Democrats are blowing a chance to show the public how it is being screwed.
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Confused by the tariff complexity, claims, and counterclaims?
Here, plain and simple, is proof that the Democrats haven’t yet learned how to counter the mad churnings of the MAGA propaganda machine. Even when they find a free “gimmie” staring them in the face, Democratic message-bearers have trouble driving home the truth about the scary, life-changing tariff situation.
That, in a nutshell, is perhaps the greatest challenge before us. If we fail to elevate truth-telling so that it can compete in the public arena with lies tarted up by a con man, we may lose our democracy forever.
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Let’s take a closer look at the abundance of opportunities to connect with voters and expose the current tariff madness.
To start, there’s the total fantasy that Donald Trump’s tariffs will somehow save America $6 trillion, which the administration refuses to even attempt to explain.
That number just happens to match the number Trump wants to give back in tax cuts — largely to the very rich.
While it’s understood that the costs of tariffs fall disproportionately on the poor and middle class, the MAGA public still doesn’t seem to get that the Trump tax cuts will overwhelmingly redound to the rich. The Democratic messaging on this point has failed to cut through beyond its constituency.
As a “side issue,” the origin of the purported $6 trillion tariff bonanza deserves attention. According to Vanity Fair, the president’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, who has pushed the tariff plan, first came to Trump’s attention when the latter’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, saw mention of a book by Navarro.
Soon the president bought into Navarro’s idea that a tariff war against friend and foe alike was a painless path to mastery of the world economy. No matter that Navarro’s book was full of dubious and even fabricated material. Tellingly, his often-cited “expert” source was actually a fictional person he named “Ron Vara” (an anagram of his own surname).
Even Elon Musk called Navarro a “moron” and “dumber than a sack of bricks.”
In any case, the main focus should be on this tariff-based giveaway to the rich — which is essentially a massive wealth transfer from the rest of us. Obviously for Trump and the GOP, the existing level of wealth inequality, obscene though it is, is simply not enough.
If the Democrats were half as competent at messaging as thousands of random internet influencers are, they would be running ads right now, showing the public exactly how Americans in the top 1 percent income bracket live — and asking, why the vast majority of hard-working Americans should shovel still more money to such people. Savvy marketers would even viscerally enforce just how ridiculous and offensive it is to do that, with images of excess, a la the series White Lotus.
After drawing attention to the self-indulgences of the super rich, Democrats should then compare that to the reality that the rest of us are barely scraping by. For example, this story on how people who earn $50,000 a year in New York City still cannot afford a decent apartment — and why some actually commute to their jobs from homeless shelters. And then drop the hammer on a system rigged to make sure that grotesque wealth inequality keeps growing.
But Democrats — who, because of the warped nature of the post-Citizens United campaign finance system, must depend on those with ample resources to pay the tab when they run for office — cannot really touch this one.
The exceptions that prove the rule include Bernie Sanders, which is why we’ve always been told he could not win, that the “American public” is “not that far left.” Nonetheless, he and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing large crowds with their current economic inequality tour, though you wouldn’t know it from the meager coverage.
The Trump Tariff Hokey Pokey
It’s not easy for the “experts” (including academic pundits and specialists in the media) to admit the topic of tariffs — and indeed economics in general — is hard to understand, even for themselves. We’ve seen weeks of coverage, pro and con, without a truly clear explanation of the causes, stakes, and solutions to the growing mess with its abundant variables.
But one thing that should be easy to do but still isn’t being done: Decry the depravity and total dishonesty of the current regime.
To be sure, well informed, discerning individuals understand the true nature of the Trump enterprise.
They see how inadequate the man himself is. They know that he is comically ignorant, commands few facts (and most of those cited in misleading ways), makes extraordinarily simple-minded assumptions, has a heinous indifference to the lives of others, and takes his cues on policies entailing serious, irreversible consequences from crackpots or any random stranger who grabs his attention.
But thanks to the unrelenting, facts-be-damned propaganda spewed by a coalition comprising the White House, social media, and Fox News and its fellow-travelers on the MAGA right, a significant segment of our population still believes our 47th president to be skilled, strategic, and capable — if not an omniscient genius.
