Portside

President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have indeed had the effect of freeing the country—not from the global economy, as Trump claims, but from a series of flawed assumptions about who Trump is, how he operates, and how to make sense of what he is doing.

Above all, the tariffs have made clear how all of Trump’s policies fit together: Every step he takes is aimed at concentrating the power of government in his own hands as he seeks to intimidate opponents and move aggressively to eliminate alternative sources of public influence in the legal system, the universities, and the media.

The most conspicuous moment of truth has been for Trump’s supporters in big business and other advocates of a loosely regulated free market. They thought they could get what they wanted out of Trump, mainly lower taxes and less regulation, without having to worry about his very explicit campaign promises to impose tariffs, let alone to do so in a madcap way that now threatens their own wealth. They couldn’t imagine that Trump would happily wreak such havoc in the national and global economies or demolish the entire post–World War II economic system.

Why did they miss this? The fact that Trump lies regularly and has few fixed principles has, perversely perhaps, been a source of his political strength. Those who rally to him fool themselves into thinking they can have Trump à la carte. They assume he really means his pledges to policies they like and that he’s lying to the masses when he promises policies they don’t like. All the old nonsense about taking Trump “seriously but not literally” was a way for his apologists to assume he couldn’t really mean the more outlandish things he said.

His supporters in business and among the wealthy like to view themselves as gimlet-eyed realists, so the ease with which they were bamboozled is quite remarkable—and is easily measured. In its first quarter survey of 134 CEOs from January 27 to February 10—that is to say, during the very early days of Trump 2.0—the Conference Board’s measure of CEO confidence rose by nine points to reach its highest level in three years. “CEOs were substantially more optimistic about current economic conditions as well as about future economic conditions—both overall and in their own industries,” said Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the Conference Board. They have since undergone a remarkable change of heart. An April survey of 329 CEOs by Chief Executive found 62 percent of them predicting a slowdown or a recession within the next six months, up from 48 percent in March.

The big thing the CEOs missed, pre-Liberation Day, is that Trump is not a capitalist in the strict sense of the term. He’s a kleptocrat. Webster’s defines kleptocracy as “a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain at the expense of the governed.” That’s a rather good definition of the Trump regime.

His rationales for his tariffs change regularly. At some moments they’re about returning manufacturing to the United States, at others they’re just a bargaining tool. But one justification is constant: They are designed to force business leaders and other nations alike to deal with Trump. And he wants to humiliate them in the process, as his most revealing comment on this mess made clear.

“These countries are calling us up kissing my ass,” Trump told a Republican gathering last week. “They are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal, I’ll do anything, sir.’”

He also took a shot at those Republicans who finally found their voices in raising doubts about his tariffs. “I’ll see some rebel Republican,” he said, “you know, some guy who wants to grandstand, say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me tell you, they don’t negotiate the way I negotiate.”

That last sentence is entirely true. No one who had the interests of his country in mind would negotiate like he’s negotiating. This is precisely why Congress should strip this reckless, self-absorbed, petty man of the power to put the entire world economy at risk out of a desire to turn everyone into a supplicant subject to his will.

Not only does Trump’s approach to tariffs shake the confidence of the world in the stability of the United States; it also opens up limitless opportunities for grift. This or that industry will have to come to Trump for exceptions to his ever-changeable tariff schedules.

Last weekend, the administration excluded phones, chipmaking, and some computers from his tariffs. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went on television and muddied the waters, casting doubt on exactly what would be exempted and what would not. Who knows where that issue will stand by the time you read this.

The pandemonium that is Trump’s policymaking process is why the world now sees our country as unreliable. But the consistent message was: The bazaar is open. Come and get Trump’s special blessing by kissing his … well, you know where. And you can bet that the deepest-pocketed actors in our economy will have a better chance of cajoling the exemptions and concessions they want from Trump than will a small business threatened with bankruptcy because an imported component it needs to make its product remains subject to tariffs and enormous price increases.

Since Trump took office, his opponents have struggled with the blinding speed of his wrecking crew. How, his foes have asked, can we keep focus when he is doing so many bad things simultaneously—ignoring the Supreme Court by keeping Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, an entirely innocent father of three, in an El Salvador prison to which he should never have been sent; lawlessly closing agencies and laying off workers through Elon Musk’s DOGE; violating the First Amendment by deporting legal residents because they exercise their free speech rights; attempting (with some, but fortunately not universal, success) to intimidate universities and law firms into submission to the president’s diktats; going after the Associated Press for refusing to go along with Trump’s whim in unilaterally renaming the Gulf of Mexico; and undercutting our democratic allies, notably Ukraine.

The answer is that all these abuses are about the same issue implicated in his tariff overreach: the danger to our country created by a president who has always told us how much he admires and aspires to one-man rule. It’s a shame that few in the GOP raised their voices when Trump came for law-abiding fathers, legal immigrants, or dedicated civil servants. Only when he came for big market investors and 401(k)s did the perils of Trump’s power grab begin to arouse cross-party opposition.        

But better late than never. Resistance to Trump is rising—most recently in the backlash against the lawless and contemptible treatment of Abrego Garcia and Harvard University’s defiance of Trump’s freedom-crushing takeover attempt.

Now his tariff adventures have shaken Trump’s own electorate and begun to crack GOP solidarity. Will Republicans finally contain him before he bankrupts us all? If it takes a threat to our bank accounts to save our constitutional rights, so be it. 

E.J. Dionne Jr. is a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and co-author (with Miles Rapoport) of 100 Percent Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting.

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