The Explanation is Always Stupider

What a surreal week. Last Wednesday (April 2), Trump announced his “reciprocal tariffs,” which were an insane mash-up driven by 19th-century nostalgia and last minute AI formulae. The market see-sawed (nearly 5,000 points on the Dow) along with the tariff news, which became so confusing that even the White House couldn’t accurately calculate China’s rate. In the face of a collapsing stock market and disturbing trends in the bond market, was our President sober and grave? No. He was giddy, basking in all the attention he’d created for himself.

What would he do next? What was he up to? Throughout these ten days, official and surrogate explanations see-sawed along with events. High tariffs are super awesome! Lowered tariffs are super awesome! Also, future high tariffs are super awesome! Unless they don’t happen, which is also super awesome! (We have always been at war with Eastasia.)

Meanwhile, more serious people were all laser-focused on one question in an effort to save their businesses, retirements, and bank account balances: what are the tariffs supposed to accomplish? For people who care about the economy or their personal wealth, the answer is critically important. If we can figure out what Trump is trying to do, maybe we can prepare for the fallout.

I’ve spent the last two months reading and listening to various serious and unserious people attempt to answer the question and almost to a person they’re getting it wrong. They have made a category error, believing the answer has something to do with macroeconomics or industrial policy or cowboy diplomacy. To their credit, a good many of them have even applied a heavy “stupidity” filter to try to account for the jittery mind making these “decisions,” but their explanations always end up in a blind alley of confusion and contradiction.

Trump is in the process of rewiring the U.S. economy, some say, freeing up capital by shifting U.S. away from a tax-based revenue scheme. It’s very America-first: tax goods made by foreigners to fund the smaller, DOGEd government, and U.S. companies will be have the largest economy in the world all to themselves. To a simpleton, they note, it makes sense, but here’s why it’s wrong….

No, say others—it’s nothing so grand. However misguided, Trump believes tariffs will help rebuild the country’s industrial base. This jives with his juvenile fascination with big factories puffing smoke while burly men sweat in front of blast furnaces. Trump loves a big truck and a man with a wrench. It’s all about inflating his ego, they continue, but here’s what you need to understand about industrial policy….

No, no, no, even this analysis is too sophisticated, the real cynics argue. Instead, he’s playing mob boss and putting pressure on other countries to extract certain concessions before he cancels their tariffs. Pay the protection money, and Don Trump will make sure nothing happens to your pretty little country. Of course, it will never work when you consider how hard it is to create bilateral trade pacts, which I’ll explain now….

Well. These answers rest on an unspoken assumption that the answer to the basic question—what will the tariffs accomplish?—relates to the economy at all. All the explanations, all the reporting that fit his actions into the framework of sober governance, it’s all wrong. This thinking is a category error. He’s not thinking about public policy or the economy when he makes these decisions, he’s thinking about Donald Trump. Remember the iron law when trying to figure out his motives: the explanation is always the stupider.

Fortunately, there is a cheat code that infallibly reveals what Trump is doing. It goes like this: what action would a man with narcissist personality disorder take to ensure he is the center of attention, no matter how favorable or negative it is?

When you apply this filter, all of a sudden tariffs are high explicable—and in fact, inevitable. For the malignant narcissist, tariffs are the perfect issue. Outside of war, nothing has the capacity to focus so much attention from so many people on a single individual. The issue places him at the center of very important conversations all across the planet, and it is impossible to tune into the news anywhere without hearing Trump’s name.

It’s not a purely performative issue like the wall, either—tariffs truly have the capacity to alter the world, and permanently. When he listens to the sound of the market spiking or collapsing, it’s saying “Trump.” The most powerful people in the world, thousands and thousands of them, are talking about Donald Trump. CEOs are calling and pleading with him. Foreign leaders are giving speeches about him. Newspapers are full of stories about him. Fox News is on a constant loop about what a genius he is.

It doesn’t matter that the economy may be tanking, nor that his political enemies have ammunition to use against him. The situation has created a worldwide panic, and he is at the center of it. And no matter what happens, it will leave a legacy for Trump. For the narcissist who doesn’t care if he’s remembered as a Gandhi or a Hitler so long as he’s remembered, it’s an amazing hack. (The fact that it’s incredibly simple is also a huge bonus for a man as lazy as Trump.)

Let’s consider the flip-flops, which most politicians try to avoid. If we’re thinking in terms of public policy or economics, they don’t make any sense. But as techniques to rivet attention on Trump? Ideal.

