Yet bizarrely, the man who for decades has been a symbol of unapologetic American excess is now defending his tariff policies by making a case against abundance.
When confronted with the reality that, should his tariffs go fully into effect, Americans will no longer have access to low-priced goods that are currently being imported, Trump is now arguing that children are going to have to get used to having less.
Last week, Trump said at his cabinet meeting, “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
Asked about it on NBC’s Meet the Press, he reiterated the talking point, saying, “They don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
Jonah Goldberg is correct: Trump’s economic policies are of a sort that only leftists can love. Two slices:
In an interview with Time magazine, President Trump explained how he approaches tariffs and trade negotiations. I use the word “explained” with some trepidation because explanations imply a certain delineation of reasoning, facts and logic along with opinion and perspective. If you ask me to explain my support for abolishing rent control and I respond, “Because vests have no sleeves and turtles smell of elderberries,” have I really offered an explanation? Or have I merely revealed what passes for my thinking?
“We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history,” Trump “explained” at great length. “Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things.”
“I own the store, and I set prices,” Trump said. He will set those prices based on “statistics” and whatever else he — and he alone — deems relevant.
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We’ve heard far less about how Trump’s economic “philosophy” is a fundamental repudiation of American conservative economic and political philosophy going back more than a century. We certainly haven’t heard this from most Republican politicians, even though we would if a Democratic president were philosophizing and setting tariffs along the same lines.
Trump’s defenders often say we shouldn’t take him literally, we should take him seriously. Fair enough. I am fine with conceding he doesn’t literally think America is a department store. But he clearly thinks this analogy captures some basic truth about not only how trade and macroeconomics work, but also about his ability to outsmart the market. I don’t just mean the stock market. I mean the whole capitalist order. He — and he alone — knows how much steelmakers and coffee brewers, car manufacturers and car buyers should pay for what they need, when they need it.
Despite its crudely cartoonish form, Trump’s analogy is the essence of left-wing economic thought.
[DBx: How fortunate we Americans are that Donald Trump is finally saving us from officious, arrogant elites who think that they know better than we know what’s best for us.]
GMU Econ alum Dominic Pino makes plain that Trump is comically ignorant about trade and tariffs. (Well, it would be comical if Trump didn’t hold political power. Because he holds political power, it’s frightening.) A slice:
He really sincerely believes, despite all evidence to the contrary, that tariffs are paid by foreigners as a kind of access charge to do business with the U.S. He thinks that because the U.S. market is the best in the world, people from other countries should have to pay to do business here.
“For the most part we’re just going to put down a number and say, ‘This is what you pay to shop,’” Trump said, downplaying the idea of more trade agreements. “They’re going to pay for the privilege of being able to shop in the United States of America. It’s very simple.”
He even suggested that this plan has been poorly communicated so far. “I think my people haven’t made it clear. We will sign some deals, but much bigger than that is we’re going to put down the price that people are going to have to pay to shop in the United States.”
“Think of us as a super luxury store,” the president continued. “You’re gonna come, and you’re gonna pay a price, and we’re gonna give you a very good price, we’re gonna make very good deals, and in some cases we’ll adjust, but that’s where it is.”
That’s where it is — complete economic incoherence from start to finish.
Scott Alexander explains that the ultimate blame for Trump’s catastrophic protectionism falls on the populist right. Three slices:
Although it’s true that tariffs owe as much to Trump’s idiosyncrasies as to the inexorable logic of right-wing populism, the ability of a President to hold the nation hostage to his own idiosyncrasies is itself a consequence of populist ideology.
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Populism, especially far-right Trump-style populism, isn’t just a grab bag of opinions on immigration, crime, etc. On a deeper level, it’s a toolbox of strategies, justifications, and beneficial memes for circumventing the institutional middle layer. Some of this is unitary executive doctrine. Some of it is an intense us/them distinction which treats any internal dissent as treason. Some of it is hard-forged antibodies to believing the media or expert class about anything. Some of it is a principled refusal to ever listen to or care about corruption allegations. Liberals treat these as anomalous vices, but they’re all load-bearing parts of a social technology for letting leaders ignore the institutional middle layer and govern without their consent.
