Donald Trump should take the win, but he probably won’t.
The markets rallied when investors thought the court ruling against Trump’s tariffs would finally end the trade drama roiling the economy.
But the president has vowed to fight on, and was able to get the tariffs turned back on while his appeal is heard.
This is only a temporary setback, he says, a bump in the road to Damascus that will convince tariff apostates like your friendly columnist to accept the savior, and embrace the miracle of a new era of 1960s-style manufacturing returning to Middle America.
Full disclosure: I want Donald Trump to succeed. It’s just that he could have achieved much of what he’s doing now and not throw the US economy and his presidency into a potential existential crisis.
Again, I say this as someone who sees a lot of merit in Trump’s vision for the future of the country. The vast majority of his vision will save this country from the anarchy of the left that was unleashed under Joe Biden, whether or not he was sentiment enough to notice in his waking hours.
Trump’s continued pressure on higher education to educate rather than indoctrinate with taxpayer money should qualify him for Mount Rushmore, IMHO.
Ditto for closing the border because we still have a welfare state, and you can’t have one with open borders. DOGE was great and necessary even if it saves a fraction of what is promised.
DEI must have been invented by our adversaries like the Chinese, given how it warps the American meritocracy and Trump rightly is hell bent to end it.
And yet trade — namely a stultifying trade war — could short circuit all of the above, yet be totally avoided with a defter policy hand as opposed to all-out war with everyone, maybe by isolating our true adversary in Communist China.
Tariff trauma is real and it’s growing, and it could be immediate as in later in the summer, when retailers discover they can’t eat the tariff costs, and that Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary, is applying band-aids in the form of tariff frameworks with various trading partners.
None of those deals will negate the fact that there still will be higher tariffs on goods consumed not by rich people, but average Americans.
If Trump’s tariff plans work, more automated factory jobs, not those millions of widget manufacturers promised by Howard Lutnick, might return in a few years to some town near you. But inflation — a tax on the working class — would be just around the corner.
That’s why Trump should take the win, allow this obscure, but important trade court — the International Court of Trade — have its day in the sun and move on with more pressing matters, like deregulation and drilling, which has created more jobs than those shirt factories lost to China.
The word I’m hearing from Wall Street is he won’t. There are other ways to get around the court ruling and impose tariffs, and Trump has shown no desire to back down. Buckle up.
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