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In America, the chaotic first few months of Donald Trump’s term have featured roiling stock markets, mass deportations, and a Tesla showroom on the White House lawn. But if you look north, it has unified Canadians against a common threat: a country once considered a friend.
In a bewildering reversal of a close allyship that’s lasted for more than a century, Trump recently started a hot-and-cold trade war that has so far produced 25 percent tariffs on many of Canada’s goods. Canada has imposed retaliatory tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. imports, and announced yesterday that more are set to go in effect in response to Trump’s latest auto levy. In the meantime, Trump keeps waving around the threat of annexation. He has repeatedly suggested that Canada become America’s “51st state” and, according to The New York Times, told then–Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in early February that he considers the 1908 treaty delineating the Canada-U.S. border to be invalid. Many Canadians have responded in kind, sending a clear message to the Trump administration by hitting America where it hurts: the economy.
Now is “the time to choose Canada,” Trudeau said in February. “It might mean opting for Canadian rye over Kentucky bourbon, or forgoing Florida orange juice altogether.” The “Buy Canadian” movement is gaining ground; Canada is America’s top export market, and 63 percent of Canadians are actively looking for Canadian-made products when they shop, according to a poll from February (though enthusiasm for the movement varies based on class and age). Some stores are adding “Made in Canada” labels to products—one liquor store in Vancouver posted “Buy Canadian Instead” signs on empty American-whiskey shelves—and Canadian grocers are reporting that domestic-product sales have recently increased by up to 10 percent. Canadians make up the largest group of international visitors to the U.S., but Canadian airline bookings for U.S. destinations have reportedly dropped more than 70 percent for the spring and summer, according to one industry monitor. The U.S. Travel Association calculates that a 10 percent annual decline in Canadian travelers could amount to more than $2.1 billion in spending losses for America.
Figuring out how to deal with Trump’s recent attacks is the top issue for some Canadian voters ahead of the April 28 federal election, ranking even higher than the economy. Conservative and Liberal party platforms prominently feature their plans for how to rebuild Canada with reduced dependence on America. “The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over,” Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said last week. Across party and provincial lines, the path is clear: Canada wants to Trump-proof itself and America-proof the future.
On the other side of the border, Americans who oppose Trump have struggled to come up with a unified response to his presidency. In part because of the speed and scale of his directives, it’s been hard to develop a protest message or strategy that is as ubiquitous as the “Buy Canadian” movement. Since January 22, the number of street protests in the U.S. has more than doubled compared with the same period at the start of Trump’s first presidency—but they also tend to be smaller in scale, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. Jeremy Pressman, a co-director of the organization, told me that disorientation could be a factor affecting protests. Since taking office, Trump has signed off on a flurry of actions that empower ICE to detain and deport peoplewithout due process, pave the way for Elon Musk’s shadow presidency, gut the federal government, and grant mass pardons for January 6ers (while also floating the idea of compensating them for their prison time). What should the next protest focus on when so much of American life is under attack?
That’s not to say that larger-scale action has been absent in America. The People’s March took place in D.C., two days before Trump’s second inauguration, to “help participants find a political home.” Thousands joined, but it ultimately saw far fewer people than the Women’s March, eight years prior. Pressman noted that lately, more people have shown interest in economic boycotts of companies that support Trump or the administration’s anti-DEI agenda, including Amazon, Target, and Tesla. Republican representatives are getting shouted down in local town halls (Democrats, too, for their inaction), and protesters are demonstrating at Tesla facilities across the country. A bright spot has been the national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, headlined by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which has drawn more than 100,000 attendees over the past month.
Protesters also face an environment especially hostile to dissent. When Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student activist on a green card, was arrested in New York last month, the government did not provide evidence of illegal activity. And when Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student who co-authored an op-ed urging her university to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” had her visa revoked without her knowledge and was confronted by six masked federal agents last week, the Department of Homeland Security stated vaguely that she had “engaged in activities in support of Hamas.” Their stories are a warning from the Trump administration: Defiance can come at a steep price.
Of course, protests outside the U.S. are bound to look much different from those in a country contending with its own leadership. But Canada’s situation is a notable point of contrast, because the sentiment of citizens is being echoed and acted on by their representatives. Even if America’s anti-Trump protests pick up more speed, a successful movement requires those in power to be willing and able to harness that energy. Traditionally, two important avenues for such action run through Congress and the courts. When Trump signed an executive order in 2017 banning travel to the United States from seven predominantly Muslim countries, thousands of people flooded airport terminals in protest. Civil-liberties groups took notice and filed suits in quick succession to block the order; the watered-down version of the ban, upheld by the Supreme Court more than a year later, was a pale imitation of the original.
Things are different this time. “Two months into Trump’s second term, fear is taking hold across broad cross sections of American society,” my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote last week. Trump and his allies are openly calling for the impeachment of federal judges who push back on his orders, and high-powered law firms are falling like dominoes as they capitulate to the administration’s demands. Half of Congress is beholden to the president; the other half is dogged by historically low favorability polling. Whereas Canadian leaders of all political stripes are calling for their constituents to boycott American goods, America’s only opposition party is scrambling to cobble together a coherent strategy. Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who delivered a record-breaking 25-hour speech on the Senate floor this week, issued a wake-up call to his fellow senators: “Generations from now will look back at this moment and have a single question: Where were you?”
Winning more blue congressional seats in the 2026 midterms is one way to loosen Trump’s grip on the federal government, but those are more than a year away. “The only way to win is people power,” Jonathan V. Last, the editor of The Bulwark, wrote last week; the Democratic Party “will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.” “Hands Off!” protests against Trump and DOGE will take place around the country tomorrow, with a large march planned in Washington. Thousands have rallied to oppose the detainment of Öztürk and Khalil. And the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariff announcements have already ramped up outrage over potentially devastating price increases. Many Americans still have an appetite for dissent. But whereas the Trump presidency has cast into sharp relief Canada’s national identity, it has had the opposite effect domestically. The challenge for Trump’s detractors will be figuring out how to take a fractured coalition and rebuild.
Over the past decade or so, an influential set of female novelists has been circling a shared question: Given how often women are forced to understand themselves as fundamentally in relation to others (most commonly a child and/or a partner, but also parents, extended family, friends), is it possible for a woman to have an authentic, independent self? If a female narrator is extracted from her core relational ties, what kind of consciousness is left?
After Thursday’s stock-market sell-off provoked by Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would be imposing new tariffs on almost every country in the world, the one thing we can say for sure is that Wall Street blew it. In the three trading days leading up to Trump’s much-anticipated “Liberation Day” speech, the market rose steadily as investors apparently convinced themselves that Trump would not do anything too crazy. Surely moderation would prevail.
It did not, much to the chagrin of the stock market and anyone with a 401(k). Trump’s protectionist scheme—which he’s applied unilaterally through a dubious invocation of emergency economic powers—is unprecedented in modern times. It inflicts crushingly high tariffs not only on an obvious target such as China, America’s emerging strategic rival, but also on such countries as Vietnam (which makes much of the clothing and shoes that Americans wear) and Bangladesh, as well as on our allies, the European Union and Japan. Although Trump described these tariffs as “reciprocal,” the reality is that they’re nothing of the sort: In most cases, they’re far higher than the rates other countries impose on us. This lays the groundwork for retaliation by our trading partners, potentially leading to a trade war.
