The Tariffs Are Here

And that's bad news for pretty much everyone. Including Republican politicians.

I’m no economist, so I won’t give you any kind of careful analysis of Donald Trump’s new tariffs other than to say two things:

(1) All the actual economists think this is going to be a disaster, and

(2) As far as anyone can figure out, no one in the administration did any careful analysis of any of it either.

Political scientist David Karol notes that one of the reasons that Congress over the years has given presidents so much authority over trade is that for the last century or more presidents were invariably less protectionist than the Congresses who worked with them. So it was considered safe to give presidents authority they could use in specialized circumstances without having to worry that any president would start an overall trade war.

And it makes sense that presidents would be (relative) free traders compared to Congress. Economists tell us that (at best) tariffs help specific groups at some cost to the overall economy, and while members of Congress have narrow interests, presidents typically care more about the economy as a whole.

What no one was prepared for, unfortunately, was a president who believes that tariffs are magic beans that have a wide variety of only positive effects – and one who refuses to absorb or even consider any new information, or even have anyone in the White House who would dare to contradict his myths and prejudices with facts.

And so, here we go. I’m sticking with my totally non-expert guess that the recession started last month, but at this point actual experts are now expecting a recession at some point this year, perhaps with renewed inflation as well.

For no reason.

This is obviously not how the United States is supposed to work, with the whims of the president overriding everything else. Here, as with so many other things, the key players are Republicans – in the Senate, in the House, in statehouses. All of whom have constituents who will suffer if economists are correct about the economic consequences of Trump’s action, which in turn will likely mean that those elected officials too will suffer.

Given that Republicans are already doing poorly in elections this year, it’s certainly plausible that adding a recession could lead to a massive blowout in the midterms, and perhaps even in 2028. And for what? This isn’t Democrats in 2009 willing to risk electoral defeat to pass their decades-long goal of significant health care legislation, or Republicans who did the same to attack abortion rights. There aren’t five elected Republicans who ran for office to impose high tariffs. There may only be the one.

How much Republicans may suffer is still unknown. But Trump’s approval rating is already net negative and falling. We don’t know whether a normal recession under current conditions of partisan polarization will have similar effects to, say, the 2007-2009 recession, and of course we don’t know yet how severe the (likely, I guess I should still say) downturn will be or how long it will last.

I just keep coming back to the same thing. In the pandemic recession, the Democratic House and Speaker Nancy Pelosi acted quickly and a Republican-majority Senate and President Trump went along. In 2008, at the critical point in the financial crisis, Speaker Pelosi and the House Democrats acted rapidly, despite dissent from radical Republicans, to keep the worst from happening.

Indeed, as I’ve noted before, despite the fact that the last five and ten of the last eleven recessions began during Republican presidencies, the last time unified Republican government had to deal with a recession was back in 1953, and the time before that was 1929. Perhaps they’ll do fine this time, as Dwight Eisenhower’s Republicans did. But it seems quite plausible that the gang who are causing this mess won’t have a clue how to clean it up. We’re as likely to have Trump fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell and try to replace him with Hershel Walker or, I don’t know, Jessica Rabbit as we are to just have them implement normal Keynesian counter-cyclical policies. Not to mention that the chances of getting anything sensible through the Republican House seem slim indeed, even if Speaker Mike Johnson supported it.

(And again: Unlike most previous recessions, this one would be fully imposed by the actions of the president for no particular reason other than that he was an economic illiterate who thought he knew more than everyone else about how things worked).

Will Republicans do anything about it? Four GOP Senators broke with Trump on Wednesday to pass an anti-tariff resolution, although it won’t be brought to a vote in the House and would be vetoed if it made it to the White House. That does seem to be part of a trend that may have started a few weeks ago of Republican politicians showing a bit more resistance to Trump. Four Senate Republicans have plenty of potential clout; as Bloomberg’s Steven Dennis points out, those four could threaten to oppose the big Republican tax bill unless Trump backed off the tariffs. But we seem to be a long way from that happening.

Unfortunately, the most likely next step is pain, and plenty of it. Wish I had better news.