The emperor has no clue
The market has been panicking since the start of the month, for something that was inevitably coming – and what the Trump administration has been threatening since February, with a pointless trade war. While the die-hard Trumpers are still trying to rationalize away this insanity, it’s finally sinking in to Trump’s donors that the emperor has no clothes: He’s reckless and an imbecile who doesn’t even grasp the basics of economics and he’s going to ruin things in ways that will extend well beyond his time in office, as there’s little reason for other countries to trust how the United States will treat its allies in the future.
Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, has been one of the most ardent defenders of these tariffs in the media, but things got a bit different on Sunday when he made the rounds on political talk shows. While Trump has been arguing that the tariffs are a way to drive manufacturing back to the US, the problem is that a lot of these jobs can’t exist in the US and would drive the prices up on goods substantially even if they were. Lutnick basically admitted as such when he said that the new factories he was bringing to the US were going to be entirely automated, and wouldn’t create new union jobs. He tried to backtrack by arguing that they needed specialists, but that only shows that Lutnick, like the rest of this administration, is hopelessly out of step with the way things really work.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making