Donald Trump’s chaotic ethos can be summed up in this sentence: Never admit you’re wrong, and only weak countries carry trade deficits.
Those two pillars of Trump’s political thought have followed him from his days as a Manhattan real estate developer, through the dawn of the social media era, and right into the Oval Office. His latest global trade war is combining those two toxic ideas into what economic experts warn is an “astonishing act of self-harm” that has left business leaders “terrified” of the financial chaos to come.
Congressional Republicans are belatedly waking up to the grave threat of Trump’s sweeping tariffs, but their efforts to stop him will be fruitless. Unlike issues including abortion and immigration, closing the trade deficit may be Trump’s only core value. And it’s Trump—not Congress—who holds the power in this new, more autocratic presidency. The end result will be a drawn-out and uncertain political conflict that holds the world economy hostage. How’s that new Golden Age working out?
Trump’s protectionist trade views are a product of the late 1970s, when the collapse of the post-World War II Bretton Woods economic system, a rising Japan, and a global oil shock made protectionism the hottest political fashion. In 1987, Trump would make his political debut with full-page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post slamming American trade policy and accusing foreign leaders of “laughing at” American leaders like Ronald Reagan.
In a letter addressed “To the American People,” Trump torched Japan for “taking advantage of the United States.” He called out the country’s “huge” trade deficits as a sign of weakness. The Wall Street Journal analyzed the language used in Trump’s ad and found the same phrases reappear dozens of times in Trump’s public comments across the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s, long after it was clear that his view was wrong.
Despite his reputation for being a political chameleon, Trump found his misguided voice on tariffs early and never wavered, even when Reagan’s own economic advisers rejected protectionism in favor of broader free trade. By 1989, Trump had reached his current, fully fundamentalist view on tariff policy, and he was ready to deploy his nativist poison on the public.
“America is being ripped off. And I’ll tell you what. We’re not going to have an America in 10 years if it keeps going like this,” Trump told ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer. “We’re a debtor nation, and we have to tax, we have to tariff, we have to protect this country. And nobody’s doing it.”
While the countries Trump targets for criticism may have changed since the 1980s, he maintains an unflinching belief that “trade wars are good,” as he said in March 2018. Some Republican insiders hoped that the Heritage Foundation handlers around Trump might push the president back toward economic orthodoxy, but that was clearly delusional.
Trump implemented some of the harshest tariffs in American history because he believes a nonsensical set of myths about how our economy works. His economic policy is guided solely by what he misremembers about the 1970s, and nothing is swaying him. As Trump posted to Truth Social on Friday morning, “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
A great example of how Trump’s delusion is screwing the economy is his remark last week that American manufacturing will easily replace all U.S. imports in just two years. Actual manufacturers say that number is more like 10 to 12 years, and that assumes the economy remains stable. In the meantime, prices will spike and supply chains will be devastated, leading to potential product shortages and—you guessed it—even higher prices!
The result is a looming electoral wipeout that plenty of Republican lawmakers can see coming but most feel powerless to stop. “He doesn’t give a f-ck,” one White House official said, which is always what you want to hear about a president who just declared economic war on the entire world. Now some GOP lawmakers are preparing for a possible “blue wave” election in 2026, and deciding it might be better to retire than to try and defend the indefensible. Sure, running away is always an option.
Trump’s fixation on outdated economic ideas has already cost American investors over $11 trillion, including trillions of dollars drained from public sector pension funds and retirement accounts. Most Americans don’t have the savings to weather the kind of global trade war Trump is about to incite, but that never mattered to Trump or the GOP.
Like everything else about him, Trump’s trade policy is just another extension of his rotted out 1980s psyche—and America’s working class will pay the price for his latest round of economic shock therapy.