The Folly of trump's Nativism and Me-First World-View as the Trade Wars Escalate

trump is still obsessed with tariffs, even after all the economic chaos he's inflicted over the last three months.

Unhinged

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 20, 2025 at 4:07 PM

trump remains convinced tariffs are a winning move, that the "billions in revenue" getting raised by him - by the by, none of the ports were taking in tariffs because their systems are still screwed up - will fill our coffers even as Elon Musk and his DOGE minions empty them to their own pockets, and that - as always - he's the big business genius while every other financial expert/banker/CEO are screaming how tariffs won't work and are gutting their profits.

trump is still crowing how his "trade deficit" announcements are forcing nations to deal with him, even as there's every evidence that our major trading partners are about to drop very big hammers on us (hat-tip to Comrade Misfit who shared this CNBC report from Lori Ann RaCocco):

U.S. importers are being notified of an increase in canceled sailings by freight ships out of China as ocean carriers try to balance the pullback in orders resulting from President Trump’s tariffs and the escalation of tensions in the trade war.

A total of 80 blank, or canceled, sailings out of China have been recorded by freight company HLS Group. It wrote in a recent note to clients that with the trade war between China and the U.S. leading to a demand plummet, carriers have started to suspend or adjust transpacific services...

The impact of the diminished freight container traffic to North America will be significant for many links in the economy and supply chain, including the ports and logistics companies moving the freight. If each sailing was carrying 8,000 to 10,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units), that would equal a decline in freight traffic of between 640,000-800,000 containers, and lead to decreased crane operations at the ports, lower fees that could be collected, and declines in container pick-ups and transports by trucks, rails, and to warehouses for storage...

“We have no way of knowing how significant this drop in orders will be on vessel schedules,” said Alan Murphy, CEO of Sea-Intelligence. “There are no models to extrapolate this. What I can tell you is the majority of containers on the vessels servicing the Asia to U.S. trade routes is China. We won’t go to zero containers, but we will see a decrease in containers and as a result, in the future, we will see a massive raft of blank sailings announced...”

This is the first wave of a cascade effect, where the lack of shipments from China will disrupt our nation's supply chain from ports losing businesses to trucks / planes / trains / shipping companies losing money from dropped demand to deliver incoming materials across the nation. We won't see it now but in a month, maybe two months: fewer goods reaching our shelves at Wal-Mart or warehouses for Amazon. Fewer cars, and fewer car parts to manufacture here in the U.S. Fewer people working our supply chains, increasing unemployment and accelerating a growing economic recession. Among other losses to our nation's well-being.

And still trump thinks this is all glorious, that tariffs work.

I've written before why trump believes in tariffs, that he seems to think they generate revenues far greater than they really do. There are several other reasons he's obsessed: 

trump believes he's a world-class negotiator and that tariffs allow him to break and make deals to serve his whims. This is partly a vanity program; driven by pride and arrogance, blended with the stupidity and ignorance about how global economics really work (what the hell did he fail to learn at UPenn Wharton College of Business???).

trump really doesn't understand how trade deficits - which he based his blanket tariff orders a few weeks ago - work, and how little they affected our nation's economic strengths. Just because we were operating massive trade deficits with smaller (Third World) nations didn't mean those nations were defrauding the United States in any way: In a lot of cases it was because those nations didn't have enough revenues to buy things from our nation that would have meant any value to them. We traded with Madagascar for their vanilla but they had no reason to buy our soy or our motorcycles, not at the scale that would have balanced the books. And yet, the United States kept running one of the largest (based on GDP and sheer financial wealth) economies on the planet. Trade deficits didn't hurt us at all. Trade boycotts due to these tariffs, however, that will hurt...

But what's proving to be the biggest reason - other than trump's overall stupidity - is trump's Nativist / America-First world-view blinding him to how vital trade can be. trump wants to push his Narrative of "Make America Great Again" and to him that means cutting the United States off from the rest of the planet (with the exception of trump's BFFs Putin and Russia). Shutting down our foreign aid, closing off half of our State Department's foreign relations, pushing a harsh border enforcement to drive away foreign students AND tourists AND anybody else - and no lie, including penguins - all of this comes from trump's belief that America is a "superior" nation under attack by lesser mortals looking to defraud or destroy us.

It's a world-view no different than the one shared with trump's idol, the person he's admired for years. Yeah, that guy, he loved inflicting tariffs as soon as he came to power in Germany (via Timothy W. Ryback at the Atlantic (paywalled)):

Hitler had what one might call a diffident, occasionally felonious disregard for financial matters. He owed 400,000 reichsmarks in back taxes. His understanding of economics was primitive. “You have inflation only if you want it,” Hitler once said. “Inflation is a lack of discipline. I will see to it that prices remain stable. I have my S.A. for that.” (The S.A., or Brownshirts, were the original paramilitary organization associated with the Nazi Party.) Hitler held Jews responsible for most of Germany’s financial woes.