All of this stunned investors, which is why the sell-off was so sharp. (Even though the timing of Trump’s announcement on Wednesday coincided with the New York Stock Exchange’s closing, the rout began in after-hours trading even as he was speaking.) To a degree, one can excuse the markets for their utter lack of foresight. Trump is nothing if not capricious, and in the past couple of months, he first imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico and then put them “on pause.” The notion that he might back off his more extreme protectionist impulses was wishful but not unthinkable.
In the end, however, investors’ unwillingness to believe that Trump would overturn the global trading order has to be seen as a willful blindness to who he is and what matters to him. In general, Trump is uninterested in policy, but trade is the one exception, and always has been. His attitude toward trade—namely, that trade deficits are horrible and tariffs are great—has been strikingly consistent for almost 40 years. The way he talks about trade has stayed the same, and his position on tariffs has stayed the same.
What happened on Wednesday, in other words, was not a case of the president throwing the market a curveball. It was a case of him doing exactly what he’d promised to do and what he’s wanted to do for decades.
Understanding Trump’s view requires no great interpretive skills, because his position on trade is a very simple one: If the U.S. has a trade deficit with another country, that means the U.S. is being “ripped off” (a phrase he has used many times in his political career). In the real world, a bilateral trade deficit, meaning that the U.S. buys more from a country than it sells to that country, can happen for many reasons, many of them non-nefarious. The U.S., for instance, buys agricultural products and basic manufactured goods from developing countries that don’t have a big appetite for Boeing airplanes or Microsoft software. So those countries typically take the dollars they earn and buy U.S. government bonds, knowing that their money will be safe, instead of purchasing American goods. That creates a trade deficit, without anything sinister behind it. But for Trump, any trade deficit means that Americans are being played. And Trump hates few things in this world more than feeling that he’s been played.
You can see this conviction that any trade deficit is a problem in the peculiar formula that the administration used to calculate the supposed “tariff rates” Trump says countries are charging us. In his Rose Garden speech, Trump claimed that those rates represented the impact of overt tariffs plus non-tariff trade barriers (such as currency manipulation and restrictive regulations). But that’s not where the numbers came from. Instead, the administration calculated its rates simply by dividing our trade deficit with a country by our imports from that country. As a result, any country with which we have a high trade deficit got labeled as having a high tariff rate, even if its actual rate might be low; likewise, countries with which we have small trade deficits—or, in some cases, a surplus—got labeled as having low tariff rates, even if their actual tariffs might be high.
As former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wrote on X, “This is to economics what creationism is to biology, astrology is to astronomy, or RFK thought is to vaccine science.” The Trump formula was silly and deceptive, but it was also a perfect expression of his view that trade deficits are evidence that America is being ripped off. The sole reason you would equate a trade deficit with a tariff rate is because you think that trade deficits exist only as a result of trade barriers or other manipulative activity. In fact, that’s exactly how a White House official explained the reasoning: “The model they used is based on the concept that the trade deficit that we have with any given country is the sum of all the unfair trade practices, the sum of all cheating.” And that’s exactly what Trump thinks. So it’s no surprise that, as The Washington Post reported today, Trump personally decided to use that formula, instead of an approach that would have actually targeted high trade barriers.
Using this formula also has another goal: The only way for a country to bring down its tariff rate according to the White House model—and therefore have Trump lower his new tariffs in return—is for the country to dramatically narrow the United States’ trade deficit with it. Simply lowering trade barriers, if they exist, won’t be enough, because they don’t factor into the random calculation of these so-called tariff rates. Israel, for instance, eliminated all of its tariffs on U.S. imports on Tuesday. Trump still imposed new tariffs on Israel on Wednesday. That’s because Trump’s real goal is not really to eliminate trade barriers; it’s for the U.S. not to have a trade deficit with any country in the world. Only then, theoretically, would he feel that America is not being ripped off.
That sounds crazy. And it is. There is no good economic reason the U.S. should have zero bilateral trade deficits; there is no chance that we will eliminate all of them, and if we did, it would be an economic disaster, with Americans forced to sharply curtail their purchases of everything from electronics to apparel. But this is what Trump has been working for all along. In 2017, during his first year in office, he said: “The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue.” He’s told us who he is and what he wants. We’re all going to pay the price for believing otherwise.
President Donald Trump’s high-tariff regime will impose higher prices and lower growth on Americans. It will have another effect that nobody in the administration seems to have considered at all: a tsunami of smuggling.
In a few days’ time, every desirable consumer good will be dramatically more expensive in the United States than on world markets. Flat-screen TVs, athletic shoes, video-game equipment, even household basics such as coffee, toilet paper, and soy sauce—all will soon cost 20, 25, 35 percent more than they cost on world markets.
Trump has just opened perhaps the greatest arbitrage opportunity in the history of world trade. His effort to repeat the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s will also replicate the cross-border bootlegging of alcohol during Prohibition.
From around the world, goods will flow to American black markets. That flow will overwhelm U.S. enforcement capability. Only about 26,000 officers in the Department of Homeland Security are charged with enforcing customs duties at borders, seaports, and airports. Policing flows of fentanyl has been difficult enough. But as abundant as fentanyl is, most Americans don’t buy it: It’s an extremely harmful product, trafficked by some of the world’s most vicious criminals, and most people rightly want nothing to do with it.
But not even the most fervent MAGA supporter will think it harmful to bargain-shop for free-trade underwear out of the back of a truck driven from Mexico or Canada. Nor will it be easy to motivate state and local police to raid the stalls and stands that will soon appear on the streets of American towns, let alone monitor the near-infinite quantity of transactions in online marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy.
Against the illegal fentanyl trade, Americans can seek the help of friendly countries. But why would any country help the United States enforce its unilateral trade aggression against the rest of the world? If European luxury brands, Asian electronics manufacturers, or Indian grocery chains suddenly open enormous outlet malls in Bermuda, the French and Dutch Caribbean islands, or Toronto and Vancouver, few local authorities will pay attention to the Trump administration’s objections.
In fact, those governments have every reason to help freedom-loving American citizens defeat the outrageous tariffs imposed on them. As angry as Canadians, for example, are with the U.S. government, they have no quarrel with the American people. And what better way to show friendship to Americans in a time of hardship than helping them drive home with a brand-new set of tires or replacement car battery at everyday low prices? On the way home, the cross-border American could enjoy a free-trade chocolate bar at free-trade prices.
A border-town retail explosion could offset some of the economic pain inflicted on Canadian workers laid off thanks to the Trump tariffs. A job selling auto parts may not pay as well as a job making them, but it’s better than nothing. And every additional retail job has the consolation that it strikes a retaliatory blow at the hostile U.S. government that caused the layoffs.
Canada could stimulate the surge in the cross-border retail sector by offering tax relief to American visitors. Canada collects a federal value-added tax of 5 percent; in some provinces, that tax is combined with a local sales tax to make the rate as high as 15 percent. Even after a retail tax, Canadian prices (adjusted for currency) will soon be much lower than U.S. prices. But what if goods were sold tax-free altogether to shoppers who carry a U.S. passport?