They assume he knows a lot about making money, making deals, and high-level governance in general; and they believe he has surrounded himself with experts every bit as capable as President Joe Biden’s — just with a different political and philosophical orientation.
There’s a reason people with experience in similar phenomena compare Trump’s hold on his hard-core followers to that of a spellbinding cult leader — or a world-class con man.
Related: Getting the ‘Cult’ Out of American Culture
A World-Class Plan
Not even Trump’s top picks could explain it, but The Washington Post did an excellent job of describing what happened when Trump did a world-class flip-flop on tariffs — noting especially how Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent seemed blindsided by the massive drops in the stock market.
It’s striking how unprepared the White House was for this outcome. As recently as Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was celebrating how low the yield on the 10-year Treasury [bond] had fallen and predicting this could spur a revival of the housing market as mortgage rates became cheap again.
By Wednesday, Bessent was forced to go on Fox Business to reassure people around the world that this won’t turn into a crisis. “I believe that there is nothing systemic about this, I think that it is an uncomfortable but normal deleveraging that’s going on in the bond market,” he said.
Ditto in this superb piece:
Trump’s advisers were still projecting confidence that his effort to restructure the world’s economy and sweep away generations of globalization was foolproof despite the S&P 500 wiping away 12 percent of its value in a week. One senior White House official said that Wall Street didn’t understand Main Street — and that Main Street was still backing the president.
But hours later, Trump partially backed down — escalating his trade war with China but lowering many of the tariffs he had just imposed on the rest of the world. Stock markets soared.
“I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history,” Trump reveled, less than 90 minutes after his Truth Social post that upended his week-old policy.
Of course, the next day the markets dropped precipitously again.
As you can see, the president likes vague statements for which he cannot be held accountable, such as “I guess” or “they say,” whoever “they” might be. And he and his team have no shame about taking the same organizations he reviles as “fake news,” or having an anti-Trump agenda, and gleefully citing them as impeccable authorities when their reporting can be spun as validating what he does.
Most importantly, he is able to create chaos, then spin it as if he accomplished something: “biggest day in financial history.”
The fact that Trump is erratic and random in what he does was underlined by his sudden realization that he was triggering a potential global market crash only when several people managed to gain his ear — including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who said on Fox that a worldwide recession might be the inevitable outcome.
Then, as swiftly as he had endangered the financial wellbeing and jobs of billions of people, Trump put many of the tariffs on hold. And — probably falsely — claimed he had been thinking about doing that “over the last few days.”
In other words, he suddenly recognized what a mess he was making, and tried to sell this abrupt about-face as the fruit of a purportedly reasoned process — his way of thinking things through. He then tried to further paper over the fact that delegations of the desperate had spoken with him Wednesday about the damage he was causing — by claiming that his decision “probably came together early this morning, fairly early this morning.”
Probably? He is again narrating in the speculative third person, as if speaking about someone else divining what happened. Surely he knows when and why he made his decision; he just doesn’t want to say.
But then he tacitly admits the rush to reverse his previous policy direction, the urgency he felt to undo what he and his minions had described as a judiciously fashioned policy decision. As he told reporters in the Oval Office:
Just wrote it up. We didn’t have the use of, we didn’t have access to lawyers. We wrote it up from our hearts.
A sudden, market-roiling, globe-shaking policy reversal by the US government: No need to run it by legal, we’ll just go with our hearts! Wow.
I saw a few mentions of Trump’s telling little statement, but again, there was no influential entity, like the Democratic Party, to point out that the emperor not only has no clothes — but that the emperor himself had suddenly realized he was buck naked. At the North Pole.
Again, some observers did try to point out that Trump’s own people had been churning out headlines day after day, claiming that their boss knew exactly what he was doing and that everything was going splendidly as he went about his business of making the country Great Again.
In his remarks, Trump was both admitting a rash and sudden decision that something had to be done to avert catastrophe, and at the same time trying to sing his adoring followers a completely different melodious tune — namely, that he and his people know what they’re doing.
But this was something certainly we’ve been talking about for a period of time, and we decided to pull the trigger, and we did it today, and we’re happy about it.
