Tariffs

The White House press conference between President Trump and newly-elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney shows that every generation gets the summit it deserves. World War Two had Yalta, the 1970s the Camp David Accords. Barack Obama had a beer with the cop who arrested Henry Louis Gates, Jr. And Trump bragged about the new 24-karat White House gold décor and said, about Canada, “I think we have a lot of things in common.” The half-hour press scrum veered between mutual respect and Trumpian disdain, while Carney struggled to get a word in, flopping his hands in his lap like fish on a deck. He called Trump a “transformational President” and said, “We’re stronger when we’re together.” Trump said, “I have a lot of respect for this man.

How was your Liberation Month? It’s been almost 30 days since Donald Trump stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and announced a shocking set of massive tariffs on the world. The event caused huge convulsions in the economic universe: trillions were wiped off the stock market and, under huge pressure, Trump did agree to a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs. After that he exempted electrical goods, though his standard 10 percent remains, and the heads of most financial analysts are still spinning trying to figure out what it all means. Yet for all the angst and the apoplexy, yesterday the S&P 500 index closed just 1 percent down from where it was at the beginning of the month.

He’s survived an assassination, bounced back from bankruptcy and – so far, at least – avoided all attempts to jail him. But Donald Trump’s most audacious feat is yet before him: to persuade Americans to pay more for their goods as their beloved businesses struggle – and then be grateful to him at the polls.  While tariffs threaten to raise prices across the board for consumers, small businesses with lower margins than their larger competitors are struggling. “Whether or not you support tariffs, or whether or not you think certain offices should be cut, I think overall, any kind of economic turbulence is uniquely burdensome for small businesses,” says Molly Day, the National Small Business Association’s vice president of public affairs.

They never learn, the libs. Back in 2016, they provided hours of entertainment assuring themselves that Donald Trump would “never be president” (“take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi, who in another galaxy, long, long ago was speaker of the House). Patriotic citizens, eager to instruct the public about the dialectic of hubris and nemesis, stitched together many joyful compilations of Hollywood celebrities, ditto-head news readers and Democratic politicians intoning that party line.  Then, after the impossible mutated into the inevitable and Trump was elected, the narrative shifted to “the walls are closing in on Donald Trump.” If it wasn’t Russia, Russia, Russia it was Stormy Daniels, putatively shady business deals or putative efforts at insurrection.