Why does Trump like tariffs?

Tariffs are the latest manifestation of Trump and his oligarchy of multi-billionaires that have seized America -- a strange brew of tax avoidance, ignorance, and xenophobia and racism.

Tariffs are in many ways the perfect encapsulation of the ludicrous mindset of Trumpism and its billionaire greed and overreach.

Take an initial animating force of tax avoidance, mix in swirling clouds of ignorance as to how economics work, douse it all in a deep bath of racism and xenophobia, and in the same spirit, pull an anachronistic policy off the highest shelf from a century ago and blow the dust off it, and voila — they have concocted a diabolical toxin that is already poisoning the American economy and sending it collapsing into a recession if not something far worse than that.

Live shot from inside the Trump White House as the tariff policy is being created.

Yet the core of this is the tax avoidance — billionaires devouring additional billions, from the largest trough of capital available, the government of the United States of America. They already succeeded at being taxed at rates far lower than any of the rest of us pay — 8.2% for the billionaires rather than the 39-50% that a doctor pays — and now they want to ensure that they are not taxed at all.

Trump and Musk are literally cutting taxes for themselves, and then making up the difference by:

• slashing federal programs (and privatizing them, so they can gobble them up),

• raising taxes on middle and working class families (anyone making under $360,000 a year will see their taxes go up under the current Republican plan), and then

• bringing back tariffs, with the weird and false premise that this will somehow shift the burden of taxation off of Americans and onto foreigners.

Tariffs sound good to the MAGA cult. They take discontent and resentment and displace it onto “those foreigners” — along with the pie-in-the-sky idea that we can make them pay taxes instead of us.

But of course tariffs have been roundly and completely discredited. The taxes are invariably passed along to consumers as extra costs — so we have to pay for them. Then other nations retaliate, driving all the taxes ever higher, leading to higher costs for everyone while taking a wrecking ball to trade, crashing all the companies that import or export anything, leading them to lay off workers, driving up unemployment, right as costs are exploding. This spiral is already starting to happen, right now, as the Federal Reserve now predicts a 2.8 percent decrease in GDP this quarter, driven by collapsing exports and disintegrating consumer confidence.

Tariffs were economic anathema before Trump — to both liberal and conservative economists and policymakers. They were considered to be a major factor in deepening the Great Depression! Eliminating tariffs was one of the paramount long-term goals of conservative free marketeers for literally centuries, and now all of that is being chucked out the window like a Russian dissident suffering an unfortunate “accident.”

There’s a saying that holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Tariffs are the economic equivalent of that. A country that enacts a tariff is drinking economic poison and expecting the other countries to die.

So Trump and his cronies are either entirely ignorant of this — or they know full well that tariffs are poisonous but they don’t care. The higher costs fall most heavily on working class and middle class families who spend a larger share of their income on necessities like food, clothing, and household goods. A billionaire and a truck driver use the same amount of toilet paper, but triple the cost of toilet paper (because of an explosion in the cost of Canadian wood, for example), and the truck driver will feel the pain, whereas Elon Musk will not even notice.

The problem with all of this for Trump and Musk — and for the Zuckerberg and Bezos types that have become Vichy collaborators — is that the billionaires’ wealth is absolutely tied to and in many cases built on the backs of the economic well-being of the rest of us.

If the economy craters, no one will buy Teslas, and most of Musk’s paper wealth will be vaporized. If there is a crash, advertising dollars will dry up, as will consumer spending, and the stock prices of Facebook and Amazon will drop.

And then there’s the political problem. Elon Musk is now the co-president: he is as much of the face of the Trump regime as Trump himself is, illegally cutting government agencies and programs that were investigating or regulating him, while redirecting massive government contracts into his own pocket ($400 million for armored Teslas, trying to seize Verizon’s $2.3 billion contract with the FAA and give it to his Starlink company, etc.). Trump cloaked himself in the mantle of his fellow billionaires, with the trillion-dollar front row at his inauguration. He’s now executed an historically titanic grift with the “crypto reserve” (a tale for another time). He has at least thirteen billionaires in his Cabinet or other major offices in his administration.

It is a billionaires’ coup. And if they now break the economy, it will be the billionaires who get the blame.