Is There Actually A Plan?

 During the first sojourn in Trumpistan, Josh Marshall and John Scalzi posited something called Trump's Razor. The basic formulation is:

According to Trump’s Razor: “ascertain the stupidest possible scenario that can be reconciled with the available facts” and that answer is likely correct.

So if we look at the absolute brain damaged nonsense of Trump's tariffs yesterday, Trump's Razor suggests that Trump has a naïve and deeply wrong idea about trade and trade deficits; he feels he was thwarted from instituting his tariffs during the first administration; he is now unbound; he has declared war on global trade.

As an explanation, that really does fit the available facts. 

However, Richardson picks up on something Senator Chris Murphy has suggested. I'll just quote from her:

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) noted tonight that the tariffs make no economic sense because “[t]hey aren’t designed as economic policy. The tariffs are simply a new, super dangerous political tool.” Murphy suggests they are a way to make private industry dependent on the president the same way he has tried to make law firms and universities dependent on him. Industries and companies “will need to pledge loyalty to Trump in order to get sanctions relief.”

Murphy warns that “[t]he tariffs are DESIGNED to create economic hardship…[s]o that Trump has a straight face rationale for releasing them, business by business or industry by industry. As he adjusts or grants relief, it’s a win-win: the economy improves and dissent disappears.”

This is also plausible. Trump is using every lever - constitutional or otherwise, legal or not - to consolidate power in the White House. This is because his basic impulse is dictatorial. Using tariffs to crush the economy and in particular force major industries to bow to his fetid will could very well be the point of all this.

I am a bit skeptical, simply because Trump is not a man of subtle plans and long term stratagems. As Krugman notes, the bizarro formula they used to calculate "tariffs" (really just a weird version of the trade deficit in manufactured goods) may have simply been fed into Grok, Elon Musk's AI program. Krugman then goes on to say that these laughable numbers are yet another dominance display. Trump will make Republicans defend his absolute nonsense. 

Yesterday, before Trump's declaration of economic warfare, four Republican Senators voted to revoke Trump's tariffs on Canada, with Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul joining Murkowski and Collins to provide the 51 votes (it's likely DOA in the House). They did this because Canada launched targeted tariffs on bourbon. 

Here's where we come to the intersection of stupid or fascist. 

Canada knew how to target their response to the appropriate Senators. The EU, China, Japan, hell the rest of the world have people in decision making positions who are smart and respond to actual facts. Trump's forcing supporters to defend the rank lunacy of his tariffs is about dominance and about the fact that Trump is always right. Maybe he really IS going to use tariffs to try and force American industry to comply with his every whim. 

It doesn't mean he will succeed. 

The US markets are open. The NASDAQ is already down over 4%, the S&P down 3%. Consumer confidence is collapsing. The Atlanta Fed is predicting we are already in an overall contraction in the economy before he created his insane clown tariffs. 

As Jon Chait notes, dictators arise when what they do is popular. Putin took on the oligarchs and corruption (eventually replacing them with his own oligarchs and corruption). Orban tapped into Hungarian anger over migration. Erdogan, too, was popular at first.

I'll give Chait the last word:

Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.

The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.