It’s a pattern we’ve seen a hundred times. First, Trump begins by announcing a thing that will happen in the future—tariffs in this case. This brings a lot of attention, and ensures it will persist until the future thing arrives. (Trump learned a long time ago that it doesn’t matter if it ever arrives—you can’t take away the attention he got by announcing it in the first place. Again, his focus may be getting attention, but his mode is laziness.)

Next, he reads the room and pivots based on the reactions he receives. If he gets a tepid response, he’ll try pouring gasoline onto his fizzling fire. Not only will we build a wall, but Mexico will pay for it! No one has ever seen anything like this before! In the case of the tariffs, reversing himself meant injecting a new dynamic into the situation. The markets jumped and his allies spent a day praising him. Meanwhile, he used higher Chinese tariffs to look tough, which let him have it both ways. It was genius, of a kind. It didn’t seem possible for Trump to get moreattention once the tariffs began, but he managed to pull it off.

Finally, Trump announces another round of future actions. Again, he may never take these actions, or he may change his mind along the way, but in the moment he’s deferring action, he’s bringing the attention back to himself. By postponing the tariffs for three months, he ensures everyone will have to stay engaged with him for another 90 days, and he sets himself up for another marquee moment in July.

You may point out that he has policy “commitments” and has been a fan of tariffs for years. Really? Views like those he held on abortion, Christianity, or the Democratic Party? This is a man who will abandon any view in a New York minute if it offers even fleeting benefit. He’s far more famous for his lack of conviction, for flip-flopping on his positions day by day—spouting whatever view brings him the most attention in a given moment. Does anyone really believe he has a deep philosophical commitment to tariffs? Of course not.

The shocking thing about the tariff situation is that the stakes are so high. It makes it harder for us to imagine this is all an attentional tantrum, but not only is it consistent with his behavior, it’s the only thing that makes sense.

As a coda to all of this, yesterday the White House exempted “smartphones, computers and some other electronic devices” from the Chinese tariffs. This takes the pressure off Apple and other electronic companies, but the relief doesn’t make a lot of sense in policy terms. Trump has declared trade war on China. Three days later he offers a partial surrender? But it’s not about policy, and he doesn’t care about the details. This concession doesn’t mean he’s paying attention to treasury bonds or that he’s “softening his position” on tariffs. It doesn’t mean anything.

Donald Trump is a narcissist and the answer to what he’s up to is incredibly stupid. He’s doing it for the attention.

75 Days of Stable Genius

Yesterday, billionaire Trump sycophant Bill Ackman took to X to praise the President. “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

Let’s review the tape.

January 26: President Gustavo Petro refuses to accept Colombian migrants from the U.S. In a declaration misspelling the country’s name, Trump enacts 25% tariffs on Colombia. Colombia immediately declares retaliatory tariffs. Hours later, Colombia accepts the migrants and both countries cancel the tariffs.

(Dow: 44,713)

January 27: Trump lackeys trumpet the president’s actions and a White House statement declares “America is respected again.”

February 1: Announces 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% additional tariffs on China. “They owe us a lot of money, and I'm sure they're going to pay." All three countries promise retaliation.

(Dow: 44,421)

February 3: Trump delays tariffs on Mexico and Canada for 30 days.

(Dow: 44,556)

February 7: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warns, "Mr Trump has it in mind that the easiest way to do it is absorbing our country and it is a real thing.”

February 10: Announces 25% tariffs on all aluminum and steel imports.

(Dow: 44,593)

February 13: Announces “fair and reciprocal” tariffs on (all?) foreign countries. Details are vague. Trump: “Prices could go up somewhat short term, but prices will also go down. So Americans should prepare for some short-term pain.”

(Dow: 44,546)

March 4: The 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports begins. Fearing spiking energy costs for American customers, Trump lowers the tariffs on Canadian energy to 10%.

(Dow: 43,006)

March 5: Delays 25% tariffs on car companies for one month.

(Dow: 42,579)

March 6: Amid blowback and falling stock prices, Trump relents and again delays the tariffs on Mexico and Canada for a month, declaring as he does so that there were “no delays at all.”

(Dow: 42,801)

March 12: The 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum begin.

(Dow: 40,813)

March 26: Announces a 25% tariff on all automotive imports (vehicles and parts).

(Dow: 42,299)

April 2: Announces “reciprocal” tariffs on all countries save Russia, Belarus, Cuba and North Korea. Tariffs are calculated by trade deficits, not foreign tariffs, based on a formula possibly created by AI.

(Dow: 40,545)

April 8: On the eve of the tariffs taking effect, Trump brags to a Republican audience, “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!’”

He insists, “I know what the hell I’m doing. I know what I’m doing.”

