Liberated or Ta-ripped off?

Liberation Day passed and all I got was this lousy $45 made-in-America t-shirt, which frayed on its first clean in my South Korea-manufactured washing machine, a stray thread catching under the agitator, wrenching the post and short-circuiting the entire appliance. Now a new washer costs $1,200 thanks to tariffs slapped on appliance-producing countries. Guess my kids better get used to wearing dingy, soiled outfits, lest they want to master the old art of the rubbing board. But they can take heart, as their little hands are rubbed raw and bloody scrubbing grass stains out of their jumpers, knowing that Uncle Sam is no longer a sucker.

Funny: I don’t feel particularly liberated. But as my washing machine was sputtering loudly to a break, I got the romantic urge to start chanting “USA! USA! USA!”

My fellow Americans are, to a paunchy man, not enthused about Liberation Day fallout, especially if they happen to conduct a semi-annual check on their 401(k) performance. Two days after Trump penned in place his tariff regime, Wall Street blew its top. The picture painted by business commentators was a cartoon cash register angrily firing out its drawer, sending wads of cash into the ether. Traders punished the President by kneecapping the Dow Jones, choke-slamming the S&P 500, and force-feeding the Nasdaq Composite a pear of anguish. According to the integer-eyed observers at Reuters, stocks haven’t felt so bruised and battered since the onset of Covid lockdowns. Thousands of “points” were lost between the indices, and $5 trillion in “value” was wiped—which sounds pretty grim! What a “trillion” bucks means in market valuation, and what “valuation” is in tangible terms, however, you’ll need some coke-addled banker bro to explain because those words come across as an abstract Galaga score. Financial charts resembling Atari 2600 graphics fail to draw a practical through line from how market swings affect cracking your monthly nut.

That Trump is effectively giving the counting-house class his bronzed middle digit should, in theory, excite Democrats. At last! After Obama refrained from prosecuting firms that dumped subprime mortgage-backed securities, inciting a global recession, and Joe Biden presided over record ka-ching gains, shouldn’t the Occupy crowd be giddy that the President is purposefully tanking the market? Bernie Sanders should be shedding tears of material dialectic joy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is supposed to be Instagram living with wide-eyed, effusive praise. The Democratic Socialists of America must be happily ripping rose petals outside the White House’s North Gate. Whenever the NYSE’s closing bell is rung down, a Marxist gets his wings.

But poor Karl, were he alive today, would see his entire worldview overruled by a unique phenomenon: incorrigible Trump Derangement Syndrome. Senator Sanders is slagging Trump’s tariffs as a “sales tax on imported goods”—a revolutionist’s black execution of plain language, as Sanders knows well he’s providing an odd tautological definition of tariffs. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has inveighed against Trump’s punitive price hikes since January, explaining to her economically vacuous followers that “*WE* pay the tariffs,” and not the targeted country. One wonders if she thinks CEOs shoulder the corporate-tax hike she’s always cawing about, or if those too are passed down to us plebs.

The Left is competing in Olympic-level rhetorical contortions in flailing to traduce Trump over his intervention into global commerce. To be sure, the President pulling the markets by their short hairs is no nugatory tinker. This is a real changing of the guard. The spectre of uncertainty haunts the banks of America. Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis likened it to the Nixon Shock, which scratched the dollar’s convertibility to gold. Worse, it’s all seemingly based on a demented whim, if we take Trump’s instinctual core in the most ungenerous light. Ed West analogizes it to puerile jealousy: making ourselves poorer to punish everyone else who feeds on our fat wallets. We may have all to put off our retirement by five more years, but at least those dastardly penguins of Heard and McDonald Islands won’t be able to rip us off anymore. The tariff on their eggs just went ten points higher!

Maybe it would be salutatory to drop easy cynicism for a second, and give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps this is his Bristol speech moment, and his deliberate yanking away of Wall Street’s opium pipe is being done for the “general good” over “local prejudices.” Or it could be the equivalent of the Volcker vault, a conscious raising of interest rate to crush inflation and spring forth sustainable growth. “I don’t want anything to go down, but sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something,” Trump lectured a media scrum, which, in turn, triggered every American’s inner toddler to tantrum, pounding the ground, bicycle kicking in the air. Tucker Carlson was right: Daddy is home. And there will be no more chocolate ice cream for dinner.

Or, if we were to lend the President our imagination, and to see through his sunken eyes to picture our nation’s glorious rebirth. At a nondescript time in the far offing, the United States will have reshored and reborn its majestic manufacturing base, where, from sea to shining sea, smoke towers and mills will dot our great land, cresting our bountiful hills, shadowing the Great Plains, revitalizing our urban cores. The rust of Midwest factories will be wiped clean, renewed in a burst of industry. Dying towns will be brimming with vitality, producing cutting-edge whatits, doodads, zigamarigs, gizmogings, and shiny bright portals into an endless scroll of dopamine activators. Saxon steel and iron will return to our hands, and an endless summer to our great court!

All right, enough flights of fancy. Whatever mercantilist land of milk and honey Trump is pushing upon us won’t come without a good bout of misery first. Economies can’t change on a dime. Entire supply chains, warehouses, divisions of labor, and intermodal shipping arrangements constructed for specific purposes over the course of decades can’t morph like putty into a new industrial paradigm. Consequential ideas don’t come gratis. A price must be paid, either today, or out of the pockets of tomorrow’s generation. So Eden, and so JPMorgan Chase, must sink to grief. Nothing Goldman Sachs can stay.

But let your heart not be troubled! For if you find your golden years delayed a few more fiscal years so your retirement fund can actually cover that two-bedroom condo in The Villages, there is still hope for low-stress employment. Apple will soon be paying out a steady wage to anyone willing to twist tiny screws into iPhones, in mass factories that will be everywhere from Burlington to Tallahassee to Santa Fe to Missoula to San Diego. Our glorious future awaits just over the red horizon! As for the flashing, tremulous zigzag that cumulates the force of our capitalist system, well, look out below!

Update: It appears the President has managed a fine bit of legerdemainic brinkmanship. We’ve been liberated within the week! Uncle Sam is fully rehabilitated, returned to his old yeoman self. Now quit your crummy laptop job and hustle off to your local steel mill, which popped up last Thursday, and get to work!