I see the process at work in the alliance currently building between Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. Orban just welcomed Netanyahu with full military honors in Budapest even though a warrant for Netanyahu’s arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC) is still active as of November 2024. Since autocrats like to cover for each other, Orban announced that Hungary will withdraw from the ICC in solidarity for helping Netanyahu evade accountability. Among the crimes that Orban is helping Netanyahu cover up is the execution-style murders by Israeli military forces of 15 Palestinian paramedics and rescue workers, who were recently removed from a mass grave. The majority of the aid workers were from the Palestinian Red Crescent, a sister organization of the International Red Cross.
An example more relevant to the United States is the relationship between Donald Trump and El Salvador’s autocratic leader Nayib Bukele. For example, in 2021, Bukele fired all the judges on El Salvador’s highest court, which issued a ruling that enabled Bukele to subvert El Salvador’s constitution, specifically the provision that prohibited presidents from running for two consecutive terms in a row. Similarly, Donald Trump’s refusal to rule out seeking a third term and his claims about finding a Constitutional loophole have striking parallels with Bukele’s behavior in El Salvador. Trump has also used his alliance with Bukele to subvert Constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights by shipping off immigrants to Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center gulag. When a U.S. federal judge tried to block deportations to Bukele’s prison colony, Bukele posted a message on X, “Oopsie, too late!”
Conversely, democracy prospers when corrupt autocrats finally they have to take accountability for their actions. In an example from today, South Korea’s Constitutional Court unanimously upheld the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol. In another recent example, French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen has been convicted of embezzlement and has been barred from seeking higher office for 5 years. Le Pen was found guilty of diverting funds designated for the European Parliament and using them to fund campaigning in France by her authoritarian, anti-immigrant party, National Rally. Along with Cory Booker’s record-breaking talking filibuster against Trump and Elon Musk wasting over $20 million to lose a Wisconsin Supreme Court race, these worldwide steps taken to hold corrupt autocrats accountable are a bright spot for democracy this week. Now if only we could finally bring civil charges against Elon Musk for his blatant violations of election laws against bribing voters…