(Dow: 37,645)

April 9. Hours after the new “reciprocal” tariffs had taken place, and amid hastening market collapse, Trump relented, delaying the higher tariffs for 90 days while retaining 10% tariffs on these countries. He also raised tariffs on China to a rate of 125%.

Republicans spend the day declaring Trump a master negotiator, routinely invoking The Art of the Deal.

(Dow: 40,608)

April 10. After a rally following Trump’s latest flip-flop, stock markets begin the day in steep decline. Dow: 39,459 (11:30am ET)

The Anti-Trump Argument Can’t Br THAT Hard to Make

We are in the early days of an elective economic and governmental collapse. The Trump tariffs combined with the assault on government function, including defanging the revenue-gathering IRS, along with a massive tax cut for the rich, are about to explode the U.S. deficit and immiserate millions. Anyone who even glances at these actions understand immediately how dire our situation is. And you don’t have to be an economist to get it:

“This week, just before the tariff chaos, 63% of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago. All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25% of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.” (Financial Times)

We see the disaster, understand what its consequences will be, and know who is to blame. So how are Democrats handling moment? Leaving aside a few notable and stellar outliers (Bernie, AOC, and their whistle stop tour, Cory Booker’s 25-hour Senate speech, Chris Murphy’s ongoing commentary), not well. You’d think the argument against the current situation would more or less make itself (see the 1,300 protests on Saturday and their various signs), but for Democrats, apparently not.

Here’s a clip posted by the House Democrats of a social media video prepared by Rep. Chris Deluzio, a Western PA Democrat.

“The President’s tariff announcement and his trade policy has been chaotic and it’s been inconsistent. [some throat-clearing and straw-manning about bad uses of tariffs in the lead up to:] Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically or they can be misused.” (Source: X)

He goes on to describe how Trump did the tariffs wrong, but was basically right that they’re a good idea. This kind of messaging has been bog-standard since the 1980s, when Dems lost their House majority for the first time in forty years. They were shocked that the white working class rejected their pro-union message and went for Reagan’s “free-market” approach. For forty years they’ve been making some version of Deluzio’s argument: the Republicans are right, but we have a less-crazy version of their policies we think you’ll love.

(Narrator: they do not love it.)

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For decades I never got why Republicans loved Reagan so much. He was mean, dumb, corrupt (don’t forget Iran-Contra!), and he lied a lot. Yeah, he cut a lot of taxes, but Carter did, too, and Republicans hated him. It wasn’t really until the Trump years that it started to come into focus. Reagan didn’t just give the GOP a big political win, he gave them a potent new message that would change how every American saw government and politics. He characterized government as both corrupt and inefficient (with more than a dash of latent racism), and proposed business as a moral, efficient counterpoint. Of course, Democrats, as handmaidens of government, were by association also corrupt and immoral.

Forty years later, this is the world we live in. No one trusts government or politicians, and the very enterprise of government is considered suspect by most Americans. It hasn’t been accidental, and the GOP has built amazing infrastructure to nurture it.

Pivoting off Reagan, the GOP learned how to do messaging right. Newt Gingrich was a key figure in this transition with his Contract with America, which gave the GOP a blueprint for singing in harmony. Rush Limbaugh, with his dittohead army, amplified the GOP in the early 1990s, and the party got an official “News” organization with Fox News in 1996. The Heritage Foundation gave them a think tank to workshop policies, and they began fitting other parts of their operation into a seamless messaging outfit.

Americans once loved the federal government—and why not? It helped defeat a depression as well as the Nazis and it put men on the moon. It provided health care and retirement benefits for the elderly. It defeated Jim Crow. More than three-quarters“trust[ed] the government to do what’s right” up until Nixon’s reign of corruption. Democrats are the party of government, but they rarely try to defend it. So now Dems hate government as much as Republicans.

Messaging has a lot to do with a party’s available politics, and the Dems have a more complex coalition, with unrelated and occasionally contradictory goals, to manage (unions and environmental activists are often in conflict, to offer one example). But the Democrats don’t even try to have coherent messaging, which is on magnificent display right now.

Because the GOP have had so much success framing the terms of the debate—if not reality—Democrats have internalized the lesson that they must always defer to conservative views as legitimate. For decades, they’ve tried to contain their messaging within the conservative framework. Republicans have claimed to be the real Americans, and they’ve defined the White working class, rural America, and traditional values as normative—and the Democrats have accepted the framing. Thus do you end up with convoluted arguments like Deluzio’s that they’re really more awesome than Republicans in helping “real” America.

