Categorically different. He was deeply wrong and stupid as hell for the disinfectant comment. However, he is spot on and absolutely right for the tariffs.
Trump is proof that you can be incredibly stupid and incredibly right at different times on different things…much like most people in fact.
False. Trump’s tariff “solution” would’ve made sense 40 years ago, when most manufacturing jobs hadn’t yet gone overseas. You can’t undo four decades of bad policy that has decimated American manufacturing in just one, two, or even four years. It took decades to dismantle that capacity, and it will take a long time to rebuild it—either here or in nations that negotiate good, fair agreements with us.
So, dropping a tariff bomb on the American people now—rather than imposing them slowly over time to give manufacturers a chance to rebuild capacity domestically—means that all of Donald’s blue-collar, or formerly blue-collar and now outright low-income voters, will be unnecessarily hurt in the pocketbook. These are the very people who went to the polls to protest against inflation. Trump’s new taxes mean an economic slowdown and more inflation—exactly what his voters thought they were voting against.
His intentions and actions, while appropriate 40 years ago, are too much, too soon for an economy that voters are already unhappy with. Most Americans are against this, even more will be when prices rise, and most Trump voters had no intention of voting for tax increases or pro-inflation policies like this.
As soon as voters start feeling this in their wallets over the coming weeks, they’ll express their outrage and displeasure at the polls and no amount of blaming Democrats will change the fact that these new tariffs supported by Trump and MAGA Republicans in Congress are why it’s happening now that they are in office and have imposed them.
If it gets bad enough, there could even be a veto-proof majority in Congress to stop these tariffs and reverse or severely limit them while Donald is still in office.
It’s Congress—not the President—that holds the power of the purse. If MAGA politicians had any foresight, they would’ve passed legislation to prevent these tariffs and instead negotiated smart trade agreements with a sliding scale of tariffs. These could have been designed to financially reward companies that start bringing jobs back—with a goal of moving as many as possible over the short, medium, and long term—without devastating consequences for the economy.
At this point, with this move, when Democrats retake the White House, the House, and the Senate (as they did during Obama’s first two years in office after the Great Recession), they’ll undo all of it at voters’ insistence. Then nothing will be done in the medium or long term to undo the 40 years of damage—and the four years of higher taxes on nearly everything will have been for nothing.
It’s the right idea long term, but absolutely the most foolish thing you can do in the short term. The wave of voter opposition, and the impulse to flush all tariffs down the toilet or lower them back to levels that encourage unfair trade, will ensure that we miss the chance to adopt sustainable policies. The result? No real change—just more pain for lower- and middle-class Americans, who will see their pocketbooks squeezed and be forced to pay higher prices for everyday goods they rely on, goods that still aren’t made here and won’t be even a few years from now when all this is repealed.