Tariff- and tax-free shopping for Americans would stoke a Canadian retail bonanza that would cushion the shock to the rest of the Canadian economy. The United States might respond by constricting highway border crossings, creating traffic jams for drivers reentering the United States. Such countermeasures would only intensify the bitter unpopularity of Trump’s tariffs—and, as with Prohibition’s alcohol ban, they would dismally fail. The goods will move by boat from Halifax southward along the Eastern Seaboard, from Kingston and Thunder Bay across the Great Lakes, from Vancouver via the Georgia Strait, and so on. They will move by small plane, by snowmobile, and by foot.
Canada could become a consumer paradise: a shiny new West Berlin to a drab MAGA version of East Germany. Even the brutal East German secret police lost their fight against the movement of goods. By the end, the Stasi had given up trying.
For Canada to assist U.S. smugglers might seem an unfriendly act, but the U.S. tariffs are an unfriendlier act. The Trump administration has already made clear that the United States no longer seeks or wants allies. It has abandoned Ukrainian troops in the field. It is plotting how to annex Greenland, which is Danish territory. It does not honor Trump’s own signature on the trade treaty it imposed on Canada and Mexico just five years ago. Why would betrayed ex-friends assist the United States government in preventing Americans from buying cinnamon and cloves at normal prices?
The Trump tariff scheme is headed for collapse sooner or later. The sooner, the better for both Americans and the rest of the world. Everything that can be done to accelerate that outcome is a service to humanity.
The U.S.-Canada bond was forged in the agony of two world wars, strengthened by cooperation in the long struggle against Soviet Communism and Islamist terrorism, and demonstrated in happy decades of cross-border cooperation against many shared threats. That bond can now triumphantly find expression in millions of consensual retail exchanges: the world’s desirable products at honest world prices, all sold with a smile and a friendly “Alrighty then!” to every satisfied American customer.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Updated at 12:43 p.m. ET on April 4, 2025.
For a few months, the Donald Trump White House managed, at least in public, to keep some of the right’s fringiest figures at bay. Until yesterday.
The far-right celebrity Laura Loomer was at the White House on Wednesday. If you don’t spend a lot of time online, you probably don’t know who Loomer is, and that’s healthy. To say that she is a “conspiracy theorist” is not quite enough: She has referred to herself as a “proud Islamophobe” and has claimed that 9/11 was an “inside job”; she has charged that some school shootings were staged, accused Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis of “exaggerating” her struggle with breast cancer, and questioned whether the “deep state” might have used an atmospheric-research facility in Alaska to create a snowstorm over Des Moines. (Why? So that foul weather would suppress the turnout in the 2024 Iowa GOP caucuses and hurt Trump’s campaign.)
Loomer has even alienated her ostensible allies in the MAGA movement, to say nothing of the hostility she has engendered among various other Republicans. (Peter Schorsch, a former Republican operative who now runs the website Florida Politics, described her to The Washington Post as “what happens when you take a gadfly and inject it with that radioactive waste from Godzilla.”) Indeed, Trump’s own aides found Loomer so toxic that they tried to keep her away from the 2024 campaign, as my colleague Tim Alberta reported last year. A source close to the Trump campaign toldSemafor last fall that Trump’s people were “‘100%’ concerned about her exacerbating Trump’s weaknesses,” but that attempts to put “guardrails” around her weren’t working. Trump clearly likes the 31-year-old provocateur, and in Trumpworld, there’s apparently very little anyone can do once the boss takes a shine to someone.
And so Loomer reportedly walked into the Oval Office yesterday with a list of people who should be removed from the National Security Council because of their disloyalty to Trump and the MAGA cause. (Asked for comment, Loomer declined to divulge “any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump.” She added, “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of strong vetting, for the sake of protecting the President and our national security.”)
The next day, at least six staff members, including three senior officials, were fired. If Loomer had nothing to do with it, that’s a hell of a coincidence. (The NSC spokesperson Brian Hughes told The Atlantic that the NSC does not comment on personnel matters. Asked by a reporter whether Loomer had anything to do with the firings, President Trump said, “No, not at all.”)
Today, an unnamed U.S. official toldAxios that Loomer went to the White House because she was furious that “neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs. The result, according to the official, was a “bloodbath” that took down perhaps as many as 10 NSC staff members. Most reports named Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence, and Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs; otherreports claim that David Feith, a senior director overseeing technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, senior director for international organizations, are among those dismissed. Walsh formerly worked as a senior staff member for Marco Rubio on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Boodry was National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’s legislative director when Waltz was a House member, and Feith was a State Department appointee in the first Trump administration.
The firings at the NSC represent an ongoing struggle between the most extreme MAGA loyalists and what’s left of a Republican foreign-policy establishment. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, for example, has been in an online tussle with the Republican fringe—a group that makes Cotton seem almost centrist by comparison—over Alex Wong, another Trump NSC official, whom Loomer and others have, for various reasons, accused of disloyalty to Trump. Other conflicts, however, seem to center on a struggle between Waltz and the head of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, Sergio Gor, who has reportedly been blocking people Waltz wants on his team because Gor and others doubt their commitment to the president’s foreign policy.
Such internal ideological and political food fights are common in Washington, but the national security adviser usually doesn’t have to stand by while his staff gets turfed on the say-so of an online troll. If these firings happened because Loomer wanted them, it’s difficult to imagine how Waltz stays in his job—or why he’d want to.
Waltz, of course, is already slogging through a mess of his own creation because of the controversy surrounding his use of the chat app Signal to have a highly sensitive national-security discussion about a strike on Houthi targets, to which he inadvertently invited a journalist—The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg. (Waltz’s week wasn’t getting any better before Loomer showed up: New reports claim that the meeting about the Yemen strikes was only one of many conversations about important national-security operations that Waltz held over Signal.) Trump reportedly kept Waltz on the team purely to deny giving “a scalp” to the Democrats and what he perceives as their allies in the mainstream media.
Now Waltz’s authority as national security adviser is subject to a veto from … Laura Loomer? It’s one thing to dodge the barbs of the administration’s critics; that’s a normal part of life in the capital. It’s another entirely to have to stand there and take it when an unhinged conspiracy monger walks into the White House and then several accomplished Republican national-security staffers are fired.
The reason all of this is happening is that in his second term, Trump is free of any adult supervision. The days when a Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis or a Chief of Staff John Kelly would throw themselves in front of the door rather than let someone like Loomer anywhere near the Oval Office are long gone. Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants who are apparently so scared of being exiled from their liege’s presence that they can’t bring themselves to stop someone as far out on the fringe as Loomer from advising the president of the United States.
Meanwhile, a person close to the administration told my colleague Michael Scherer today that “Loomer has been asked to put together a list of people at State who are not MAGA loyalists.” Waltz might yet get fired, but whether he stays or goes, he doesn’t seem to be in charge of the NSC. Perhaps next we’ll see if Marco Rubio is actually running the State Department.
The president of the European Commission said that the bloc is “prepared to respond” with countermeasures to President Donald Trump’s tariffs but will attempt to negotiate with him first.
Hungary announced that it will pull out of the International Criminal Court. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who faces an ICC arrest warrant, landed in Budapest today for a visit.
At least seven people have died after intense flooding, tornados, and storms hit the central United States. More extreme weather is expected to continue affecting the area this week.
Dispatches
Time-Travel Thursdays: RFK Jr.’s nostalgia for the past obscures a longer history of America’s struggle with weight-related chronic illness. The truth is, America was never healthy to begin with, Lila Shroff writes.
