The tariffs appear to have been thought through with about as much care politically as they were economically. Which is to say, none.

A couple of days (or a million years) ago, I wrote about the politics of Trump’s tariff policies (this was before Americans had been told just how liberated they were going to be), suggesting that this supposedly populist cause was not proving very popular.

Writing in today’s Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch looks at how the president’s economic policies have been received by the non-MAGA Republicans who rallied behind Trump in November:

The speed and scale of the American public’s souring on Trump’s economic agenda is stunning. This week, just before the tariff chaos, 63 per cent of Americans had a negative view of the government’s economic policy, comfortably the highest figure since records began almost 50 years ago.

All-time records were also shattered for the share of people who expect the economy to further deteriorate over the next year. Just 25 per cent of US adults said they expect their finances to look better in five years than today — lower even than at the nadir of the Great Recession.

Notably, these sharp deteriorations are being felt across the aisle. Even before “liberation day,” a third of Republicans disapproved of Trump’s actions on the economy, a remarkable feat given levels of partisan polarisation in America. A lot of people who thought they were an “us” have discovered they are a “them.”

I doubt if it’s true that those unhappy Republicans consider themselves a Democratic “them,” but they may well give less to the GOP and, when it comes to the midterms, choose to sit at home, staring at their 201(k)s. This will increase the chance that an unrepentantly radicalized Democratic Party, which must be unable to believe its luck, will sweep to victory.

Burn-Murdoch is writing, I imagine, from a leftish perspective (the FT is the FT, after all), but he is onto something when he speculates that part of the trouble may be that some of the White House leadership have been caught up in their own media bubble and therefore “tend to be detached from both wider public opinion and dissenting voices.” That’s never wise. The same criticism, incidentally, can be leveled at the FT journalists who performatively quit X, shocked to come face to face with disagreement. But that’s a discussion for another day, and it doesn’t take away from the fact that “liberation day” appears to have been thought through with about as much care politically as it was economically. Which is to say, none.

And there’s something else: the extent of the tariffs suggests that they are the product of an ideological obsession rather than thought-through rational analysis aimed at increasing this country’s prosperity. In my post, I quoted from an article by Michael Brendan Dougherty in the course of which he made this point:

The more that a president seems to be on an ideological crusade — whether Clinton before 1994, Bush before 2006, or Obama before 2010 — the more likely he is to be hammered for it.

Quite.

Writing in The Spectator about a week before “liberation day,” Kate Andrews:

But the normalcy that Trump promised to return — to politics, to cultural norms — has been replaced, in part, by MAGA’s own eccentricities. Voters could be forgiven for thinking his decisive win was going to mean a watering-down of identity politics, not obviously a push to conquer Greenland. If voters took the President at his word, they would have expected narrow tariffs to give a boost to American business, not a stock market panic that has not just terrified investors, but workers with savings and retirement plans, too.

Defenders of the president’s strategy talk of the long game, but the way things are going, that game won’t get past the second inning.