The Republicans swept the elections because of inflation and public disorder.
The year was 1946. The end of wartime price controls had sent prices soaring. Railways, coal mines, and steel mills were shut by strikes. The Republican message was clear and convincing: “Had enough?”
Yes, said the voters, they had. Democrats lost 55 seats in the House, 12 in the Senate. The Republicans took control of both chambers of Congress, after spending the preceding decade and a half as the minority party in both.
All seemed set for a huge GOP win in the 1948 presidential election. A leading candidate for the nomination that year was Robert Alphonso Taft, the eldest son of former President William Howard Taft. Robert Taft represented Ohio in the U.S. Senate, where he’d accumulated a staunchly conservative voting record. He opposed foreign aid, distrusted foreign-military alliances, and championed a high protective tariff for American industries.
In September 1947, Taft toured California. National and local reporters closely followed the probable next president. Some 50 journalists gathered when Taft called a press conference in an auditorium in Santa Cruz. Taft was asked about the cost of living because prices were rising fast, even faster than in the previous year, when voter discontent had already been burning hot.
Seldom has a single answer to a reporter’s question sunk a political career so rapidly and totally. Here’s how Time magazine reported what came next:
Bob Taft was talking matter-of-factly, almost abstractedly, as if he were speaking across a committee table. But for a fraction of a second, every man in the room looked up and stared as if the Senator had just pulled out his penknife, opened it, and absently swallowed it.
Taft had been discussing the high price of food and what he thought should be done to allay it. “Voluntary reduction of consumption,” he said, “is the first step. We should eat less … eat less meat and eat less extravagantly.” He went right on talking. The Chicago Daily News’s Ed Lahey broke in, gave him a chance to get off the hook by asking: “Do you think that would cover the whole populace?”
“Yes,” the Senator said. “Hoover suggested the same thing some time ago. He suggested that we ought to start … a campaign to save food and eat less.”
At Taft’s next appearances, hecklers chanted “Eat less, eat less.” Democrats ridiculed him as “Eat Less Taft.” The following year, Republicans rejected Taft as their nominee in favor of the more progressive and internationalist Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York. The GOP had lost its momentum: At the general election, the Democrats held the presidency and regained control of the House and Senate.
I think of “Eat Less Taft” as I hear President Donald Trump’s appointees defend their administration’s consumer-crushing tariffs. On Meet the Press this past Sunday, the near-billionaire Treasury secretary proclaimed that “the American dream is not ‘Let them eat flat-screens’” and “the American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles from China.”
Scott Bessent’s denigration of affordable televisions was not a one-off gaffe. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York on March 6, he stuck to the script: “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” A few days later, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked on television whether the Trump tariffs were worth the risk of recession. Lutnick delivered an emphatic yes: “These policies are the most important thing America has ever had. It’s worth it.” President Trump alluded to an impending “disturbance” in his March 4 speech to a Joint Session of Congress. Questioned later in the Oval Office about a possible recession, he euphemistically acknowledged a “period of transition” ahead.
So get ready to Eat Less.
At least Taft’s message offered some kind of hope at the end—and, of course, it wasn’t Taft’s personal fault that food prices had risen. But Trump’s tariffs are Trump’s fault, and it’s clear that if he has his way, they will be permanent.
Trump promotes tariffs as a way to shift the costs of financing the U.S. government from Americans to foreigners. His commerce secretary suggests that tariffs might do away with the need for income taxes altogether. Income taxes fall most heavily on the affluent; tariffs fall most heavily on the middle class and poor. Trump has sold his party on tariffs as a way to redistribute the cost of government away from his donors to his voters.
At the same time, Trump’s tariffs are advertised to do a dozen other magical things. They promise to stop Chinese currency manipulation, as well as to stop fentanyl from coming into the United States. They are supposed to compel foreign governments to do more of the government regulation that the United States wants (for example, to police intellectual-property theft) and less of the government regulation that the U.S. does not want. Even with this wish list, the tariffs make no sense. If cheap Chinese goods are your issue, why tax Canadian aluminum and Mexican glass? If your goal is to encourage other countries to increase their defense spending, why start a trade war with Australia after it already made a down payment on three U.S.-made nuclear-powered submarines?
Trump is a flimflam man who will promise anything to anybody and count on the suckers forgetting tomorrow what he said yesterday. His Cabinet officers, however, are gradually revealing the true cost of the Eat Less scam. They do not match Taft’s self-harming candor. But their real message of “Less for you, more for us” is reverberating louder and clearer.
The post The Trump-Tariff Advice: Eat Less appeared first on The Atlantic.