In 1924, a German professor named Eugen Herrigel set out to learn about Zen Buddhism, which was starting to penetrate the West. He found a teaching position in Japan, where he hoped to locate someone who could instruct him in the philosophy. Rather than the sort of course he had in mind, he was informed that because he lacked proficiency in Japanese, he would be required instead to learn a skill—namely, kyūdō (the way of the bow)—and this would indirectly impart the Zen truths that he sought …
In short, Herrigel learned that the secret to archery—and the approach to life he was seeking—is to know when to stop resisting change and simply let it occur. Fortunately, you don’t have to spend half a decade studying archery in Japan to benefit from this central insight.
Take a look. In the 1960s, Vine Deloria Jr. was a budding Native American activist. Philip J. Deloria writes about his father’s transformation—and the world he built at home.
Read. Derek Thompson interviews Richard White, the historian and author of The Republic for Which It Stands, about the real story behind the Gilded Age.
Déjà vu: TikTok’s time was nearly up, and then President Donald Trump stepped in to save it. This happened in January, and also earlier today, when Trump said that he will sign another executive order to delay a possible ban on the social-media app.
Out of concern about the app’s possible weaponization by the Chinese government, Congress passed a law in April 2024 that required TikTok to spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or else stop operating in the United States. When the deadline for such a sale initially arrived earlier this year, American TikTok users had the hallucinatory experience of losing access to the app … for 14 hours. Trump intervened for the first time then by pushing the deadline for a sale back for 75 days—an extension he is now doubling—and the app soon came back. Months of news coverage, analysis, discussion, viral memes, and even some widely covered “Keep TikTok” protests outside the U.S. Capitol culminated in a brief shut-out and a punted deadline. The app reappeared with a pop-up message thanking Trump for the reprieve: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
TikTok went back to business, mostly as usual. Many American companies and rich people have been rumored to have an interest in acquiring the app. These have ranged from the interesting but unserious (YouTube personality MrBeast or one of the Shark Tank guys) to the serious but uninteresting (current TikTok U.S. data-center operator Oracle) to the obvious names that would pop up no matter what big tech acquisition we were talking about (Elon Musk, Amazon, Microsoft). In his post today, Trump alluded to a pending deal without specifics. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” he said. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed.”
This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.
More recent polling from Pew shows a country with negative but not-very-strong feelings about the ban. Fifty percent of adults supported the idea in March 2023, and that number has now dropped to 34 percent. The percentage of Americans who oppose it has grown from 22 percent to 32 percent. But the percentage of Americans who say they’re not sure about it has risen as well, from 28 to 33 percent. We have approximately a three-way tie on the issue, with opposition and support about as prevalent as shoulder shrugs. Pew didn’t see a big partisan divide on this, either—39 percent of Republicans support the ban, compared with 30 percent of Democrats. People who oppose the ban tend to do so on free-speech grounds, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. They also tend to say they’re unconvinced by arguments about TikTok’s threat to national security.
Perhaps the problem is that these arguments were abstract in the way that data protection is always kind of abstract. They also seemed hypothetical, because as far as the public knows, the U.S. currently has no evidence that Chinese intelligence has ever accessed Americans’ data en masse via TikTok. That’s not to say there’s no chance that TikTok could be used for some nefarious purpose, but the app is not exactly an outlier in this regard; ByteDance employees have been caught using it to track journalists, for example, similar to the accusations more than a decade ago that employees at Uber were using their app’s “God View” to track individual users. The government has also made it seem like we have bigger problems on our hands when it comes to China (and not just a trade war). For instance, the Biden administration accused the Chinese of intelligence efforts to gain control of American power grids and water pipelines, which sounds acutely terrifying; the vague notion of China pushing propaganda on social media falls more into the bucket of “not ideal.” Trump acknowledged this disconnect in January with his signature wild directness: “Is it that important for China to be spying on young people? On young kids watching crazy videos?”
Of course, he was also the one to have first proposed the ban, back in 2020. At that time, some of his more important allies were anti–social media, arguably anti-tech Republicans such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued strenuously that TikTok was an urgent threat to national security. This was a time-limited approach—years passed and nightmare scenarios remained hypothetical. And Trump’s commitment to the ban disappeared when he was out of office. While campaigning in 2024, Trump made a TikTok account that now has more than 15 million followers; in his second term, his administration is tightly knit with the tech industry.
During President Joe Biden’s term, Congress followed through on the ban seemingly because it represented a quick and dramatic intervention to ease anxieties about social media in general. (This is the logic behind the billionaire Frank McCourt’s bid to acquire the app and strip it of its famous recommendation algorithm.) But Americans don’t currently appear to care very much about the narrative that TikTok is addictive, either. Fewer than half of the Pew respondents who said they support a ban cited people spending too much time on TikTok as a major reason. It wasn’t among the top three reasons overall.
The law on the books now reads as the semipermanent result of a political moment that has ended. The whole years-long debate may soon feel like a hallucination, too.
Donald Trump had a plan. It was not a good plan, or even a plausible one. But it was, at least, a coherent plan: By imposing large trade barriers on the entire world, he would create an incentive for American business to manufacture and grow all the goods the country previously imported.
Whatever chance this plan had to succeed is already over.
The key to making it work was to convince businesses that the new arrangement is durable. Nobody is going to invest in building new factories in the United States to create goods that until last week could be imported more cheaply unless they’re certain that the tariffs making the domestic version more competitive will stay in place. (They’re probably not going to do it anyway, in part because they don’t know who will be president in four years, but the point is that confidence in durable tariffs is a necessary condition.)
Trump’s aides grasped this dynamic. “This is the great onshoring, the great reshoring of American jobs and wealth,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, declared on “Liberation Day.” The White House accordingly circulated talking points instructing its surrogates not to call the tariffs a leverage play to make deals, but to instead describe them as a permanent new feature of the global economy.
But not everybody got the idea. Eric Trump tweeted, “I wouldn’t want to be the last country that tries to negotiate a trade deal with @realDonaldTrump. The first to negotiate will win – the last will absolutely lose.”
Eric’s father apparently didn’t get the memo either. Asked by reporters whether he planned to negotiate the tariff rates, the president said, “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate. They always have.”
Someone seems to have then told Trump that this stance would paralyze business investment, because he reversed course immediately, writing on Truth Social, “TO THE MANY INVESTORS COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES AND INVESTING MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE.”
However, there is a principle at work here called “No backsies.” Once you’ve said you might negotiate the tariffs, nobody is going to believe you when you change your mind and say you’ll never negotiate.
Indeed, precisely two hours and 17 minutes after insisting that his policies would never change, Trump returned to Truth Social to announce excitedly that the policies were going to change: “Just had a very productive call with To Lam, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, who told me that Vietnam wants to cut their Tariffs down to ZERO if they are able to make an agreement with the U.S. I thanked him on behalf of our Country, and said I look forward to a meeting in the near future.”
The possibility remains that Trump will revert to insisting that the tariffs are permanent and irrevocable. The day is still young.
To be sure, signaling openness to negotiation on tariffs is also a plan. But it’s a very different plan than attracting massive investment into domestic production. The idea behind this other plan is a game of chicken: We think the balance of trade protection is unfavorable to the United States, and could be made more favorable by leveling the playing field. Threatening a global trade war imposes pain on other countries, making them willing to reduce their tariffs on American goods, leading to freer global trade.