Hitler relied on Gottfried Feder, the National Socialist Party’s long-serving chief economist, to develop the specifics of an economic program. Feder had helped concoct the strange brew of socialism and fanatical nationalism in the original 25-point program of this putative “workers’ party.” In May 1932, Feder outlined what would become the first Nazi economic plan, in a 32-page position paper designed for ready implementation were Hitler to suddenly find himself in power. High on Feder’s agenda for a Hitler economy were tariffs.

“National Socialism demands that the needs of German workers no longer be supplied by Soviet slaves, Chinese coolies, and Negroes,” Feder wrote. Germany needed German workers and farmers producing German goods for German consumers. Feder saw “import restrictions” as key to returning the German economy to the Germans. “National Socialism opposes the liberal world economy, as well as the Marxist world economy,” Feder wrote. Our fellow Germans must “be protected from foreign competition...”

Any of that anti-foreigner rhetoric sound familiar?

The crash of 1929 had plunged Germany, along with much of the rest of the world, into an abyss. Markets collapsed. Factories were idled. Unemployment soared. In the early 1930s, one out of three German workers was unemployed. But Hitler had inherited a recovering economy: In December 1932, the German Institute for Economic Research reported that the crisis had been “significantly overcome”; by the time Hitler was appointed chancellor, in January 1933, the economy was on the mend.

You could say the same about Biden's economic recovery post-pandemic, which the mainstream media underplayed while obsessing over the price of eggs. trump's chaotic decision-making undid a lot of that, much like what happened in Germany:

But Hitler made no effort to reassure the markets, insisting that the tariffs were necessary and that he needed time to fix the ruined country his predecessors had left him. “Within four years the German farmer must be saved from destitution,” Hitler said in his first national radio address as chancellor. “Within four years unemployment must be completely overcome.” Hitler provided scant details as to how this was to be accomplished. By this point, he had broken even with the tariff cheerleader Feder, and had abandoned most of the action items for developing a nationalist and socialist economy. These items had included increased taxation of the wealthy; state supervision of large corporations; and the prohibition of “new department stores, low-priced shops, and chain stores.”

As chancellor, Hitler left his own plans for the German economy intentionally vague. His chief priority, as he told his ministers, was to secure an outright majority in the March 5 Reichstag elections. Hitler calculated that he needed between 18 million and 19 million votes. “There is no economic program that could meet with the approval of such a large mass of voters,” Hitler told party leaders.

But although the average voter may not have cared about the details of the Hitler economy, the markets did. The initial surge in stocks that greeted Hitler’s appointment halted then dipped and flattened amid the political and economic uncertainty of Hitler’s chaotic first weeks as chancellor...

The Hitler tariffs, announced on Friday, February 10, 1933, stunned observers. “The dimension of the tariff increases have in fact exceeded all expectations,” the Vossische Zeitung wrote disapprovingly, proclaiming the moment a “fork in the road” for the German economy. It appeared that Europe’s largest and most industrialized nation would suddenly be returning “to the furrow and the plow.” The New York Times saw this for what it was: “a trade war” against its European neighbors...

The primary targets of the Hitler tariffs—the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands—were outraged by the sudden suspension of favored-nation trading status on virtually all agricultural products, as well as on textiles, with tariffs in some cases rising 500 percent. With its livestock essentially banished from the German market, Denmark, for example, was facing substantial losses. Farmers panicked. The Danes and Swedes threatened “retaliatory measures,” as did the Dutch, who warned the Germans that the countermeasures would be felt as “palpable blows” to German industrial exports. That proved to be true.

“Our exports have shrunk significantly,” Foreign Minister Neurath informed Hitler in one cabinet meeting, “and our relations to our neighboring countries are threatening to deteriorate.” Neurath noted that informal contacts with Dutch interlocutors had been “bruskly broken off.” Trade relations with Sweden and Denmark were similarly strained, as were those with France and Yugoslavia. Finance Minister Krosigk anticipated that the agricultural sector would require an additional 100 million reichsmarks in deficit spending...

The costs of those tariffs arrived in the form of harsher sanctions and cutoffs, forcing the government to spend more than expected to aid farmers (and likely other industries). But none of that mattered to Hitler, who pushed forward on his agenda to seize authoritarian control of Germany outright, and basically building up a war machine with the armies to begin annexation and invasion of neighboring countries, triggering a world war by 1939.

If anyone else can notice the trends here - the tariffs leading to trade wars leading to military aggression and straight-up wars of blood and carnage - you can see where trump is taking the United States. We're not going back to some glorious isolationist nativist homeland that never existed outside of the fevered fantasies of a white patriarchal class: We're turning ourselves into a pariah state no different than Iran or North Korea, and about to escalate matters with our neighboring trade partners in Mexico and Canada with our unjustified version of an Anschluss. 

"This is NOT going to end well" is a fcking understatement tonight.