There’s a classic episode of The Simpsons in which Homer gets a gun. He thinks his awesome gun is great for everything, home defense, opening beer bottles, whatever. When Marge says she doesn’t want a weapon in the house, Homer replies. “A gun is not a weapon, Marge, it’s a tool. Like a butcher knife or a harpoon, or … or an alligator. You just need more education on the subject.”
How Homer thinks about guns is not all that dissimilar to how Donald Trump thinks about tariffs. Or if you want an even more dated pop culture reference, the Trump administration talks about tariffs the way Chevy Chase did in the old Saturday Night Live parody commercial for “New Shimmer”: It’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.
On one hand, the president believes that tariffs make us rich. “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,’’ he said on the campaign trail. Last week in his address to Congress he said, “Tariffs are about making America rich again.” Indeed, fondness for tariffs as an economic cure-all are one of the very few policy positions he’s been consistent on for decades. Even back when he was a pro-abortion rights and anti-gun rights Democrat, he was adamant that tariffs were essential. In his telling, they protect American jobs and create new ones—at no cost to American consumers. And while it is true that consumers don’t necessarily absorb 100 percent of the cost of tariffs in every instance, the overwhelming majority of economists agree that consumers get stuck with the bulk of the inevitable price spikes.
So one might wonder why Trump would wait at all to impose tariffs. Just do it and make us rich again. But he’s not doing it because, as he concedes, tariffs can also cause a “little disturbance” for American businesses. Some car parts cross the Mexican or Canadian border up to eight times before the final product, an “American” car, is completed. Under pressure from the auto industry, Trump agreed to delay auto tariffs for 30 days, as if whole plants that would make those parts strictly within U.S. borders could be moved here or built in 30 days.
The administration also insists that tariffs are a useful tool for other stuff—strengthening the border, say, or stopping the flow of fentanyl into America. (Never mind that the amount of fentanyl coming into the United States from Canada is close to zero, statistically speaking.)
“This is not a trade war. This is a drug war,” says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. White House economic and trade advisers Peter Navarro and Kevin Hassett sing from the same hymnal. But if tariffs make us richer and cost us nothing, why are the administration’s economic advisers so eager to defend tariffs on non-economic grounds? Does success in the “drug war” mean self-inflicted impoverishment in the “trade war?”
“Drug war” is the floor wax, “trade war” is the dessert topping.
Then there’s the push for “reciprocal tariffs,” which will allegedly go into effect on April 2. The stated justification is that they will force other nations to lower their tariffs. And in response, we will lower ours. The idea seems to be that American businesses will positively respond to the incentives of high tariffs and bring manufacturing home, and foreign businesses will respond to tariffs and lower trade barriers, which will cause us to get rid of tariffs, too. Except the Trump administration doesn’t want to lower tariffs, it wants more and bigger tariffs: because they’ll make us rich, save “America’s soul,” “make our country a fortune” and thereby free us to eliminate the income tax and balance the budget.
Tariffs are a tool, you see, like a butcher’s knife, harpoon and alligator all rolled into one glorious Swiss U.S. army knife.
I think Trump sincerely believes that tariffs are great economic tools. But I think he likes tariffs for another reason: They generate chaos that allows him to “save” individual businesses from the very chaos he creates. They keep him at the center of not just politics but economics, too. They incentivize business to make placating, pleasing or rewarding Trump crucial to their bottom lines.
This sort of incentive for corruption—both in the literal sense but also in terms of policymaking—is one of the main reasons we have an income tax in the first place. So many industries sought special treatment for themselves or vigorous enforcement for their competition when tariffs funded the government that Congress—traditionally the designer of trade policy—became a hive of corruption. The IRS was, in part, an antifraud invention.
Now that trade policy is run out of the Oval Office, such corruption will be a feature, not a bug.
