The Anti-Wonk

 Last week, Trump met with donors and GOP Congresscritters and floated the idea of replacing the income tax with tariffs. As Jon Chait and Matthew Yglesias have pointed out, this is one of those myriad things that would have killed another politician's career.

The reasons are fairly simple. If you wanted to replace the revenues from the income tax with a tariff, you would have to raise tariffs by a LOT. Some of this will come with the idea of zeroing out existing programs, but we've seen time and time again since Reagan that the GOP rails against Big Gubmint, but then can't actually find programs to kill without unacceptable political costs. Think of Trump's efforts to repeal ACA.

So, this massive tariff would function as a de facto national sales tax. At a time when inflation seems to be the biggest concern for everyone, a massive tariff would be hugely inflationary - as would Trump's other dumbass idea: deporting millions of undocumented workers. In fact, this combination of levying a massive tariff to restrict imports and reducing by huge numbers the pool of labor would basically wreck the American (and likely global) economy. It is a catastrophically bad idea.

As Chait points out, this scheme is consistent with the GOP's long running hatred of any form of progressive taxation. Shifting the tax burden away from top earners towards consumers will shift the amount of taxation paid for by people who don't have a lot of money. The idea that this will onshore jobs is also just dumb. No company is going to completely shift its global supply and manufacturing chains for what will likely be a four year window of American protectionism.

That feeds into Yglesias' main point: We simply don't hold Trump accountable for being a terrible president. His ideas are really, really bad. In fact, they were so bad his last time in office that all he really accomplished was massive tax cuts and reshaping the judiciary - which ANY Republican would have done. The uniquely Trumpist ideas all died on the vine. You may have heard that the Big Beautiful Wall was never built nor did Mexico pay for it.

Meanwhile, Biden has done quite a lot. The American economy is the envy of the world, we've made massive investments in clean energy, we are reinvigorating our alliances, and we have reduced the debt burden on millions of Americans. 

Fundamentally, the difference and the baffling reason that this race is so close is that Biden is not a good salesman and that's all Trump ever was - and Trump's sole product was his "brand". Biden's stutter is a bigger liability as he gets older, but Trump's increasingly obvious mental collapse gets waived away because he never really made any sense.

The Biden team has said that "democracy is on the ballot" this fall, and that is literally true. However, in some ways the fact that this race is even close is fundamental indictment of where democracy currently stands. Trump is a felon; Trump tried to overthrow the election; Trump is a sexual predator.  However, simply on the ability of citizens to make a rational decision about which man will do the best job, it's absolutely crazy that anyone who support this gibbering lunatic.