This strategy relies not on convincing businesses that Trump is completely serious, but instead on making other world leaders believe that Trump is willing to endure fantastic amounts of economic pain in order to gain bargaining leverage. “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side that you are crazy,” the investor and pro-Trump social-media influencer Bill Ackman rationalized on X.
Could it work? Like the original plan, this is not a good one by any means. Attempting to negotiate new trade deals with almost every country and territory in the world, some of which are uninhabited, poses a formidable diplomatic challenge. (Do penguins have a trade representative?) There is very little in Trump’s record to suggest that he’s going to pull it off. The fact that he is freezing domestic investment decisions in the meantime and risking stagflation or a recession is going to undermine his leverage rather than increase it.
We’re the ones who are waging a trade war against the entire planet. Attempting to intimidate all other countries at the same time is a bit like a school bully walking into the cafeteria and announcing that everybody has to start handing over their lunch money on an ongoing basis. The strong-arm method is best suited for one-on-one negotiations, rather than giving everyone an incentive to band together in self-protection.
In any case, the madman approach to achieving freer global trade by tanking the American economy, whatever odds it may stand of success, is simply not the same thing as creating a permanent new system of protected domestic industry. That vision had danced in Trump’s head since the 1980s. He decided that now was his chance to finally make it happen. It lasted less than a day.
Deep down, Sam Altman and François Chollet share the same dream. They want to build AI models that achieve “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI—matching or exceeding the capabilities of the human mind. The difference between these two men is that Altman has suggested that his company, OpenAI, has practically built the technology already. Chollet, a French computer scientist and one of the industry’s sharpest skeptics, has said that notion is “absolutely clown shoes.”
When I spoke with him earlier this year, Chollet told me that AI companies have long been “intellectually lazy” in suggesting that their machines are on the path to a kind of supreme knowledge. At this point, those claims are based largely on the programs’ ability to pass specific tests (such as the LSAT, Advanced Placement Biology, and even an introductory sommelier exam). Chatbots may be impressive. But in Chollet’s reckoning, they’re not genuinely intelligent.
Chollet, like Altman and other tech barons, envisions AI models that can solve any problem imaginable: disease, climate change, poverty, interstellar travel. A bot needn’t be remotely “intelligent” to do your job. But for the technology to fulfill even a fraction of the industry’s aspirations—to become a researcher “akin to Einstein,” as Chollet put it to me—AI models must move beyond imitating basic tasks, or even assembling complex research reports, and display some ingenuity.
Chollet isn’t just a critic, nor is he an uncompromising one. He has substantial experience with AI development and created a now-prominent test to gauge whether machines can do this type of thinking. For years, he has contributed major research to the field of deep learning, including at Google, where he worked as a software engineer from 2015 until this past November; he wants generative AI to be revolutionary, but worries that the industry has strayed. In 2019, Chollet created the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus for Artificial General Intelligence, or ARC-AGI—an exam designed to show the gulf between AI models’ memorized answers and the “fluid intelligence” that people have. Drawing from cognitive science, Chollet described such intelligence as the ability to quickly acquire skills and solve unfamiliar problems from first principles, rather than just memorizing enormous amounts of training data and regurgitating information. (Last year, he launched the ARC Prize, a competition to beat his benchmark with a $1 million prize fund.)
You, a human, would likely pass this exam. But for years, chatbots had a miserable time with it. Most people, despite having never encountered ARC-AGI before, get scores of roughly 60 to 70 percent. GPT-3, the program that became ChatGPT, the legendary, reality-distorting bot, scored a zero. Only recently have the bots started to catch up.
How could such powerful tools fail the test so spectacularly for so long? This is where Chollet’s definition of intelligence comes in. To him, a chatbot that has analyzed zillions of SAT-style questions, legal briefs, and lines of code is not smart so much as well prepared—for the SAT, a law-school exam, advanced coding problems, whatever. A child figuring out tricky word problems after just learning how to multiply and divide, meanwhile, is smart.
ARC-AGI is simple, but it demands a keen sense of perception and, in some sense, judgment. It consists of a series of incomplete grids that the test-taker must color in based on the rules they deduce from a few examples; one might, for instance, see a sequence of images and observe that a blue tile is always surrounded by orange tiles, then complete the next picture accordingly. It’s not so different from paint by numbers.
The test has long seemed intractable to major AI companies. GPT-4, which OpenAI boasted in 2023 had “advanced reasoning capabilities,” didn’t do much better than the zero percent earned by its predecessor. A year later, GPT-4o, which the start-up marketed as displaying “text, reasoning, and coding intelligence,” achieved only 5 percent. Gemini 1.5 and Claude 3.7, flagship models from Google and Anthropic, achieved 5 and 14 percent, respectively. These models may have gotten lucky on a few puzzles, but to Chollet they hadn’t evinced a shred of abstract reasoning. “If you were not intelligent, like the entire GPT series,” he told me, “you would score basically zero.” In his view, the tech barons were not even on the right path to building their artificial Einstein.
Chollet designed the grids to be highly distinctive, so that similar puzzles or relevant information couldn’t inadvertently be included in a model’s training data—a common problem with AI benchmarks. A test taker must start anew with each puzzle, applying basic notions of counting and geometry. Most other AI evaluations and standardized tests are crude by comparison—they aren’t designed to evaluate a distinct, qualitative aspect of thinking. But ARC-AGI checks for the ability to “take concepts you know and apply them to new situations very efficiently,” Melanie Mitchell, an AI researcher at the Santa Fe Institute, told me.
To improve their performance, Silicon Valley needed to change its approach. Scaling AI—building bigger models with more computing power and more training data—clearly wasn’t helping. OpenAI was first to market with a model that even came close to the right kind of problem-solving. The firm announced a so-called reasoning model, o1, this past fall that Altman later called “the smartest model in the world.” Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, told me the program represented a “new paradigm.” The model was designed to check and revise its approach to any question and to spend more time on harder ones, as a human might. An early version of o1 scored 18 percent on ARC-AGI—a definite improvement, but still well below human performance. A later iteration of o1 hit 32 percent. OpenAI was still “a long way off” from fluid intelligence, Chollet told me in September.
That was about to change. In late December, OpenAI previewed a more advanced reasoning model, o3, that scored a shocking 87 percent on ARC-AGI—making it the first AI to match human performance on the test and the best-performing model by far. Chollet described the program as a “genuine breakthrough.” o3 appeared able to combine different strategies on the fly, precisely the kind of adaptation and experimentation needed to succeed on ARC-AGI.
Unbeknownst to Chollet, OpenAI had kept track of his test “for quite a while,” Chen told me in January. Chen praised the “genius of ARC,” calling its resistance to memorized answers a good “way to test generalization, which we see as closely linked to reasoning.” And as the start-up’s reasoning models kept improving, ARC-AGI resurfaced as a meaningful challenge—so much so that the ARC Prize team collaborated with OpenAI for o3’s announcement, during which Altman congratulated them on “making such a great benchmark.”
