April 11, 2025

The Anti-FDR: Keeping ScOR #6

April 11, 2025

Even as the Trump-Musk regime dismembers the federal government, especially the parts aimed at making life better for regular people, Donald Trump now seems bent on crashing the economy, too.

Or is he? What is Trump up to with his tariff loop-de-loops? No one seems to know for sure, including his closest advisors. In the days following Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of his hefty so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on most of the world’s nations, and before he blinked a week later and dialed most of them back, top figures on his economic team told conflicting stories about the administration’s goals. Some, clearly revealing their own hopes, suggested the tariffs were just an opening gambit, setting the stage for negotiations with various trading partners. A lot of the tariffs would soon go away, they implied, so everyone should calm down. Other advisors, and Trump himself, initially shot down this notion, saying the border wall of import taxes was here to stay. The onerous Trump tariffs would stay in place permanently or until manufacturing returned to America on a mass scale. Under this second scenario, tariffs would become a major source of government revenue in the bargain. The two goals outlined above are in direct conflict. Either Trump was unleashing shock-and-awe to leverage freer trade, or he really meant to build an economic Fortress America. He couldn’t do both at once, though the president himself showed no sign of understanding this.

Trump claimed a “national emergency,” allegedly caused by chronic U.S. trade deficits, to justify blowing up a global trade system that the United States was instrumental in building over 80 years. This “emergency” was news to most people, but Trump’s Rose Garden announcement sparked a real one. Stock markets the world over headed south, then sank some more. When an ominous selloff of U.S. treasury bonds gained momentum, experts got genuinely alarmed. This signaled a loss of faith in the United States as the safest haven for investment.

Apart from Trump allies and lackeys, almost everyone seemed to think this over-the-top tariff barrage was a disastrous mistake. Some conservative analysts insisted the president was on the right track in seeking to reorder the global economy, but even most in that camp said he was going about it clumsily and needed to, at the very least, backpedal and move more gradually. Meanwhile some of the more conspiracy-minded returned to the theory that Trump must be a Russian asset, trying to destroy the U.S.-led global order as a service to his master in the Kremlin. Farfetched, perhaps. But if it were actually true, proponents of this theory reasonably ask, what would Trump be doing differently?

The most convincing attempts to explain Trump’s tariff-palooza point to his oddly outdated, mercantilist notions about international trade. Trump seems to believe that if Americans are buying more stuff from a given country than we’re selling to that country, the United States is losing and indeed is being cheated. As long ago as the 1980s, Trump was telling CNN (referring to Japan at the time): “A lot of people are tired of watching other countries ripping off the United States. ... They laugh at us. Behind our backs, they laugh at us because of our own stupidity.”

While some countries, most notably China, put up real barriers to U.S. exports and subsidize their own industries, the mere fact of a trade imbalance doesn’t mean other nations are cheating. “Americans spend more on clothing made in Sri Lanka than Sri Lankans spend on American pharmaceuticals and gas turbines. So what?” writes economist Brent Neiman. “That pattern reflects differences in natural resources, comparative advantage and development levels. The deficit numbers don’t suggest, let alone prove, unfair competition.”

Trump also believes, or pretends to believe, that tariffs are paid by the foreign country on whose products the tax is levied. Speaking to a Republican Party event as another of his tit-for-tat tariffs on China went into effect, Trump said, “Right now, China is paying a 104% tariff. Think of it.” It’s quite a thing to think of, and his audience dutifully applauded, but of course those tariffs on Chinese goods will be paid by American importers, with most of the cost passed on to U.S. consumers.  

If only there were some sane and responsible people, some other entities with power, who could stop this wreckage.

The economic theory behind all this is probably not what matters, though. Because for Trump, everything is about Trump. As America’s Leader, he identifies the nation with himself – “l’etat c’est moi.” Combined with his cockeyed ideas about global trade, this leads him to take trade deficits personally. He apparently imagines the world is now laughing at him as it rips him off. So he lashes out. A day before he reversed course, Trump was reveling in the entreaties from nations asking to have the tariffs eased. “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” Trump told the Republican gathering. “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything, sir!” Who was laughing now?

Thinking about the behavior of the president of the United States, a couple of images come to mind. One is of a toddler in his highchair, flinging tariffs here and there like fistfuls of apple sauce while reveling in the reaction. See me now, Mommy and Daddy? What are you gonna do about it? Another is the climactic scene of Scarface, with Trump as Al Pacino, reloading his machine gun with clip after clip of tariffs and blasting away. “Say hello to my little friend! You want more?! ... I take you all to fucking hell!” 

This is our duly elected president and the “leader of the free world,” taking us all to hell, displaying what David Sanger of the New York Times called Trump’s “burn-it-down-first, figure-out-the-consequences-later recklessness.” Conservative stalwart George Will called Trump’s economic policies a delusional disaster. “He believes in the immediate translation of whims into policy proposals, without an intervening pause for study,” Will wrote. An unnamed Goldman-Sachs executive told the Times: “Someone has to stop him.”

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Hold on a minute, some progressives might be thinking. If George Will and Goldman-Sachs are upset, maybe Trump is on to something!