Really? Talking about reversing course for a period of time? On its face, that makes no sense. And can you recall the last time Trump was not “happy” about anything he did? I sure can’t.
Trump’s ‘Master Strategy’
And of course it’s also possible that Trump was signaling his most savvy and well-off supporters, via a Truth Social post, that he was about to do something that would restore the market: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT” — DJT just happening to be the ticker symbol for Trump’s own Truth Social company.
And DJT stock just happening to shoot up more than 10 percent in value in the four hours between Trump’s “great time to buy” post and his tariff pause announcement — while the overall market remained essentially flat.
This looks like a blatant case of insider trading but — with the rule of law gone and the SEC itself now in the hands of the criminal class — don’t waste a moment hoping that anything will be investigated, or that people will be charged with illegally profiting from events that brought others pain and suffering.
In any case, by the time, hours later, that Trump made his tariff freeze announcement, the Trumpians were ready to rewrite reality entirely, appearing on social media, TV, and in front of any handy crowd, to reframe the freeze as what it was not.
On X, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick called it “one of the most extraordinary Truth posts of his Presidency.” (As if we should now reasonably expect to see major announcements, with potentially ginormous market implications, posted on a social media channel majority-owned by Trump himself — instead of a proper statement from the White House.)
Then Trump, speaking on the South Lawn to a group of race car champions, downplayed the actual multicar pileup he had caused and blamed random individuals’ ridiculous skittishness for the market hysteria:
I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy.
And then everyone in the MAGA camp assured the American public that the on-again-off-again-on-again tariffs were all part of the plan. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote on X:
President Trump’s master strategy, bold statesmanship and brilliant tactical planning has [sic] done more to reform broken international trade in days than anyone has achieved in decades while economically and politically isolating the global architect of economic aggression: China.
Before long, Navarro — the guy whose offbeat ideas Trump had based his whole tariff caper on — was being excluded from meetings and his name was no longer mentioned in official pronouncements.
Bessent, who was opposed to Navarro’s tariff toughness from the start, was now ascendent. Navarro tried to put a bold face on it, appearing in a Fox Business interview outside the White House and claiming unity and comradeship with Bessent: “One band, one sound, my brother.”
On cue, Fox was only too happy to mislead its viewers and Trump’s base yet again.
Meanwhile, not enough has been made of the fact that Trump’s people have offered conflicting explanations of what the tariff strategy even is.
One group says the intent is to force other countries to lower their trade barriers through pressure and negotiation so that American goods can find lucrative markets overseas.
Another, which includes Navarro, says the idea is actually to keep tariffs permanently high in order to raise money to offset the proposed Trump tax cuts — even if the other nations reduce or eliminate their tariffs on American goods.
These contradictory explanations, on their face, suggest that no one in the White House thought through the far-reaching implications before tossing a tariff bomb into the middle of the long-standing international trade system. That’s pretty shocking, and, again, we don’t see effective messaging from the Democratic opposition on such key issues. TV ads could have underlined that the Trump people have no clear goals at all.
And back on the farm, the backpedaling and hairsplitting begins. One pro-Trump economist was ready to spin it this way:
I agree that the communication needs to be clearer. … My impression of what’s going on and from looking at comments officials are making is that there is a discernible logic and thrust to what they are doing generally. Then there are certain stray comments that are very unhelpful and confusing. … On the other hand, there are a lot of people who just don’t like this administration who are using that lack of clarity to throw up their hands and say there is no plan, this is all crazy, when a good-faith effort to make sense of what they’re doing does in fact point to a perfectly discernible and coherent direction.
Nice try. But actually, as demonstrated by the scenario we have reprised above, it is “all crazy.”
And yet we know that what The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel aptly dubbed the “internet’s justification machine” will create reason where none exists, and cite any inevitable market rebounds as proof of Trumpian brilliance.
The Trump cultists, growing concerned as they finally notice the concrete blocks crashing all around them, will be reassured by Fox that everything is going according to plan, much like they are asked again and again to “Trust Jesus,” who, like Trump the Father, moves in mysterious ways.