Chollet, for his part, told me he feels “pretty vindicated.” Major AI labs were adopting, even standardizing, his years-old ideas about fluid intelligence. It is not enough for AI models to memorize information: They must reason and adapt. Companies “say they have no interest in the benchmark, because they are bad at it,” Chollet said. “The moment they’re good at it, they will love it.”
Many AI proponents were quick to declare victory when o3 passed Chollet’s test. “AGI has been achieved in 2024,” one start-up founder wrote on X. Altman wrote in a blog post that “we are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.” Since then, Google, Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek have launched their own “reasoning” models, and the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has said that artificial general intelligence could arrive within a couple of years.
But Chollet, ever the skeptic, wasn’t sold. Sure, AGI might be getting closer, he told me—but only in the sense that it had previously been “infinitely” far away. And just as this hurdle was cleared, he decided to raise another.
Last week, the ARC Prize team released an updated test, called ARC-AGI-2, and it appears to have sent the AIs back to the drawing board. The full o3 model has not yet been tested, but a version of o1 dropped from 32 percent on the original puzzles to just 3 percent on the new version, and a “mini” version of o3 currently available to the public dropped from roughly 30 percent to below 2 percent. (An OpenAI spokesperson declined to say whether the company plans to run the benchmark with o3.) Other flagship models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have achieved roughly 1 percent, if not lower. Human testers average about 60 percent.
If ARC-AGI-1 was a binary test for whether a model had any fluid intelligence, Chollet told me last month, the second version aims to measure just how savvy an AI is. Chollet has been designing these new puzzles since 2022; they are, in essence, much harder versions of the originals. Many of the answers to ARC-AGI were immediately recognizable to humans, while on ARC-AGI-2, people took an average of five minutes to find the solution. Chollet believes the way to get better on ARC-AGI-2 is to be smarter, not to study harder—a challenge that may help push the AI industry to new breakthroughs. He is turning the ARC Prize into a nonprofit dedicated to designing new benchmarks to guide the technology’s progress, and is already working on ARC-AGI-3.
Reasoning models take bizarre and inhuman approaches to solving these grids, and increased “thinking” time will come at substantial cost. To hit 87 percent on the original ARC-AGI test, o3 spent roughly 14 minutes per puzzle and, by my calculations, may have required hundreds of thousands of dollars in computing and electricity; the bot came up with more than 1,000 possible answers per grid before selecting a final submission. Mitchell, the AI researcher, said this approach suggests some degree of trial and error rather than efficient, abstract reasoning. Chollet views this inefficiency as a fatal flaw, but corporate AI labs do not. If chatbots achieve fluid intelligence in this way, it will not be because the technology approximates the human mind: You can’t just stuff more brain cells into a person’s skull, but you can give a chatbot more computer chips.
In the meantime, OpenAI is “shifting towards evaluations that reflect utility as well,” Chen told me, such as tests of an AI model’s ability to navigate and take actions on the web—which will help the company make better, although not necessarily smarter, products. OpenAI itself, not some third-party test, will ultimately decide when its products are useful, how to price them (perhaps $20,000 a year for a “Phd-level” bot, according to one report), and whether they’ve achieved AGI. Indeed, the company may already have its own key AGI metric, of a sort: As The Information reported late last year, Microsoft and OpenAI have come to an agreement defining AGI as software capable of generating roughly $100 billion in profits. According to documents OpenAI distributed to investors, that determination “is in the ‘reasonable discretion’ of the board of OpenAI.”
And there’s the problem: Nobody agrees on what’s being measured, or why. If AI programs are bad at Chollet’s test, maybe it just means that they have a hard time visualizing colorful grids rather than anything deeper. And bots that never solve ARC-AGI-2 could generate $100 billion in profits some day. Any specific test—the LSAT or ARC-AGI or a coding puzzle—will inherently contradict the notion of general intelligence; the term’s defining trait may be its undefinability.
The deeper issue, perhaps, is that human intelligence is poorly understood, and gauging it is an infamously hard and prejudiced task. People have knacks for different things, or might arrive at the same result—the answer to a math problem, the solution to an ARC-AGI grid—via very different routes. A person who scores 30 percent on ARC-AGI-2 is in no sense inferior to someone who scores 90 percent. The collision of those differing routes and minds is what sparks debate, creativity, and beauty. Intentions, emotions, and lived experiences drive people as much as any logical reasoning.
Human cognitive diversity, in other words, is a glorious jumble. How do you even begin to construct an artificial version of that? And when that diversity is already so abundant, do you really want to?
Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump celebrated America’s so-called Liberation Day by announcing a slew of tariffs on dozens of countries. His plan, if fully implemented, will return the United States to the highest tariff duty as a share of the economy since the late 1800s, before the invention of the automobile, aspirin, and the incandescent light bulb. Michael Cembalest, the widely read analyst at JP Morgan Wealth Management, wrote that the White House announcement “borders on twilight zone territory.”
The most fitting analysis for this moment, however, does not come from an economist or a financial researcher. It comes from the screenwriter William Goldman, who pithily captured his industry’s lack of foresight with one of the most famous aphorisms in Hollywood history: “Nobody knows anything.”
You’re not going to find a better three-word summary of the Trump tariffs than that. If there’s anything worse than an economic plan that attempts to revive the 19th-century protectionist U.S. economy, it’s the fact that the people responsible for explaining and implementing it don’t seem to have any idea what they’re doing, or why.
On one side, you have the longtime Trump aide Peter Navarro, who has said that Trump’s tariffs will raise $6 trillion over the next decade, making it the largest tax increase in American history. On another, you have pro-Trump tech folks, such as Palmer Luckey, who have instead claimed that the goal is the opposite: a world of fully free trade, as countries remove their existing trade barriers in the face of the new penalties. On yet another track, there is Stephen Miran, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, who has suggested that the tariff salvo is part of a master plan to rebalance America’s relationship with the global economy by reducing the value of the dollar and reviving manufacturing employment in the United States.
These three alleged goals—raising revenue, restoring free trade, and rejiggering the global economy—are incompatible with one another. The first and second explanations are mutually exclusive: The state can’t raise tax revenue in the long run with a levy that is designed to disappear. The second and third explanations are mutually exclusive too: You can’t reindustrialize by doubling down on the global-trade free-for-all that supposedly immiserated the Rust Belt in the first place. Either global free trade is an economic Valhalla worth fighting for, or it’s the cursed political order that we’re trying desperately to destroy.
As for Trump’s alleged devotion to bringing back manufacturing jobs, the administration has attacked the implementation of the CHIPS bill, which invested in the very same high-tech semiconductors that a strategic reindustrialization effort would seek to prioritize. There is no single coherent explanation for the tariffs, only competing hypotheses that violate one another’s internal logic because, when it comes to explaining this economic policy, nobody knows anything.
One might expect clarity from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. But even he doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on. The “tariff gun will always be loaded and on the table, but rarely discharged,” he said last year. So much for that. Yesterday, a Bloomberg reporter asked Bessent if the Trump administration has plans to negotiate with America’s trading partners. “We’re just going to have to wait and see,” he said. Was the administration ready to negotiate with the European Union, China, or India? “We’ll see.” Asked why Canada and Mexico were missing from the president’s list of tariffs, he switched it up: “I’m not sure.” Nobody knows anything.
