“T“Oh my, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and that’s my favorite word,” he said Donald Trump last month Pundits, politicians and financial markets are trying to figure out why, since he announced that eight days ago he would to impose tariffs in the United States of America there are three largest trading companies: 25% for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China.
One view is that tariffs can be a pretty distraction. Trump, more than any previous US president, has fed obstacles over the years both to campaign and to govern. He can move seamlessly from one distraction to the next, like a magician preparing to draw a penny from where it appears hidden behind your ear.
Although he still has seven weeks before he takes office, he could use an upset that could start sooner. He ran into problems when appointments to the desk. Of course, he could easily find people who would please his order and the senate in a popular manner. But this was to overcome the main purpose of naming people, as Matt Gaetz and perhaps others whom Trump has named: to force Republican senators to show that Trump is a public necessity in order to maintain his dominance in the party.
It is not a small part of his empire; for he removes a great deal from the defects of the first term, on his part. The lesson is: the faithfulness of the first trumpet. They will be violators exile. And with small margins in the Senate and the House, things begin to develop if this core imperative is unforced.
But the day before Trump actually takes office, it’s also the perfect time to use the threat of tariffs to get foreign governments to start imposing tariffs on things that could benefit their allies, donors, or themselves. Other governments besides the three he mentioned are trying to figure out what they can offer Trump to avoid the economic disruption of tariffs. Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank, who does not see Trump as a friend urged in the EU to deal with it rather than a retaliation, eg tariff, response.
Two Trumpet’s offered prescriptions for dropping the threat – migration and drugs, in this case fentanyl -, are not credible. About 18% of the undocumented population he stumbles There have been border patrols over the past year from Venezuela and Cuba, the two countries that have been there devastated economic by sanctions from the US government. If reducing immigration were really Trump’s concern, he would have deployed sanctions that would have forced millions of people from their homes to the US border; He could essentially end these sanctions in January.
Broad economic sanctions are a form of economic violence that drives citizens to achieve political goals, including regime change. US congressman Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts, made this clear in a letter he wrote to Joe Biden demanding that the sanctions on Venezuela be dropped. Trump sanctions on Venezuela in 2017 he was killed ten thousand civilians in the first year, and more in the following years, even under Biden.
As for fentanyl, about 75,000 people he died from overdoses of this drug in 2023. But it’s hard to see how Trump can help solve this problem. It is an excellent example that more than four decades a failed “war on drugs”, according to criminalization on the use and supply side interventionthey returned worse. In this case, the drug war led to innovation. fentanyl — that is, heroin is much more powerful, much cheaper to produce, more addictive and easier to transport, distribute and sell.
The consensus in economic research on the effects of Trump’s trade war in the first term of the president’s tariff, in which he imposed tariffs on about $380bn of US imports. The overall impact on living standards for US and American workers was found to be particularly negative, with tariffs being the cost. absorbed by US consumers. Employment overall did not to increaseand perhaps from the denial they may fall into retaliatory tariffs.
Economic research related to the expected attack on tariffs that Trump talked about is also progressing he found negating the impact on the US economy. And the potential is for much more damage if other countries respond with more retaliatory tariffs than they did in 2018-2020.
Meanwhile, the productivity impact of Trump’s heavy tariffs remains high. On Sunday, he took a shot at the so-called Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and other economic powers: “We demand a commitment from these countries,” Trump wrote on Social Truth, “and not to create a new Brics currency or to bring another currency back to the powerful US dollar or they will put 100% tariffs and expect to say goodbye to selling in admirable. US economy.
None of this will happen while Trump is in office. Nor will threats like these deter the majority of the world as it prepares to replace a system of global governance that is too far gone. one country with the help of the rich in other rich countries. Our current system is one in which the exorbitant privilege that the dollar-based financial system affords the US government gives the president the power to destroy entire economies with the stroke of a pen.
But this is a longer story; for Trump is just another threat and another distraction in the post-truth world that he, as much as anyone, helped create. But it will take more than disruption to take this country further down the road to democratization and de-democratization, which is what it is. led the power they now have for themselves and for themselves.