Trump’s Tariff Madness Is About One Thing: His Thirst for One-Man Rule
Last weekend, the administration excluded phones, chipmaking, and some computers from his tariffs. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on television and muddied the waters, casting doubt on exactly what would be exempted and what would not. Who knows where that issue will stand by the time you read this.
The pandemonium that is Trump’s policymaking process is why the world now sees our country as unreliable. But the consistent message was: The bazaar is open. Come and get Trump’s special blessing by kissing his … well, you know where. And you can bet that the deepest-pocketed actors in our economy will have a better chance of cajoling the exemptions and concessions they want from Trump than will a small business threatened with bankruptcy because an imported component it needs to make its product remains subject to tariffs and enormous price increases.
Since Trump took office, his opponents have struggled with the blinding speed of his wrecking crew. How, his foes have asked, can we keep focus when he is doing so many bad things simultaneously—ignoring the Supreme Court by keeping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an entirely innocent father of three, in an El Salvador prison to which he should never have been sent; lawlessly closing agencies and laying off workers through Elon Musk’s DOGE; violating the First Amendment by deporting legal residents because they exercise their free speech rights; attempting (with some, but fortunately not universal, success) to intimidate universities and law firms into submission to the president’s diktats; going after the Associated Press for refusing to go along with Trump’s whim in unilaterally renaming the Gulf of Mexico; and undercutting our democratic allies, notably Ukraine.