By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise. The Trump administration slapped 10 percent tariffs on Heard Island and McDonalds Islands, which are uninhabited, and on the British Indian Ocean Territory, whose residents are mostly American and British military service members. One of the highest tariff rates, 50 percent, was imposed on the African nation of Lesotho, whose average citizen earns less than $5 a day. Why? Because the administration’s formula for supposedly “reciprocal” tariff rates apparently has nothing to do with tariffs. The Trump team seems to have calculated each penalty by dividing the U.S. trade deficit with a given country by how much the U.S. imports from it and then doing a rough adjustment. Because Lesotho’s citizens are too poor to afford most U.S. exports, while the U.S. imports $237 million in diamonds and other goods from the small landlocked nation, we have reserved close to our highest-possible tariff rate for one of the world’s poorest countries. The notion that taxing Lesotho gemstones is necessary for the U.S. to add steel jobs in Ohio is so absurd that I briefly lost consciousness in the middle of writing this sentence.
If the tariffs violate their own internal logic and basic common sense, what are they? Most likely, they represent little more than the all-of-government metastasis of Trump’s personality, which sees grandiosity as a strategy to pull counterparties to the negotiating table and strike deals that benefit Trump’s ego or wallet. This personality style is clear, and it has been clearly stated, even if its application to geopolitics is confounding to observe. “My style of deal-making is pretty simple and straightforward,” Trump writes in The Art of the Deal. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after. Sometimes I settle for less than I sought but in most cases I still end up with what I want.”
One can see this playbook—threat, leverage, concession, repeat—playing out across all of society. It’s happening in trade. It’s happening in law. It’s happening in academia. In the first two months of his second term, Trump has already squeezed enormous concessions out of white-shoe law firms and major universities. Trump appears to care more about the process of gaining leverage over others—including other countries—than he does about any particular effective tariff rate. The endgame here is that there is no endgame, only the infinite game of power and leverage.
Trump’s defenders praise the president for using chaos to shake up broken systems. But they fail to see the downside of uncertainty. Is a textile company really supposed to open a U.S. factory when our trade policy seems likely to change every month as Trump personally negotiates with the entire planet? Are manufacturing firms really supposed to invest in expensive factory expansions when the Liberation Day tariffs caused a global sell-off that signals an international downturn? Trump’s personality is, and has always been, zero-sum and urgent, craving chaos, but economic growth is positive-sum and long-term-oriented, craving certainty for its largest investments. The scariest thing about the Trump tariffs isn’t the numbers, but the underlying message. We’re all living inside the president’s head, and nobody knows anything.
In response to the President’s decision to drive the economy into a wall by levying extreme tariffs on essentially the rest of the world, the most common response from Trump apologists is that this is necessary for the benefit of American “workers.” I wanted to take moment to examine this argument.
Let’s start by addressing an important question: who are we talking about when we talk about “workers.” My guess is that we’re not talking about everyone who works. For example, in the last few days the person who has been pushing this argument was, a little over two months ago, celebrating the mass lay-off of Federal Workers. Further, they argued for the necessity of those lay-offs based on their own proclaimed experience of turning around “failing” businesses by… laying off workers.
I realize this feels like narrow casting, but it’s necessary in this case to unpack the shaky ground this argument is being made on. Clearly “workers” doesn’t mean everyone who works. Or even everyone who works more entry-level or lower-paid, frontline positions, which many of those government jobs were. Nor, I suspect, are they thinking about the tariffs’ impact on current service-based workers. In fact, while not all service jobs are retail, retail work remains the largest employment sector in the country today, and these tariffs will hit that sector HARD (and most likely lead to a workforce contraction) . So clearly these folks are not thinking about “retail workers.”
I guess that they are mainly thinking about manufacturing jobs. That focus on manufacturing workers as the primary workers we should be thinking of seems supported by a x/eet from another Pro-Trump account:
I don’t care if the price of your Nintendo Switch 2 goes up $20. I voted to reverse this: pic.twitter.com/niwObtjLUu
The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson used this as a jumping-off point for a series of X/eets that pointed out the problem with this thinking. For ease of reading, I’ll quote them instead of directly embedding the long X/eets:
This seems to be a photo of an abandoned plant owned by Packard Auto, a failed 20th c car maker that over-expanded in the 1940s and got out-competed by the Big Three. Guy who voted in 2024 to go back in time and fix the business decisions of an also-ran mid-century auto maker
It’s a little mean to narrowly claim that the tariffs are designed to travel back in time and change the business decisions of 1940s Packard Auto execs. But I think it’s useful to be clear about what exactly these tariffs are supposed to do, and where they’re supposed to do it.
If folks are mad about de-industrialization, we need a bigger framework to consider why, for example, even countries like Germany that ran trade surpluses also saw declining manufacturing share of the labor force. If folks are mad about photos of abandoned plants, it worthwhile to ask why THAT PLANT was abandoned.
Using de-industialization porn from the 1950s to run Econ policy in the 2020s is … I’m sorry to say, more than mildly insane. [source]
It is without a doubt a fact that we have seen a fall-off in manufacturing via off-shoring and for other global trade reasons. That has devastated communities. I don’t question that as all. And as someone who has organized workers in the recent past, I care about what happens to American workers in all sorts of roles. I also care what happens to them while they are out of work (which is another reason why I am so concerned for the immediate future, given the Trump administration’s attack on our social safety net from all sides).
At the same time, the idea that these tariffs are a strategy to help “American workers” moving forward is simply not based on any grounded facts. First, if it were, the President’s supporters could actually present coherent arguments about how the tariffs will help (or even what the tariffs are supposed to do). Are they to solve our debt? Or bring manufacturing back home? Or get better trade agreements? No one can tell.
Let’s assume that they are to bring manufacturing back home. First, there is the question of whether or not that is even possible. Again, I’ll turn to a X/eet from Spencer Hakimian, Founder of Tolou Capital Management.
Hey Cult Boys, I got another complicated math question for you.
Please see if you can help me figure it out. I just can’t seem to.
It costs $2 to make a t shirt in Vietnam. It costs $20 to make that same t shirt in West Virginia. After you tariff Walmart 50%, and make that t shirt cost $3 in Vietnam.
Does Walmart: A) Continue using the Vietnamese factory B) Switch to West Virginia’s factory
Please help.
I would welcome any Trump apologist with business experience to make the argument for “B”–especially if said WV factory doesn’t already exist. It would be great for them include why companies would make that type of capital investment given the deeply unstable policy landscape we are currently facing.
Here’s the thing, I’d also love for them to explain how option “B” creates manufacturing jobs at scale. Even the President’s own Secretary of Commerce has highlighted the flaw with that:
Watters: What kind of manufacturing are you talking about returning here?
Lutnick: What’s going to happen is robotics are going to replace the cheap labor… pic.twitter.com/k9UPNhuvU1
Robotics and other forms of manufacturing automation are going to replace much of the hand-labor that was the hallmark of mid-century manufacturing. Manufacturing could return to the US, even at scale, but that doesn’t mean that the same scale of manufacturing jobs will.
For a truly fascinating deep dive into this I recommend this X/itter thread on “Lights-out factories”–manufacturing facilities with so few people, they keep the lights off–by journalist Charles Fishman. Not only do lights-out factories exist within the US, they are increasingly being built around the world–including in Vietnam and other places to make those $3 t-shirts. I suspect that even the president’s apologists will be forced to admit that the future of American manufacturing is a move towards lights-out facilities–especially for lower-cost consumer goods.
