Pamela Smith/AP Photo
Donald Trump attends a campaign event at the Economic Club of New York, September 5, 2024, in New York.
When Donald Trump is in the room, the truth takes a night off.
Only in this Republican Party can stories about Haitians eating pets leap from 4chan to the presidential debate stage in two days. As Rick Perlstein noted today, when you have religious conviction animating your movement, trivialities like verifying claims are sidelined. As long as something fits into the worldview, it doesn’t need to be true. For all the talk about the damage of young girls being addicted to their cellphones and steps needing to be taken to wean them off, nights like Tuesday remind us that the real damage of internet addiction is occurring among old right-wing men who believe everything put in front of them.
About Kamala Harris’s strategy: The expression du jour is that Harris “baited” Trump into looking insane in front of the public, but I don’t think there was a chance that she would throw out the bait and not reel anything in. This wasn’t a fair fight. This was like the late 19th century, when the servants of some industrialist would stock the lake with hungry fish. The Harris campaign ran an ad on Fox News making fun of Trump about crowd sizes, did everything but fly a giant banner over Trump’s car reading, “We’re going to make fun of you about crowd sizes,” then made fun of him about crowd sizes, and Trump still got angry. Yes, the debate team knew who they’re dealing with, because the subject in question has the emotional self-control of a toddler.
What’s more interesting to me is the cul-de-sac that Trump has stumbled into on tariffs, which now comprise his entire economic policy. It’s indicative of this wall that has been built, not to keep out migrants from Mexico, but to keep out reality.
In 2016, Trump had a rationale for imposing tariffs. He thought cheap Chinese goods entering the country unmolested was hurting the industrial base and causing factories to close. He imposed them to revitalize those left-behind areas, rebuild those factories, lower the trade deficit, and make America great again. And they were not placed across the board outside of China; the tariffs other countries felt were sector-specific.
Somewhere along the way, an aide must have idly read half a page to Trump from Karl Rove’s book about William McKinley, and now tariffs are to him what tax cuts are to every other Republican: a cure for every ailment. (It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.) Trump’s incoherent-sounding answer at the Economic Club of New York last week about child care was merely Trump seeing tariffs as bringing in enough cash to handle the problem. The way he thinks about this is the way a gangster used to think about protection money: Trump will get rich (oh, and sure, the country will too) by sticking up other countries.
There’s been a lot of dumb talk about tariffs lately, but they aren’t totally outlandish. That’s why, as Trump said in his only somewhat accurate comeback, Biden has kept a lot of the Chinese tariffs on. Lori Wallach and the Rethink Trade crew have a good primer on the purpose of tariffs. They are a trade enforcement tool for critical industries where countries have an economic and national-security imperative to compete. They are attempts to induce that competition fairly. And they are completely justified along those lines.
Trump has decided that tariffs are just a cheat code that allows you to cut other taxes and fund every need the government has.
But that’s only if you combine them with other tools to allow for industrial expansion, like investing in manufacturing sectors or using export controls on certain technologies. The Biden administration has done this, and even added new, targeted tariffs on the same sectors where manufacturing is being encouraged. Because they are using tariffs in the manner in which they should be used, manufacturing construction in critical industries is soaring faster than any time in the last 30 years, private investment has been leveraged manyfold, clean-energy jobs in the U.S. are rising at twice the rate of other jobs, and the expected market share for U.S. semiconductors is now expected to grow after decades in the wilderness.
You’d have to know about this going in, but Harris actually alluded to it a bit when she talked about Trump “selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military.” That was a reversal of Trump’s initial flirtation with export controls. She also highlighted the increase of 800,000 manufacturing jobs, which is frankly a low number, since practically all the factories boosted by the Inflation Reduction Act are still being completed and have yet to bring on production workers.
(I would add that the one area where the Biden administration eased up on including trade enforcement tariffs in its strategy, by delaying for two years solar component penalties, is an area where Chinese dominance is continuing. The suspension of a silicon cell factory in Colorado is the direct result of this failure to use the entire toolbox. The cross-pressure from the solar installation lobby, a trade group that includes the very Chinese companies dominating production, has been very damaging for administration strategy.)
Tariffs are imposed on wholesale prices, becoming part of the input cost. They are not a direct tax added to retail prices, and they are often absorbed into profit margins. But if you’re setting tariffs on everything, from every nation, including goods that have no substitute production in the U.S., then you are likely to get higher prices as a result, because there’s nothing stopping the retailer from passing on that input cost. You can use across-the-board tariffs as a trade enforcement tool to win policy concessions from other countries, but only if you’re willing to take them off if the concessions are won.
None of this is even reckoned with by Trump anymore. If it were, he’d have to admit that his tariffs failed to bring back industrial capacity. So instead, he’s gone deep into his mind and decided that tariffs are just a cheat code that allows you to cut other taxes and fund every need the government has. That means you can’t ever take them off, if they’re your main revenue source.
Thinking about tariffs as revenue is innumerate. Trump had to pay back out almost as much additional tariff revenue that he brought in to help struggling exporters, particularly in agriculture, caught up in his trade war. Tariffs cannot replace the income tax, and fund child care and other priorities, as a mathematical matter. But worse than that, the revenue on across-the-board tariffs, where no industry will rise to pick up the production and higher prices will result, will simply come from working families. Like any sales tax, it’s going to be regressive on those who spend a higher proportion of their income on basic necessities.
By contrast, the Biden strategy shows that industrial expansion and targeted tariffs can coexist with stable inflation, which as of today is down to 2.5 percent over the last year.
The Trump position on tariffs is indicative of the brain-poisoning of an entire party that has left policy construction behind in favor of Reddit rumors. In a fact-free zone, words are mashed together to the point of incoherence, and promises can be big and bold without a thought of whether they’re true and correct.
Do debates matter? They were enough to push one old politician out of the race a couple of months ago. Today, the Republican Party, which once called itself “the party of personal responsibility” is touting internet polls that their minions stormed, and blaming debate moderators for jumping in to say there’s no evidence of Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. Republicans have gone beyond any of the rational thoughts that would involve reassessing any of their choices over the last decade.
Whether debates matter for the purposes of collecting votes will not be revealed until November. What I know is that Donald Trump’s success depends entirely on whether he’s convinced enough Americans in swing states to be as ignorant as he is.
