While there is nothing fundamentally funny about Donald Trump’s presidency, some of his policies, as Stephen Colbert and others regularly point out, register well above 9 on the Richter scale of ridiculosity. One current example of life under Trump imitating farce is his proposed 39 percent tariffs on Switzerland.
The farce I have in mind is the musical comedy Strike Up the Band, with books (it had two versions, one in 1927, one in 1930) by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind (who also wrote the definitive Marx Brothers comedies) and a score by George and Ira Gershwin. It features an American cheese mogul so infuriated by Switzerland’s efforts to block U.S. tariffs on their cheese that he finances a war in which the U.S. conquers Switzerland … almost (it’s a comedy, after all). The war is so identified with his business interests that, thoughtfully, it is named after the cheesemonger: the Horace J. Fletcher Memorial War.
In its 1927 version, the show so openly and scathingly satirized the American involvement in World War I—the business interests that had pressured the government to go to war, the wave of jingoism and the suppression of free speech that followed that decision—that audiences didn’t take to it. The watered-down 1930 version, however, was a Broadway hit.
Fast-forward to last week, when Donald Trump imposed a ruinous tariff on Swiss imports, despite Swiss President Karin Keller-Sutter flying to D.C. in an attempt to strike a better deal with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then in a phone call with Trump himself. The U.S. is running a $40 billion trade deficit with Switzerland, for which, not that it matters to Trump, Switzerland is hardly to blame. The nation manufactures high-end watches and precision tools not made in the U.S., makes pharmaceutical products, and also refines gold bullion and bars that are marketed on right-wing U.S. websites and sold to right-wing U.S. goldbugs and occasional readers of The Wall Street Journal editorial pages. None of the Swiss factories or gold refineries were offshored from the U.S.; most are venerable Swiss industries that only a limited number of American businesses have chosen to engage in.
Moreover, a number of these Swiss firms have already been opening production facilities in the U.S., so much so that on a per capita basis, the Swiss investment in the U.S. is the highest of any other nation. Problem is, there are only nine million Swiss, so when the total sum of those per capita investments is measured in raw dollars, it doesn’t come to all that much. And, of course, a nation of nine million can’t really buy as many goods, either foreign or domestic, as a nation of 340 million (us). Hence, the deficit.
Trump’s concern here is every bit as personal as that of the fictitious Horace J. Fletcher. At first glance, he doesn’t appear to be angling for personal profit, but, as with all his transactions, he’s bent on creating his signature transactional dynamic in which there’s a clear winner (him) and a clear loser (in this case, Switzerland). But who knows? If Switzerland is to win a lower tariff rate, he may require it to provide some five- or even six-figure timepieces at a steep discount (or even gratis?) to his wealthy backers, not to mention the Trump family itself. And as his policies drive down the value of the dollar relative to gold, he may compel the Swiss to provide more affordable gold bars to those same wealthy backers, or at least knock off the price on the gold trim he’s placing around every object in the White House (and Lord knows how many objects in Mar-a-Lago). Late last week, Trump proposed putting a tariff on previously tariff-free gold imports, which would surely reduce the trade deficit with Switzerland, and perhaps compel their refineries to open U.S. branches, in which Don Jr. and Eric might quietly secure a Trump Family share.
For Trump (to flip Clausewitz upside down), politics is an extension of war by other means, and that’s certainly true with tariffs. He’s punishing Brazil by threatening it with a 50 percent tariff (though the U.S. is actually running a trade surplus with that nation) because he hates its democratic socialist president, and wants to stop the trial of Brazil’s own Trump wannabe, Jair Bolsonaro, for trying to overthrow the elected government. He’s punishing Democrats by telling Republican state legislatures to strip the Democrats of their congressional seats through mid-decade gerrymandering. He’s punishing federal employees and their unions by unilaterally abrogating their contracts: Last Wednesday, the Veterans Affairs Department announced that it would no longer recognize or be guided by the contract it had with its employees’ unions, despite the administration’s promise that departments and agencies would not actually abrogate their contracts until the courts had ruled on whether this was legal.
Winners and losers. Actually, winner and losers. The problem, as Saul Bellow’s Augie March noted, is that “there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining.” In the case of the tariffs, the “adjoining” things will surely be American consumers. They’ll be able to find alternatives to Swiss cheese, but a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian coffee beans will turn our nation into a collection of caffeine-starved, semiconscious zombies. Many of whom may be just conscious enough to vote Democratic in the midterm elections.
Where the Kaufman/Ryskind/Gershwin Horace J. Fletcher had to push the U.S. into a war to get the tariffs he sought, Donald J. Trump’s tariffs are meant to have the force of war in and of themselves. Life in the Age of Trump imitates farce, only worse.