(the left also needs to cultivate certain vices to sustain its institutionalist strategy; Bentham Bulldog amply describes the subsequent left-wing failure mode as ideological cults, and the right-wing failure mode as cults of personality).
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.
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Trump and his tariffs are our first and strongest data point for determining these parameters in the American setting. Again imagining a right-wing populist who is disappointed in the tariffs, this person will have to admit that the first and only time their side got a chance to elect a friendly strongman, they screwed it up and elected a moron who destroyed the economy. The first and only time they got a chance to compare his damage to the damage of the institutions, the institutions came out looking at least more compatible with normal economic activity. And the first and only time they got a chance to see if the vestigial checks-and-balances left in place by his own party could restrain him, his subordinates proved to be spineless toadies who praised his genius and munificence even as he bankrupted the country.
Eric Boehm talks with Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-WA) about trade policy and Congressional authority.
One of Trump’s favorite talking points on tariffs is that the U.S. is some kind of free-trade paradise while the rest of the world is staunchly protectionist. It isn’t true, as is apparent if you are even slightly familiar with the federal government’s tangled web of subsidies and trade restrictions affecting large swaths of the economy.
A new report from the Tholos Foundation puts some numbers behind that intuition. The International Trade Barrier Index 2025 ranks countries based on their openness to cross-border trade. It looks at both tariff and non-tariff barriers (NTBs), such as export subsidies, quotas, and domestic regulations that hinder foreign goods, along with restrictions on trade in services as well.
It finds that the U.S. ranks 61st out of 122 countries in international trade freedom. In tariffs, it ranks 81st. In NTBs, it ranks dead last at 122nd.
The U.S. is rich despite its trade barriers, not because of them. Daniel Hannan writes in the report’s foreword, “As in past years, the world’s freest economies account for most of its GDP. Show me a country with high tariffs and I’ll show you an economic basket case.” Other countries around the U.S. ranking include Slovenia (57th), Guyana (60th), and Rwanda (63rd).
The report notes that the data on which it is based were collected in early 2025. “Trump’s tariffs, if permanent, would plunge the U.S. score from 61st to 111th overall,” the report says.
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There is plenty of truth to the claims that other countries use protectionism to benefit their industries. But the U.S. is guilty of this as well, often to a greater extent than other countries are. The 61st most free-trade country is in no position to lecture countries that rank higher about their trade barriers. The right policy for the U.S. is to reduce its own trade barriers, the burdens of which are borne by her own people.
Joe Lancaster reports that “both Biden’s and Trump’s policies are making E.V.s more expensive.”
Colin Grabow explains how “small businesses confront the tariff onslaught.” A slice:
But there’s another story about a small business struggling with surging US import taxes that I’d like to share. Last month, I spoke with the CEO of Bunch Bikes, a Texas-based electric cargo bike company that, as of April 4, had seen its tariff bill rise by over $1,100 per bike over the previous year (the amount has since increased). Instead of thinking of new ways to improve its product and better serve customers, the 8‑person operation is focused on just keeping its doors open.
The stock market was apparently recovering too much confidence in the Donald Trump administration. He fixed that with his spontaneous 100% tariff on foreign movies.
No, it wouldn’t land on Americans the way some of his other tariff acts would. But his Sunday social-media post was an especially shimmering, Technicolor example of Mr. Trump messing with the economy and people’s livelihoods on whim, to satisfy his daily need of attention.
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His trade policy is full of incompatible possibilities: Tariffs will lead to free-trade deals. Wait, tariffs will be permanent and help the U.S. steal our lost jobs back. Wait, no, the jobs will stay in China. The imports will continue. But now we’ll tax them to fix the budget deficit.