Nowhere in Trump’s plan or his apologists’ hot takes has this question about where manufacturing jobs at scale will come from been addressed. Yes, they tell us to “think about the workers,” but that’s an emotional appeal to the past, versus a fact-based argument or strategy for the future.
One final note on this: the “what about the workers” emotional appeal is being used to attack people they see as their political enemies. Even worse, those political enemies make the apologists uncomfortable by pointing out facts they can’t address on substance.
So, I’m going to pile one last uncomfortable fact on that heap: most of those apologists were for off-shoring and so-called efficiency-based layoffs before they were against them.
I grew up in a household in the eighties and early nineties where conservative talk radio was always on. So I remember what folks like Rush Limbaugh and Bob Grant were saying about American manufacturing then. The main thrust was “nobody was buying American because other countries made better products–especially cars–better, faster, and cheaper.” And whose fault was that? American workers… the same workers we’re supposed to care about now. Tell me if this type of tough-love thinking sounds familiar:
“We talk about the value of hard work, but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance.”
However, now positions have shifted, and people who have laid off workers in the past in the name of turning around failing businesses, suddenly believe that manufacture can come back home and we should suddenly care about “the workers” (though given those same people’s focus on cutting debt while preserving tax cuts that are good for them are fine with regressive taxes on American Workers via tariffs and cutting the social safety net for the former workers who currently can’t find the jobs that the apologist remind us don’t exist).
One more note on Conservative Media–which I know many of Trump’s fiecest apologists marinate in–during the 80’s and 90’s at the very least, one of the most consistent mantras of Limbaugh and others were that “We have the ‘facts’ and Democrats/Libs have the “feels.” The utterly factless and feel-based defenses to the tariffs (especially from people who claim to understand business and manufacturing) is a prime example of how either things have flipped or perhaps this was a fig-leaf from the start to protect against cognitive dissonance.
Last month, when the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to remove people without any legal process, my organization, the ACLU, sued to try to stop the deportations.
At first, things proceeded as one might expect. Because we showed that our clients were in imminent danger and that the Trump administration’s actions had, at minimum, serious legal problems, the federal court hearing the case ordered the government to pause the deportations and “immediately” send back any deportation flights that were already “in the air.” But then things took a surprising turn. The Trump administration kept the planes going, whisking our clients to a Salvadoran prison. Since then, the judge has been trying to determine whether his orders were violated. The government has repeatedly evaded the judge’s simple questions about its actions, and has now flatly refused to answer them, claiming that details about the flights, which can largely be corroborated through public information and Cabinet secretaries’ own social-media posts, involve “state secrets.”
These and similar executive actions have spurred serious concerns that the Trump administration is bringing the country into a full-fledged constitutional crisis. Plaintiffs in at least three other constitutional cases challenging Donald Trump’s actions—two cases related to Trump’s freezing of USAID funds and an ACLU case about his threat to cut off federal-grant funding to medical facilities that provide health care for transgender youth—have had to return to court to enforce prior orders. Meanwhile, Trump’s close advisers and allies—including Vice President J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, and a few members of Congress—have suggested, some more directly than others, that the president should disobey judicial rulings and wage a war of words against federal judges. But the Trump administration has not openly defied a court order, at least not yet, and there are still many tools that advocates and citizens have at their disposal to ensure that rule of law prevails in America.
For now, the Trump administration is mostly testing existing limits on executive power. Trump remarked early on to a Washington Post reporter that he “always abides” by court orders and expresses disagreement through appeal, but his actions tell a different story. Justice Department attorneys have responded to charges of noncompliance with technical rebuttals about what happened and when, and have taken the extraordinary position that the courts have no role in reviewing whether the president’s actions comply with the Constitution.
While these disputes make their way to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts has made his views known. After Trump called for the impeachment of the judge in the Alien Enemies Act case, the chief justice issued a rare public statement cautioning that appeal, not impeachment, is the proper recourse for disagreeing with a court ruling.
Meanwhile, Trump is taking ever more radical actions to undermine the foundations of American democracy. Since Inauguration Day, Trump has attacked the Fourteenth Amendment’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He has detained green-card holders and international students for their constitutionally protected speech. He has attacked the rights of trans youth to access health care. And he has mounted an aggressive assault on institutions essential to a free country, threatening sanctions against major media companies, universities, and legal firms. Trump has targeted five of the nation’s largest law firms for past representation of his political opponents or disfavored causes and other lawyers who work on national security, public safety, and election integrity.
Attacks against lawyers and judges are especially dangerous because Trump knows that the courts’ constitutional role is to check him when he violates the Constitution and laws enacted by Congress. There will always be good lawyers who will be undeterred in the honorable pursuit of our profession, but Trump’s fear tactics are already working. The president is using the power of the federal government to silence opposition.
Even in this grim landscape, plaintiffs and others who oppose Trump’s lawlessness have powerful tools to counter him. In the USAID cases, federal workers won their motions to enforce the court’s preliminary orders, and so far have prevailed in both the court of appeals and the Supreme Court. Legal remedies, which also have political consequences, can force even powerful executive-branch officials to comply.
I speak from experience. In 2015, I led a legal team that brought a contempt motion against then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, who had defied multiple court orders in our case challenging racial profiling and unjustified traffic stops of Latino residents. After a 22-day trial, the district court held Arpaio in civil contempt of court, ordered reforms to the internal-affairs system, and imposed an independent authority to conduct disciplinary proceedings in certain misconduct cases. When we proved that Arpaio’s disobedience was willful, federal prosecutors initiated criminal contempt proceedings. Although Trump later pardoned Arpaio, the civil-contempt remedies proved far more consequential: Our clients—a plaintiff class of Latino residents—protected themselves from lawless misconduct.
Similarly, in 2018, the ACLU and our partners had to enforce court orders after we successfully challenged Kansas’s state voter-ID law under the National Voter Registration Act. In contempt proceedings, then–Secretary of State Kris Kobach was forced to add 18,000 disenfranchised citizens to the voter rolls and issue corrected guidance to election officials. To deal with Kobach’s repeated violations, the district court also imposed a financial sanction and ordered him to take a course on civil procedure and legal ethics.
In both the Arpaio and Kobach cases, a political reckoning soon emerged. Contempt proceedings educate and galvanize the public. Every day of our 22-day contempt trial against Arpaio, we were met outside the courthouse by two groups: reporters and community protesters. It was the work of everyone together, especially our clients, that ensured that the rule of law prevailed. In the Arpaio case, the people of Maricopa County delivered another measure of justice when they voted him out of office in the next election.
There is, of course, a difference between Trump and other recalcitrant defendants: Federal courts cannot enforce their own orders; they depend on the U.S. Marshals Service, a law-enforcement agency within the Justice Department. And because the judiciary’s enforcement arm is in the executive branch, the president may direct the Marshals Service to stand down. The constitutional crisis comes to a head when the courts order Trump to comply, and he essentially responds: You can’t make me.
If Trump precipitates this constitutional crisis, the remedy the Framers provided was impeachment and removal from office. If Congress refuses to impeach the president, Americans still have other tools to constrain him, including at the ballot box. The ultimate check on his abuses will be in the hands of the people. The constitutional system of checks and balances is still holding—for now.
