Corruption, Cruelty and Chaos

In no particular order

We’re all understandably disoriented by the extraordinarily chaotic and disruptive nature of the ever-evolving Trump tariff regime. In the midst of the maelstrom, analysts, observers and regular folks are all, in their own way, trying to discern a logic, a strategy, a rationale for why Trump is doing what he is doing. I’ve said before that, as a general way understanding what he’s up to, that’s a fool’s errand.¹ The most commonly asserted reasons center on the notion that, in taxing imports at such high rates, we will induce companies to reshore — to (re)invest in reopening manufacturing capacity in the United States. The result will be the return to manufacturing greatness and, with it, a reinvigoration of good paying jobs for a long-beleaguered working class.² That has, historically, been a central rationale for tariffs. Our first economic impresario, Alexander Hamilton, argued for the necessity of “infant industry” protection, contending that if the United States wanted to develop independent and sustainable economic capacity, it needed to protect our then-infant nascent industries from predatory foreign competition, especially Great Britain. It’s a logic that has driven economic development strategies for centuries. And though Trump has framed the current approach as a grievance against all who are supposedly cheating us, the main target is obviously China.

But in the current context, and given the way in which the Trump administration is implementing tariff policy, the approach makes no sense. Economists have enumerated many reasons for why this is so. These include the following: 1) the uncertainty of the ever-shifting tariff regime may disincentivize many companies to want to make major investment decisions now; 2) it’s a fantasy that we can snap our fingers and bring back the kinds of manufacturing jobs that sustained a broad middle class half a century ago, when a key reason those jobs did so then was that they were heavily unionized; 3) that the nature of our economy in 2025 means that even distinguishing “foreign” from “domestic” companies and what economic benefits they deliver has little relationship to current reality; 4) that manufacturing itself accounts for perhaps ten percent of our workforce (compared to 30% in the “golden age,”) and by generous estimates, a major tariff-induced shift in domestic investment would eventually increase that figure by only a handful of percentage points; 5) that Trump’s recklessness is going to make the US a less and less reliable trading partner, among whose likely effects will be to make China a more attractive one, exactly contrary to the premise of “anti-China” policy the administration imagines it is pursuing.

And that’s not to mention the chaos all of this is causing in the equities and bond markets, which has received much of the attention in news coverage over the past few weeks.

But though we are probably chasing our tails trying to discern anything like a sound economic strategy and logic in what Trump is up to, we are on firmer ground trying to parse who will benefit and, especially, who will suffer from the current craziness. We know that ordinary consumers are going to pay higher prices for many goods, a burden that will inflict more distress on less well-off households. After all, tariffs are a highly regressive tax and exempting higher-end consumer products, like computers and smartphones from those tariffs only makes them more regressive. We can also widen our lens to see Trump’s tariff policy as part of a larger egomaniacal project in which the most powerful men in the world lay waste to reality, free from any personal consequence. That’s the context in which to understand the onslaught on our social safety net, including Musk’s ongoing efforts to undermine Social Security by constructing sheer fantasies of nonexistent fraud, or the GOP’s intention to pass a budget that will further balloon our deficits in order to make permanent tax cuts that benefit the wealthy, while gashing critical supports for the less well off, like Medicaid.

Back to the tariffs, the seemingly quixotic retreats on some of the tariffs is also a recipe for corruption. What Trump likes to tout as his negotiating savvy is nothing so much as a mafioso’s extortionate practices. As Fareed Zakaria notes:

With tariffs come tariff waivers, often granted by the hundreds to specific industries, companies, even products. In 2018 and 2019, the Trump administration announced an assortment of tariffs, including 25 percent on steel, and also a program of waivers; they got around 500,000 applications. This week, when asked how he would determine these exemptions, Trump replied, “instinctively.” Studies show that politicians’ instincts usually favor their contributors, which then encourages pervasive corruption.

This was true of Trump’s tariff policy in his first term, and the much larger scale and chaotic nature of tariffs under Trump 2.0 means that much more corruption.

Plenty of non-rich Americans will find their retirement security undermined if the markets continue to tank. But it’s hard to know how that will unfold. What we do know is that the policies Trump is pursuing will inflict certain pain on ordinary Americans in the short to medium term, with no reasonable hope of meaningful benefits in the longer run. And that ought to be the basis of the attacks on Trump’s recklessness. He’s behaving like a predator, wreaking havoc because he can, motivated mainly by ego and impulse that the thin veneer of weak rationale ought not to obscure. The primary questions we ought to be asking about any public policy approach center on its costs and benefits, with special attention to its effects on already vulnerable populations. The biggest lie Trump and Vance told America in 2024 was that they cared about the well-being of ordinary people. Weeks before election day, Vance had the gall to assert that the gap in life expectancy between the less well off and the better off was what his and Trump’s campaign “was all about.” Everything about GOP policymaking in recent decades has, in fact, ensured that that gap would only grow. Trump 2.0 seems determined to widen that chasm further, while also the circle of vulnerability to engulf more and more Americans. His tariff policy, like all of his policies, should be understood within that frame.

1. In some ways that’s not unlike attempts to understand Bush/Cheney’s ever-shifting, often self-contradictory and ultimately incoherent arguments for invading Iraq. Ultimately, those rationales papered over the fact that a corrupt and at-the-time unaccountable regime did it because they were in thrall to their own version of an America-first ideology that was indifferent to the suffering their ideas would inflict on other people and because no one could stop them from doing so.

2. That much is certainly true. The United States’ pursuit of a particular approach to trade in recent decades did contribute significantly to the terrible distress many communities in the industrial heartland experienced during that time.