How To Lose a Trade War

Last Tuesday, President Donald Trump claimed success for his tactic of “we heard you like tariffs so we put a tariff on your tariff.” China was at the negotiating table, he announced. Tariffs would come down; the Chinese were ready to make a deal. Then the Financial Times quoted Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun saying, “There have been no consultations or negotiations between China and the United States regarding tariffs, let alone an agreement.”  

This weekend, while Trump Treasury Secretary and remora Scott Bessent tried to snow ABC’s Martha Raddatz with the prospect not of trade deals but of “sub-deals” — presumably before we discuss the concept of an idea of penumbras of deals — the port in Seattle stood virtually empty.

The administration claims there are new developments every day, because they can’t admit that nothing is happening. In a world where we get our China news six weeks late via the packet from the East India Company, this might work. But unfortunately, they have the internet over there. Listening to the Trump team talk about a trembling People’s Republic on the verge of breaking against his iron will and expert dealmaking is like watching an episode of “The Office” where Michael Scott raves about how beloved he is by someone, and then the camera cuts to them saying, “I have no idea who Michael Scott is.”

This tendency toward Sino-fact phobia runs deep in America. If you ask the average American how many people there are in China, they’ll tell you a billion. As Tom Scocca points out in a fun riff in his book,  “Beijing Welcomes You,” the difference between that number and the real one is 400 million — a number greater than the population of the United States. Overconfidence doesn’t begin to describe the economic-conflict strategy of trying to bully a nation that makes all your stuff and for whom your entire population is a rounding error of their own.

Maybe “these people can’t even count” is a shallow measure for criticizing Trump’s trade war. But contrary to every economic pronouncement from this administration, it has the virtue of being an actual measurement. 

Trump’s tariff proposition boils down to this: Vastly increasing prices and triggering an inflationary spiral in America will bring China to its knees, and the economic effects of cranking the emergency brake and throwing the engine in reverse while at freeway cruising speed will somehow result in America’s reducing the five-year process of constructing its own commensurate domestic industrial capacity to “overnight.” This is an attempt at coercion akin to threatening to kill someone by holding a revolver to your own head and dry firing it while asking, “Had enough yet?” A more charitable analogy might be asking the prom queen out on a date, getting shot down and telling her, “But you’re going to get leprosy, and I’m going to become a billionaire. Ready to change your mind?” What this strategy lacks in practical macroeconomic policy sense is made up for in its utility in explaining MAGA’s success with young men who look like founding members of the Future School Shooters of America.

It would be funny that Trump’s only big idea is to threaten to shoot the hostages if we weren’t all the hostages. But this is par for the course with this administration. Unless it can be done by fiat, it can’t be done, and all the rest is displaced suicidal ideation. We are, for instance, going to get rid of the toxic, profiteering falsehoods in American health care by introducing more toxins into everyone’s environment, installing shameless liars like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Jay Bhattacharya at the top of the health pyramid and replacing safe, effective, inexpensive vaccines with hospitalizations and a lifetime of medical expenses treating the aftereffects of preventable diseases. Look here, Pfizer, we’re going to pay you more money for us to die. Or else. 

This stuff doesn’t even work on the smaller kids on the playground. Trump demanded that Ukraine forfeit mineral rights in exchange for no security guarantee, with the suggestion that it would be on the hook for paying back more for aid than they had received. Mere minutes from the signing table, he sweetened the deal for President Volodymyr Zelenskyy: What if we verbally abused you on camera so much that literally everyone else in the world — a place you can also buy arms — applauded you for walking out? You can take the disgracefully exploitive deal, or else you can take the excuse that our attempts at humiliation leave you no choice but to walk away, into the munitions showrooms of our allies and into an arrangement where they expand your own defense industry. (Trump’s only further argument for Ukraine was the suggestion that only he could control Vladimir Putin, which is working out as well as anyone expected.)

If you find the idea of members of this administration practicing self-harm appealing, there are more nuggets of hope and morbid satisfaction lying around than you think. Their case for unfettered executive power is radicalizing veterans and the bureaucracy against them. Their case for immigration crackdowns is so vile that their polling on the subject is underwater, and their best claim for a massive expansion of the ICE budget is broadly alienating the electorate by destroying the constitution to traffic cosmeticians to places the Lonely Planet guide lists as “a hidden gem for crimes against humanity.” Their strategy for winning in the courts is extorting their most competent lawyers until they quit, replacing them with people who accidentally file proprietary documents, publicly confessing to motivations their attorneys are desperately trying to disclaim and making assertions so ludicrously false that they can’t even document their own claims in court without committing perjury.

As Napoleon put it, when your opponent is doing a Drano kegstand, shout “chug.” The only problem is that we’re part of the same body politic being flooded with lye and bleach. “If you don’t let me lose, I’m going to kill myself” is a masterful argument, and when a master is at work, the only thing to do is admire their craft. But we have to figure out how to get out of the way until the performance is done. Maybe it’s time to take a tip from our corrupt Supreme Court and ask ourselves what the founders of this great nation would do in a similar circumstance. And the answer to that is “smuggling.” It’s time for Amazon owner Jeff Bezos to tear his gaze away from witnessing Trump trying to hand a privatized space monopoly to his direct competitor Elon Musk and turn it toward the empire he built shipping cheap Chinese goods to everyone in America. He has got the expected inventories, the shipping infrastructure and the home addresses in his hands. More importantly, to paraphrase a cliched internet joke: If we can just get him to put two and two together, he has the chance to do the funniest thing right now.