Trump's tariffs as dominance display

Plus, a poem

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Whenever a journalist asks me why Donald Trump is doing something, it always call to my mind the poem ‘There’s No Forgetting’ by Pablo Neruda. In the first few lines, Neruda is reflecting on all of the unanswered questions that he has about life, questions which he suggests can never be answered however much experience we accumulate:

If you should ask me where I’ve been all this time,
I have to say ‘Things happen.’
I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,
on the river ruined in its own duration:
I know nothing save things the birds have lost,
the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.
Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock
with day? Why the dark night swilling round
in our mouths? And why the dead?

And so it is with Donald Trump. After years of studying him, I’ve come to the conclusion that the reason it is so hard to figure out why he’s doing something is that he himself doesn’t really know. He offers so many reasons for every course of action that listening to them becomes almost pointless. At the end of the day, Trump operates off of emotion and feeling, not rational cause and effect. His mental processes are a sort of twisted poetry, not a scientific paper.

And so it has proven once again with the first round of Trump’s trade war. At the weekend, Trump auto-queued 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada to go into effect today, plus an additional 10% on China, which is already under older sanctions. Then, over the last 24 hours, he abruptly changed course and declared that he had reached a deal with Mexico and Canada to delay the levies for a month.

In return, Mexico promised to send some more troops to its border, a largely symbolic step it has taken many times before without needing a trade war to persuade it. Canada said it would spend a bit more money on border security, something which is hardly necessary given that the Canadian border is already incredibly secure. It makes up just 0.2% of U.S. fentanyl seizures and 1.5% of migrant arrests.

Conservative media declared victory anyway.

Fox News is gullible

I’ve always thought that one of the worst things about being a Trump supporter is how gullible you are expected to make yourself look. One minute, you’re required to fulminate that a trade war with Canada and Mexico is necessary to reshore manufacturing to the United States, stop an “invasion” of refugees, and persuade Canada to become the 51st state. The next minute, the trade war is actually being cancelled after nothing really changed, and you’re required to hail Trump as a geopolitical genius all the same.

But if we apply the twisted-poetry rubric, it becomes pretty clear what is going on here: these tariffs were a dominance display, designed to create the illusion of power and competence. The reason that Trump pays so little heed to the underlying realities of the problems he claims to care about is that they actually don’t matter. What matters is a sequence of events in which he is seen to make threats, look tough, and be able to declare victory at the end of it.

The peculiar dynamics of conservative media help to make this possible. A Democratic president who pulled what Trump just pulled would be barraged with hostile coverage in liberal outlets pointing out that he hadn’t accomplished anything. But that’s not how conservative media works - it exists to bolster the image of Trump, not to serve any particular policy agenda. It will declare victory for him again and again as he shadow boxes his way through imaginary problems and their equally imaginary solutions.

But this isn’t the end of the saga. The tariffs on Mexico and Canada haven’t been called off - they’ve just been delayed by a month. As the deadline approaches, we can expect another round of shadow boxing which will be more or less bellicose and more or less amenable to an easy off-ramp. It all depends on how the twisted poetry of Donald Trump is scanning that day.

Thanks for reading America Explained. This post is free. If you haven’t already, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, which allows you to read every post and access the full archive. It also enables me to put more time and energy into this newsletter, something that I’m hoping to do in order to cover the new administration more thoroughly. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thanks for supporting independent media and making it possible to do what I do.

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