Only if one subordinates a Kantian conception of the highest good could one be convinced that, if Americans can’t prosper, they’ll enjoy the agony of others.
How many dubious rationalizations have we had to endure? The attempts by Trump supporters to assign some logic to his tariff regime are now too numerous to count.
In the effort to contend that a worldwide trade war will produce salutary outcomes — an enterprise typically characterized by the rhetorical condescension of the deeply insecure — the president’s allies have assumed the role of used car salesman eager to say whatever it takes to get us into their jalopy. They said the tariffs would produce little pain because foreign countries wouldn’t retaliate (they did), the bond market would recalibrate in ways that help the country refinance its debt (it didn’t), and a little artificial privation is ultimately good for your soul and communitarian comity (it’s not).
On Tuesday, New York Post columnist and Fox Business contributor Charles Gasparino posited a new rationale that explains the thinking among the president’s loyalists. There appears to be an emerging willingness to acknowledge that Trump’s tariff regime will cause widespread financial hardship, but the pain will be felt exclusively by Trump’s enemies:
As a consequence of the deregulatory environment and as long as Congress extends the 2017 tax code package — the financial benefits from which consumers and producers alike will funnel into the Treasury, thereby muting the pro-growth effects of letting individuals and businesses invest their incomes and profits efficiently — no one will feel any long-term pain. No one, that is, save the people Trump and company don’t like.
According to Gasparino, the thinking inside Trump’s orbit to which he is privy has settled on the notion that the “negative wealth effect primarily targets non-MAGA affluent voters.” If this is the logic to which the administration is retreating, it is politically, economically, and morally deficient.
Trump isn’t the president of MAGA alone. If he were, he would be making policy for the benefit of only about half of the Republican Party. So much post-election analysis forecasting the rise of a youngish MAGA movement was predicated on that cohort’s expectation that Trump’s economic prescriptions (rather, the generic Republicanism that characterized his first term) was better for them in the long run than progressivism. Trump is aggressively disabusing them of that notion.
That’s only part of the reason why this logic is politically stupid. It’s also politically stupid because it’s economically stupid. Waging MAGA-style “class war” against the affluent is an assault on the engines of growth. The market meltdown is a leading indicator of how investors think producers will respond to a landscape in which economic activity is artificially throttled while the rapacious state gobbles up incomes and profits. The firms that would help establish the rising MAGA generation will put off risky capital investments and hiring programs in this uncertain environment. That’s going to hurt many more Americans than the minority who identify as MAGA.
That’s why this logic is ethically grotesque. No president emerges from an electoral contest possessed of a mandate to mete out pain to his fellow Americans. If the movement around the president has become so blinded by their hatred for their domestic political opponents that they think Americans will relish the suffering of their neighbors, they’ve lost the plot.
Many aspects of life are more important than politics. Only if you’ve subordinated a coherent moral theory that prioritizes a Kantian conception of the highest good could you convince yourself that, if Americans can’t themselves prosper, they’ll take solace in the agony of others. It’s hard to know where such a blinkered outlook comes from, but the “For You” tab is a good place to start looking.
Gasparino’s sources are probably telling him the truth, insofar as it’s a truth they’re willing to attach themselves to at the moment. What it lacks in coherence, it makes up for by at least being a cogent thought. That holds inestimable value in an environment in which cogency is in short supply. But it’s not convincing. The reason why Trump seems committed to imposing a lost decade on the planet is that he thinks trade deficits amount to a “profit and loss statement,” and the U.S. loses when it pays money for goods that it wants from countries that are too poor to purchase high-end American-made goods in precisely equal quantities. He says it all the time to anyone willing to listen.
That is defective logic, but Trump doesn’t want to hear it. So, his allies believe they are compelled to freelance a rapidly evolving series of explanations for his conduct. The latest on which they’ve settled is that, yes, this program will hurt, but it will hurt all the right people. Among the many uncharitable assumptions in this message, it rests on the belief that Trump supporters are hideous ghouls. This may be a recipe for a generational political alignment, but it’s not going to be the one that the MAGA movement wants.