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Jamelle Bouie on Trump’s Tariff Obsession
Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link): There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview. [...] You could even say that this need to dominate — this overwhelming drive to show mastery — is constitutive of Trump’s self. There must be a loser, or else there is no Trump. [...] The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command, more displays of his power and authority and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America. There’s no point to this other than a vain attempt to get every other country in the world to come begging to Donald Trump for mercy. Which isn’t going to happen. ★
Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link):
There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview. [...]
You could even say that this need to dominate — this overwhelming drive to show mastery — is constitutive of Trump’s self. There must be a loser, or else there is no Trump. [...] The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command, more displays of his power and authority and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America.
There’s no point to this other than a vain attempt to get every other country in the world to come begging to Donald Trump for mercy. Which isn’t going to happen.
