There really is only one political story this week, the inevitable story of cause and effect.
Trump was warned for months, by economists from across the political spectrum, that a broad-brush approach to tariffs, a policy he has repeatedly labeled “beautiful,” would trigger an economic calamity. Yet Trump – as is the wont of a supremely arrogant man who believes himself to be “a very stable genius” – chose to ignore the collective wisdom.
Last Wednesday, from the White House Rose Garden, the president of the United States declared “liberation day,” imposed the highest US tariffs in nearly a century—on pretty much the whole world except Russia, Belorus, and North Korea—then sat back and watched as trillions of dollars of US and global wealth was wiped out in a stock market route.
On Thursday, the Dow Jones lost roughly 1,500 points; on Friday, it lost another 2,200 points, bringing its two-day losses to roughly 10 percent of its pre-tariffs value. Every other major stock index lost at least that much. Similar patterns held for indexes around the world.
On social media, Trump responded by posting inane, all-caps comments about the patient—the US economy—surviving the surgery. This was, at best, tone deaf. The S&P alone lost $5 trillion (yes, that’s not a typo, that’s a T) in value in two days. The Dow Jones shed $6.6 trillion.
To put these numbers in human terms, just between these two stock indexes alone every man woman and child in the United States lost an average of more than $36,000. By the time you read this article, you and each one of your family members will almost certainly have lost several tens of thousands more – and that’s not even factoring in the higher prices you will now pay for consumer goods subject to these tariffs.
None of this is abstract; everyone who is saving money for retirement just took a massive hit. Everyone who have a savings plan to send their kids to college just took a massive hit. Every employer just took a massive hit—meaning there will almost certainly be huge job losses coming down the pipeline. Every consumer just took a massive hit, since tariffs will increase the price of the goods you buy. Every traveler abroad will suffer the consequences of a declining dollar. That swooshing sound? It’s the sound of a nation’s financial stability going down the toilet.
And the same pattern holds all around the world. How do you think people elsewhere are going to look at Americans now when they see a country whose president deliberately tanked their economies, destroyed their hopes for a secure retirement, and bankrupted the employers that provided millions of people with income? I’ll make it easy on you: how would you think if a foreign leader had done this to you and to your loved ones?
Trump claims he has no choice but to blow up the international order. He claims there’s a national economic emergency, and that he has to recalibrate trade to bring good jobs back to the US. On April 2nd, he was cheered on by some particularly myopic union members, notably denizens of the United Auto Workers and United Steel Workers. Afterwards, UAW president Shawn Fain took to the airwaves to defend the policy.
Of course, it’s true that a genuinely pro-labor administration could use carefully targeted tariffs to protect certain industries and high wage structures for skilled workers. But Trump’s no friend of labor; rather he’s the most anti-union president in modern US history. MAGA-man has spent the past months gutting federal employees’ job security through the actions of DOGE, and ending their collective bargaining agreements. He’s destroyed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s broken the enforcement abilities of the Department of Labor to rein in rogue employers. He reversed an increase in the minimum wage paid to federal contractors. Now he’s imposed a blunt, catch-all tariff system that will hurt workers and employers alike all over the world.
Case in point: hours after the tariffs announcement, leading vehicle manufacturers began laying off workers all over North America, including in the United States, as well as announcing price hikes for their vehicles.
There is recent precedent for the leader of a major nation using the language of “liberation” to impose a vastly destructive economic vision. In 2018, in the UK, then-Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss made a major speech outlining a program for “liberating the economy.” In September 2022, Truss became the country’s prime minister. She implemented her radical ideas with gusto, the markets tanked, the value of the pound cratered, and the Bank of England had to step in with expensive emergency members to stabilize the economy. Within weeks, wags were placing bets as to whether Liz Truss’s shelf life would be shorter than that of a supermarket lettuce. The lettuce won; six weeks after unveiling her disastrous set of policies, her own MPs—those same politicians who had previously expressed undying fealty to Truss—dumped her.
We can only hope that Trump and his ill-conceived tariffs face a similar swift reckoning.
