You Can’t Say Donald Trump Didn’t Warn You

Donald Trump dubbed himself “Tariff Man” in his first term and was clear he had even bigger plans in his second. “‘Tariff’…is one of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard,” he said during his campaign. Economists, and even some Republicans, cautioned that tariffs are not a magic wand, and waving them around as he vowed to would raise prices for American consumers and potentially trigger a recession. But he didn’t back off: “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” he insisted. Then, on Wednesday, he announced 10 percent tariffs on all trading partners, and even more on China and others, prompting promises of retaliation from across the globe.

Now, big investors are perplexed. Wall Street CEOs have been mostly silent and other powerful business leaders including reportedly Jeff Bezos, have been trying, though unsuccessfully, to dissuade the president without retribution. But what’s most confounding is that some Republicans seem to have been caught off-guard. Four GOP senators—Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, and former leader Mitch McConnell—voted with Democrats to condemn the new policy. Others expressed their misgivings in the media, albeit in a careful tone, so as not to upset their boss. “We just don’t know” what the impact of the tariffs will be, Republican Senator John Kennedy told reporters Wednesday. “Anybody who tells you otherwise that says they know has been smoking the devil’s lettuce.”

Some members—perhaps not quite as willing to publicly shrug at gambling with the American public’s financial well-being—dodged questions about the tariffs, or hid behind their anonymity to express their discomfort. Many tried to lobby the White House for carve-outs, hoping to shield some of their constituents from the pain of the trade war they enabled. “Our farmers are stretched,” Kansas Senator Jerry Moran told Politico.

Aren’t we all?

Trump’s announcement Wednesday sent stock futures plummeting, and the market meltdown continued. But Trump, in a Truth Social post Thursday morning, insisted all was well: “THE OPERATION IS OVER!” he wrote. “THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE.”

We’ll see. This is a man who managed to run casinos into bankruptcy, it’s hard to take much faith in his assurances that this tariff regime will pay off—especially since the weighted average tariff under his new plan is, in some analyses, actually higher than the Smoot-Hawley Act that many believe exacerbated the Great Depression. Trump, speaking in the Rose Garden Wednesday, presented an alternative take on that protectionist disaster: The depression, he said, “would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy.”

Trump, as always, is governing at the intersection of arrogant stupidity, rank self-interest, and bitter grievance—and it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins. To what extent is this foolishness, and to what extent is he intentionally manufacturing chaos? Either way, his party, as usual, is mostly going along for the ride. “I think it’s kind of a high-risk bet he’s making on the economy,” GOP Senator Ron Johnson told Axios. “He may be right.”

And if he’s not? The American public will be stuck with his gambling arrears.