Tariff tantrums and MAGA’s feelings by John Kato

It began, like many of his grand experiments, with a tweet. A bold proclamation that America was getting ripped off, that tariffs would make China pay, and that trade wars were “easy to win.” Fast forward to the back end of that “easy win,” and even the red-hat faithful of Middle America were beginning to feel the sting of a self-inflicted economic paper cut, one that ran deep into soybean farms, steel towns, and truck manufacturing plants.

At first, Donald Trump’s tariff strategy seemed like classic Art of the Deal theater. Slap heavy taxes on imported goods, rattle the cages of global markets, and wait for foreign leaders to bend the knee. But it turns out the laws of economics, like the laws of physics, don’t care about campaign slogans. For every Chinese product taxed at the port, an American consumer paid more at the store. For every Chinese retaliation, an American farmer watched soy rot in storage instead of ship to Shanghai.

And so, as reality started knocking louder than the applause at a MAGA rally, something unexpected happened. President Trump, normally allergic to the word “compromise” unless it involved real estate appraisals, blinked. Or rather, squinted hard enough at the economic data to realize that his beloved base was footing the bill for a war they didn’t declare and certainly weren’t winning.

Cue the pivot: Trump, the self-styled master negotiator who once declared talking to China a waste of time, found himself... negotiating. In good faith, no less.

What followed wasn’t exactly the diplomatic poetry of Kissinger and Zhou Enlai. It was more like a clumsy tango at a county fair, half bravado, half bluster, with plenty of stomping on toes. But it was negotiation nonetheless. Meetings resumed. Tweets softened (relatively). Language shifted from threats to “productive conversations.” By mid-2020, trade talks were less about “decoupling” and more about “phased deals.”

What changed? Not Trump's instincts, those remained as transactional and volatile as ever, but the inconvenient truth that tariffs hurt America more than they hurt China, especially in counties that had gone redder than a beet at a Fourth of July picnic. For every Iowa farmer with unsold corn, there was a Michigan plant manager explaining layoffs. For every retaliatory Chinese move, there was a southern textile firm shuttering operations.

And Trump, who has always been more interested in applause than policy, began hearing boos, in the form of declining poll numbers in battleground states and increasingly loud complaints from Republican senators with ag-heavy constituencies. Turns out even populist strongmen need to get re-elected.

Now, was this shift a humble admission of flawed policy? Of course not. That would require humility. But it was, in the strange, scorched-earth logic of Trumpian politics, a kind of backdoor pragmatism. If you can’t win the trade war by bludgeon, maybe it’s time to ask for a truce. Quietly. Without admitting anything. Preferably while blaming someone else.

So Trump did what he often does when cornered: he reframed. The tariffs weren’t hurting Americans, they were “bringing China to the table.” The trade deal wasn’t a retreat, it was a “huge win.” And if the farmers were still suffering? Well, here’s a bailout, courtesy of the very taxpayer whose wallet got pinched by the policy in the first place. It was the economic equivalent of breaking a vase and then offering to sell you the glue.

But irony, like karma, has a long memory. The very heartland that cheered for economic nationalism learned firsthand that global interdependence isn’t just a liberal buzzword, it’s the scaffolding of their livelihoods. And while Trump may have flirted with decoupling from China, the reality is that America’s economy is too entangled, too enmeshed, and let’s be honest, too reliant on cheap imports to go full Cold War redux.

So, in the end, Trump negotiated. Not out of ideological evolution, but electoral necessity. Not because he saw the light, but because he saw the polling. And perhaps, just perhaps, even he realized that when your base is paying more for washing machines, whiskey, and soybeans, the “easy win” starts to look like an expensive lesson.

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In the end, the man who campaigned on building walls found himself building trade bridges—at least long enough to keep the pitchforks at bay. Who knew that the path to “America First” might require a little bit of “Deal First” after all?

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From BBC 17.05.2025
The US has lost its last perfect credit rating, as influential ratings firm Moody's expressed concern over the government's ability to pay back its debt.
In lowering the US rating from 'AAA' to 'Aa1', Moody's noted that successive US administrations had failed to reverse ballooning deficits and interest costs.