A week later, during an interview with two reporters from Vox, Cass was asked whether the Trump administration was making an error by imposing a global tariff on all imports (including “shirts and screws and picture frames and bicycles.”) instead of focusing on critical items like semiconductors.
“I think a global tariff is the right way to do things,” Cass said. “It’s a very simple, broad policy that conveys a value that we see in domestic production.”
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In October, Cass wrote in The Atlantic that Trump’s global tariffs “takes the right approach to addressing globalization’s failures.” He dismissed tariff critics as unpatriotic nerds who “don’t believe that manufacturing things domestically matters.” (For a deep and thorough rebuttal of those claims, check out this response, crafted by two trade experts at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.)
Yet the evidence is now becoming overwhelming: The economists knew what they were talking about.
The manufacturing sector has dipped into a recession this year, as executives have reported higher input prices, fewer new orders, and declining employment—all of which could be attributed to the sudden tariff hikes imposed earlier this year. Meanwhile, surveys of business owners have found very little support for tariffs, while most say Trump’s trade policies are increasing uncertainty and raising costs.
The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is correct:
President Trump moves so fast and announces so much that it’s hard to sort the real from the hype. Cases in point are the invest-in-America promises that foreign governments have made as part of Mr. Trump’s trade deals. They’re so large they’re unlikely to happen, and they raise serious questions about American governance and the power of the purse.
By insisting on “no enemies to the right,” the right is repeating the left’s biggest mistake. That phrase comes from the French Revolution, when the warning was pas d’ennemis à gauche—“no enemies to the left.” It was meant to establish strength through unity, but it quickly turned into an excuse to avoid self-scrutiny—a way out of confronting one’s own radicals by insisting the only real danger was on the other side.
This is how the American left has operated in recent years. Looking at all the ground the left has lost lately, it’s clear it was a huge mistake. Instead of taking on their own radicals and self-correcting, the left ignored uncomfortable questions and let its most extreme factions set the agenda.
The result was self-defeating overreach, with policies pushed into the mainstream that ordinary Americans couldn’t stomach. And so, despite all the cultural power they acquired, the left is now managing a movement in decline.
Daniel Stid’s warning should be heeded:
I am a conservative who has spent two decades working in and around liberal and progressive foundations. No one understands better than I do the blind spots and ideological zeal that plague left-leaning philanthropy. But I am equally sure of this: The Trump-Vance Administration’s efforts to intimidate and punish progressive funders will be a cure far worse than the affliction—for conservatives and the Republic alike.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has authorized the U.S. military to strike at least six Venezuelan speedboats the administration suspected of smuggling drugs, killing dozens of people. The first one had 11 people aboard. Would you really need 11 people to smuggle drugs? Or was the number of people an indication that the boat was actually involved in human trafficking? If so, some people on that boat hadn’t yet broken any U.S. laws and didn’t deserve to get blown to kingdom come.
Then there’s the problem that national security officials told Congress during a closed briefing in September that, as the AP wrote, the boat “had turned around and was heading back to shore” and “was fired on multiple times by the U.S. military after it had changed course.” That doesn’t seem like a serious threat to the United States requiring lethal force.
Government shutdowns might look irrational, but they follow a familiar script. When political types gain more from the standoff than the solution, collisions become routine.
