From Conservative Mona Charen

 

Mona Charen Parker is an American conservative columnist, journalist, and political commentator. She has written four books.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL EDITORIAL described the tariffs President Donald Trump unveiled this week as the “dumbest trade war in history.” Let’s concede that intelligence isn’t everything. We all know brilliant people who’ve done dumb things. And we certainly all know people of average intelligence who are the sort to whom you’d entrust your children and life savings.

So it’s important not to overrate intelligence, even in leaders. But President Trump is no ordinary man. His stubborn strain of stupidity belongs on a list of deadly sins. And that weak-mindedness is now plunging the world into chaos and potentially into depression.

It should go without saying that our constitutional system was never meant to be so vulnerable to the whims and fantasies of one man. Nothing as critical as the entire world trading system or the maintenance of the NATO alliance should be decided by which side of the bed upon which the emperor wakes up. But due to the cowardice and cupidity of the GOP and others, we’ve gradually lost our antibodies to strongman rule, and we now find ourselves bowing before a power-drunk man-child.

Trump’s peculiar blind spots and obsessions now threaten everyone. All of those supposedly worldly-wise Wall Street types who either supported or did not oppose Trump’s return to power deserve some of the blame today. One thinks of Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who had labeled January 6th “an affront” to America’s “democratic values,” but nonetheless supported Trump in 2024; or Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has a long history opposing tariffs but was co-opted to the point where he told a Davos audience in January that tariffs are a good “economic weapon” and that critics should “get over it.”

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TRUMP HAS AN OBSESSION WITH TRADE. He always has, and his views are wrong historically, economically, and even morally. At his Rose Garden declaration of “Liberation Day,” he repeated his oft-stated view that the United States has been “looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far” for fifty years and more. Long-term trade deficits, he declared, are a “national emergency” that “threaten our way of life.”

In vain did a procession of first-term advisers attempt to disabuse Trump of his absurd views about trade. They patiently explained that it is Americans, not foreigners, who pay tariffs. He was deaf to this. They noted that trade deficits are not a measure of wealth—far less who is “winning” or “losing.” If we buy coffee from Costa Rica and they buy nothing from us (which isn’t true, but just as an illustration), in no sense has Costa Rica taken advantage of, far less “raped” America. We gave them dollars and they gave us coffee in return. That is called commerce, and nearly every exchange between a willing buyer and willing seller yields two winners, not one. Besides, as those first-term Trump advisers also tried to convey, those Costa Rican businessmen then take those dollars and buy American treasuries and other assets. There are no losers in this equation.

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THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY that a leader’s misconceptions have been implemented on a broad scale, but you have to reach into the history of dictatorial regimes to find parallels. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko gained acceptance not because they were true but because Stalin wanted them to be true. Lysenko rejected traditional genetics as a “bourgeois invention” and argued that acquired traits could be inherited. He promised a new golden age with dramatically improved crop yields that would transform even Siberia into a paradise of orchards and gardens. This was touted by Stalin as the “new biology” and ruthlessly enforced. Naysayers were arrested and executed.

The predictable results were repeated famines in the USSR and in China, where Mao had also embraced the fallacy. Millions of men, women, and children starved to death because a leader was able to impose his fantasies on a whole society.

Global trade is an engine of prosperity. But come to think of it, Trump’s revisionism would probably make Stalin and Mao smile.