So here we are in a crisis in which messaging couldn’t be easier, but the Dems continue to shrink from a fulsome defense of what they really believe. It’s like a political version of Stockholm Syndrome. In some ways the problem is more profound than mere messaging: in having to live in the Republican world their whole political careers, Chuck Schumer Democrats lack the imagination to envision a different world. (And of course they look inauthentic. Chuck Schumer, who valorizes this “real America,” would never be caught dead eating a smash burger at a pub.)

Eventually, the Democrats are going to have to develop a messaging strategy and infrastructure. They will always have outlier members, but as a body, they need to know what they believe, speak with a single voice, and blast their message out via networks they haven’t bothered to build yet.

But in the meantime, they must find their moral core and speak from that place. It probably wouldn’t hurt them to find their outrage and see where it points. Look at the college students being rounded up by goons in unmarked black uniforms and masks. Look at the legal immigrants being swept up in deportation purges. Consider the cancer and Alzheimer’s studies being canceled. This should outrage a Democratic politician, and that outrage should lead back to bedrock beliefs and values. Hundreds of thousands of people are out marching in the streets with a pretty clear idea about why this is wrong—surely Democratic politicians can appreciate it as well?

We have entered an existential crisis, and if the opposition party doesn’t understand what it’s opposing or why, we are in real trouble.

Liberation Day is Here

Just two days ago, I wrote that I’d be watching President Trump’s decisions on tariffs following the elections on Tuesday. (Predictably, Republicans held their seats the FL special Congressional elections, albeit by margins half as wide as four months ago, but lost the judicial election in WI.)

“The first thing to note is Trump’s tariff announcement [Wednesday]. Let’s see if he introduces more muscular, triumphalist tariffs, or subdued and perhaps symbolic ones. We can then compare those to the election results. That will be an interesting data point.”

As you must have heard, he chose door number one, exceeding even the worrywarts’ worst fears:

“The tariffs Trump announced were higher than almost anyone expected. This is a much bigger shock to the economy than the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, especially when you bear in mind that international trade is about three times as important now as it was then.” (Paul Krugman, writing on his free Substack.)

We may get some reporting on why Trump went completely insane, but until then I don’t think there’s any point in speculating. (Was he so angered by the loss in WI that he upped the ante? Was the election completely unrelated? Was something else a factor? We just don’t know.)

It will take days or weeks for the picture to resolve—and by that time, he may have already begun canceling the tariffs. But in this moment of chaos and uncertainty, a few real-time notes:

• Trump characterized the tariffs as “reciprocal,” but this was just one of many blatant lies he told while announcing the tariffs. The White House’s list of foreign “tariffs” actually had to do with a very crude calculation involving trade deficits—and may have been calculated by AI.

• The tariffs, which Trump hadn’t finalized until the day of the announcement, were not about economic policy. They were a demonstration of force. In his simple, feral mind, levying tariffs are a way of bringing the world to heel under his authority.

• They also offer the administration a massive opportunity for corruption. Trump is in a position to reduce or end tariffs on countries that help him out politically or financially. Trump cannot fathom non-transactional relationships, and I’m certain part of his power play here is designed to rake in money and power. 

• Trump hit nearly every country in the world with tariffs, but excluded Russia, Belarus, Cuba and North Korea. Are we the baddies? Yes.

• From WWII to 2007, there were zero worldwide recessions. These tariffs, if they stay in place, along the reactions to them, may well spark the third global recession in 18 years.

• By law, presidents can’t unilaterally levy tariffs—Congress has to be involved. Yet the Republicans in Congress have been largely supine in their reactions to both the tariffs themselves (which they cheered wanly) and their own constitutional powers. Yesterday, the Senate did pass a bill to overrule Trump on earlier tariffs, but it will not pass the House.

• Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent begged the rest of the world not to retaliate, but in comments following Trump’s announcement, the EU, China, and others announced, angrily, to do just that.

As I write this, the U.S. stock markets are down 3.5%, 4%, and 5%. The rest of the world is still scrambling to respond. Meanwhile, Stellantis shut down two factories in Mexico and Canada as a result of earlier tariffs—and then laid off 900 workers at auto factories in the U.S. that support the Canadian and Mexican plants. A lot of stuff is going to unfold very quickly.

As I consider this news and try to figure out how to respond in my own life, two things come to mind. One is that Trump is actually predictable, at least generally. He raised tariffs in his first administration and told us he’d raise them even more this time around, and he’s doing it. An equally predictable pattern is that if Trump tells you he’ll do something, you can be sure that he’ll do it in the stupidest and most incompetent way possible. 

Trump may cancel some or all of the tariffs or stubbornly stick with them or even raise them. He is famously averse to stout resistance. Whatever happens, make sure to factor the stupidity into your plans. We’re going to get so much more of it.