Actually, no. If Trump is out to disrupt the globalized, neoliberal economic order, he’s not trying to do so in a way that would take us back to capitalism’s post-War “thirty glorious years.” Even less would Trumpism usher in a sustainable and humane economy as envisioned by, say, the architects of the Green New Deal. An ecosocialist this man is not. (A strong clue is that he’s simultaneously trying to reverse every effort to tackle the climate crisis.) Trump instead seems bent on dragging the U.S. back to the late 1800s, when the federal government got most of its revenue from tariffs and levied no individual or corporate income taxes. Government was miniscule by today’s standards and did next to nothing to constrain corporate power. Workers and the natural world were at the mercy of the robber barons.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, offered a glimpse into this dystopian vision in a post-“Liberation Day” interview with Tucker Carlson. Bessent drew a connection between DOGE’s mass firings of federal employees, on one hand, and the dream of re-shoring thousands of factories on the other. “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings,” Bessent said. “And then on the other side of that, we will have the labor we need for new manufacturing.” (Italics added.)

Oh. So all those people Musk is firing from their public service careers — aiding sick veterans, protecting our national parks, monitoring chemicals in the environment, providing programs for poor and disabled children in our schools — can find new livelihoods stitching garments and assembling iPhones in non-union factories brought back from China and Bangladesh? The Trump regime also wants to revive the coal industry to provide energy for all this manufacturing as well as for AI data centers – another sooty reversion to the first Gilded Age. Let’s remember, too, that tariffs amount to a regressive tax, raising the cost of living for ordinary people while allowing for Trump’s desired tax cuts for rich individuals and corporations.

Please, sir! Stop! Too much winning!

All those people Musk is firing from their public service careers can find new livelihoods stitching garments and assembling iPhones in factories brought back from China and Bangladesh?

Yes, Trump put a 90-day pause on the bigger “reciprocal” tariffs he applied to most countries, but that doesn’t mean his gyrations won’t still drive the country into recession. He further escalated his trade war with China, the world’s second largest economy, raising tariffs to a whopping 145% (as of this writing). China retaliated with soaring tariffs against U.S. exporters, a threat to American farmers among others. Trump kept in place an across-the-board 10% tariff on imports from most other countries, itself a major increase certain to boost inflation — the very scourge that millions of voters entrusted Trump to solve. The newly imposed 25% import tax on steel and aluminum, cars and auto parts remains in place. This president’s erratic moves have shaken the world economy to its core. Consumer sentiment has plummeted and major banks had already raised the odds of a recession to about 50-50 before the April 2nd tariff announcement.  

The degrowth president?

The Guardian had a striking headline the other day: “Climate crisis on track to destroy capitalism, warns top insurer.” Given that the last two full seasons of Scene on Radio have explored the climate crisis (Season 5) and capitalism (Season 7) and the relationship between the two, you can imagine my eyebrows inching upward.

On its face, the headline seems backwards. Capitalism has played a central role in wrecking the climate, not the other way around, no? But the insurance guy in question, Günther Thallinger, a board member with Allianz, was talking about specific ways in which mounting climate chaos will lead to the breakdown of the capitalist financial system. When insurers can no longer afford to pay for all the wreckage from fires and floods, or even to offer coverage for climate risks, nobody will be able to finance anything, from business investments to mortgages.

Thallinger is describing key mechanisms by which industrial society as we know it will come apart – if global temperatures reach 2.5-3.5C above pre-industrial levels, as they will on our current path. This aligns with the forecast by Donella and Dennis Meadows and their team of MIT scientists back in the 1970s, as summarized in the book Limits to Growth: Without a dramatic course correction, the 21st century would bring the collapse not of the planet but of humanity’s industrial civilization.

Given this predicament, maybe Trump would do us all a great service by bringing on a global recession...? Is Donald J. Trump, of all people, the degrowth leader that some have been calling for? In his reckless incompetence, Trump will break capitalism and nature will begin to heal again? When I posted the Guardian article on a social media site, someone replied – about the prospect of climate chaos destroying capitalism – “Oh thank god. Can it hurry up?”  

Again, this is a no. Finding an ecological silver lining in Trumponomics is like celebrating that your long flight is about to end because the pilot’s going to slam the plane into the side of a mountain.  

Trump, the anti-FDR

In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took aggressive steps in the face of a catastrophic depression and ultimately saved the capitalist order – while making capitalism somewhat more humane. Almost a century later, the current U.S. president seems determined to achieve the inverse: Taking disruptive steps to single-handedly usher in a recession, if not a depression, while simultaneously restoring a Dickensian brand of “free enterprise.” And, longer term, through his twisted and petty anti-green policies, helping to hasten the breakdown of modern civilization and, with it, his beloved capitalist order.

If only there were some sane and responsible people, some other entities with power, who could stop all this wreckage. Somewhere I heard of a nation whose government had built-in “checks and balances,” and something called “co-equal branches of government.” If a rogue president were to come along and start abusing his office and sending the republic down the road to ruin, the fine citizens in those other positions of authority would, without fail, use their powers to rein in the miscreant executive.

Sounds cool.

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