U.S. President Donald Trump holds a signed executive order after delivering remarks on reciprocal tariffs during an event in the Rose Garden at the White House, in Washington on April 2.SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images
Has anyone considered just getting him another game show?
Think about it: guaranteed audience; breathless anticipation of the next plot twist; a stage on which he can play the smiting hand of God or magnanimous benefactor, depending on his whim; a teaser campaign in the week before the big reveal; even a team in charge of set dressing and extras casting.
I really think a game show might be what he wants, deep down.
On what he had dubbed Liberation Day – Wednesday to everyone with less imagination – U.S. President Donald Trump stood at a podium in the White House Rose Garden, with huge American flags fluttering from the portico behind him and an adoring audience of auto-parts assemblers, construction workers, union members and reflective-vest wearers, arrayed like a phalanx of Playmobil figurines before him.
Everyone was gathered for what Mr. Trump described modestly as “one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history.” Or, for the rest of the world – and certainly Canada and Mexico – the day they found out how many walls of their house the neighbour who’d lost his marbles was about to smash through with his car.
“I think you’re going to remember today. It’s going to be a free nation that we’re dealing with,” he said. “We’re going to have a very free and beautiful nation. It’s going to be Liberation Day in America, and it’s going to be a day that hopefully you’re going to look back in years to come and you’re going to say, ‘You know, he was right.‘”
The trade doctrine he laid out goes like this: The United States does not merely sell its products to other countries and buy goods it needs in turn; rather, it is being taken advantage of by all the free-loading countries it subsidizes. Or, as Mr. Trump said on Wednesday, his country has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered.”
You may need to squint a little to see the gobbling, galloping colossus of the United States as the wan little match girl exploited and cast aside by a rapacious world, but please give it a try.
But as of Wednesday, with the flourish of a Sharpie on an executive order executing a signature that really is not normal, all of this would stop. Tariff fences would keep other countries from flooding the American market and, thanks to the gentle coercive power of a switchblade pressed to the tender flesh at the base of a pinky finger, companies all over the world would see the wisdom in relocating to the United States. A new industrial and commercial “golden age” would bloom, Mr. Trump promised.
“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country, and you see it happening already,” he said. “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base. We will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers.”
At one point midway through his remarks, Mr. Trump produced a red Make America Great Again hat from the podium and waved it around, asking who wanted it. The crowd indulged him with a forest of waving hands and he flung the door prize at one lucky winner, like he’d once tossed rolls of paper towel at Puerto Ricans reeling from Hurricane Maria.
At another point, he treated his audience to a meditation on an obscure little bit of vocabulary he’d like to bring back.
“An old-fashioned term that we use, groceries. I used it on the campaign. It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: groceries. It sort of says a bag with different things in it,” he said. “Groceries went through the roof, and I campaigned on that. I talked about the word groceries for a lot, and energy costs now are down, groceries are down. Gasoline is way under $3 and people are beginning to be able to buy things and live again.”
Most economists agree that Mr. Trump’s tariffs are going to make all of those things – old-fashioned or not – more expensive for the very people who voted for him so they could buy things and live again. But for the President and his retinue, opposing facts are not merely neutral truths that exist in the world whether you like them or not, they are enemies begging to be punched in the face.
The closest he got to offering even a halfway useful answer to the many screaming questions of the day was contained in a janky chart he hoisted like a novelty cheque at a telethon. Mr. Trump stood there cradling the poster board – half of it hidden by the podium – as he lumbered through a live table read of the tariff damage he was dishing out, nation by nation.
As the President explained, he and his trade advisers arrived at the reciprocal tariffs by adding up the total tariffs other counties imposed on American goods and then – because the U.S. is “so kind” – cutting that number in half to arrive at the reciprocal tariffs the U.S. was enacting on these global tormenters and rip-off artists.
China, you get 34-per-cent tariffs; European Union, you’re at 20 per cent; Taiwan, 32 per cent for you. It was like an infinitely stupider version of Oprah’s favourite things giveaways.
This time, Canada was relatively spared, though the 25-per-cent tariffs on automobiles will be plenty punishing.
And tomorrow or next week or three months from now, he could change his mind and lob something even worse than that.
If someone doesn’t give this sad, hungry man with a hole right through the middle of him a game show, none of us are getting off the spinning wheel of insanity to which we’ve all been strapped.