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Imagine
that you’re listening to some garrulous old guy in a diner, telling you
what’s wrong with the world — which mainly involves how we’re being
victimized and taken advantage of by foreigners. You hear him out; after
all, there have been approximately 17,000 news analyses telling us that
garrulous old guys in diners represent the Real America.
Despite
your best efforts to avoid being condescending, however, you can’t help
noticing that his opinions seem a bit, well, factually challenged. No,
we aren’t experiencing a huge wave of violent crime carried out by
immigrants. No, we don’t give away vast sums in foreign aid. And so on
down the list. Basically, what he imagines to be facts are things he
thinks he heard somewhere, maybe on Fox News, and can’t be bothered to
check.
O.K., in general we should be
prepared to cut ordinary citizens a lot of slack on such stuff. People
have children to care for, jobs to do and lives to live, so we can’t
expect them to be policy wonks — although maybe they should have a
better sense of what they don’t know.
But
what if the ranting, ill-informed old guy who strongly believes things
that just aren’t true happens to be the president of the United States?
Donald
Trump’s declaration that he’s ready to impose tariffs on steel and
aluminum is bad policy, but in itself not that big a deal. The really
disturbing thing is the way he seems to have arrived at that decision,
which apparently came as a surprise to his own economic team.
In
the first place, the alleged legal justification for his move was that
the tariffs were needed to protect national security. After all, we
can’t be dependent for our aluminum on unstable, hostile foreign powers
like … Canada, our principal foreign supplier. (Canada is also our biggest foreign supplier of steel.)
The
point is that the rationale for this policy was obviously fraudulent,
and this matters: It gives other countries full legal license to
retaliate, and retaliate they will. The European Union — which is, by
the way, a bigger player in world trade than we are — has already threatened to impose tariffs on Harley-Davidsons, bourbon and bluejeans.
Meanwhile,
in the days since Trump’s announcement, he’s tweeted out one falsehood
after another. And I don’t mean that he’s been saying things I disagree
with; I mean that he’s been saying things that are simply, flatly wrong,
even according to the U.S. government itself.
He has, for example, declared that we have large trade deficits with Canada; actually, according to U.S. numbers, we run a small surplus. The Europeans, he says, impose “massive tariffs” on U.S. products; the U.S. government guide to exporters tells us that “U.S. exports to the European Union enjoy an average tariff of just three percent.”
These aren’t pesky little errors. Trump — who can get comprehensive briefings on any subject, just by saying the word, but prefers to watch “Fox & Friends” instead — has a picture of world trade in his head that bears as little resemblance to reality as his vision of an America overrun by violent immigrants.
And his notion of what to do about these imaginary problems amounts to no more than a bar stool rant. “Trade wars are good, and easy to win,”
he tweeted, where he clearly thinks that “winning” means selling more
to the other guy than he sells to you. That’s not how it works.
In fact, even if we could eliminate U.S. trade deficits with tariffs, there would be lots of unpleasant side effects:
sharply higher interest rates wreaking havoc on real estate and those
with large debts (hello, Jared), and a sharply higher dollar inflicting
severe harm on exporters, like many of America’s farmers. And a
full-scale trade war would disrupt international supply chains, displacing huge numbers of workers: The U.S. government’s own estimates say that exports to the European Union, Canada and Mexico support 2.6 million, 1.6 million and 1.2 million American jobs respectively.
Will
Trump actually follow through on his ranting? Nobody knows. Maybe the
adults in the administration, if there are any left, will find some
bright, shiny objects to distract him — say, meaningless “concessions”
by Canada and Mexico that convince him that he’s won big. But whether or
not the trade war actually happens, Trump’s display of belligerent
ignorance ought to worry us a lot.
For
one thing, talking tough and stupid on trade in itself damages U.S.
credibility: If we go around threatening our most important allies with
retaliation against policies they don’t even have, how can we expect
them to trust us — or support us — on anything else?
Beyond
that, is there any reason to believe that Trump’s belligerent ignorance
stops with trade? Actually, we know that he’s just as bombastic and
clueless (with added racism) when it comes to crime, and there’s no
reason to believe that he’s any better on real national security issues.
Listening
to a garrulous old guy spout nonsense is annoying in the best of
circumstances. But when this particular old guy controls the world’s
largest military, nukes included, it’s downright scary.
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