Trump’s Tariff-Extortion No-Brainer

Whichever way one looks at the wholesale and the blanket imposition of tariffs on imported goods and commodities by President Donald “Executive Order” John Trump, during the very first month of the second nonconsecutive tenure of the self-styled New York City Real-Estate Developer, the outcome of the print-negatives of the outcome of the pictures does not look even nearly a quarter as good as what these tariffs were supposed to achieve or represent. In an article published in Fortune Magazine some 8 months ago, titled “Nobel Economist Warns a Dearth of Blue-Collar Jobs Is Among the Biggest Threats to the US Economy - And They Fell by More Than 100,000 Last Year” Fortune 2/20/26), the writer, Sasha Rogelberg quotes renowned Nobel Economics Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, of New York City’s Columbia University, as noting with utter chagrin that Mr. Trump’s massive sheaves of tariffs that were indiscriminately imposed on the Global Market and Community of Sovereign Nations, and meant to render the American Manufacturing Industry more competitive and robust, has not had the desired effect.

And the simple reason for the foregoing state of affairs is the age-old commonsensical fact that one cannot facilely tax one way out of self-made economic distress by the kind of blatant and reckless Statutory Extortion imposed by Mr. Trump and his so-called ragtag regime of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) lumpen-poor and the working-class averse right-wing kleptocrats of the US Republican Party. On the latter count, one could also add, noetically, into commercial competitiveness and/or viability.

Now, what this author understands the foregoing observation to mean or imply is that to become healthily competitive on the Global Market and Community, the government of any industrially advanced and scientifically methodical nation, such as the United States of America presumes itself to be, needs to put in place such critical incentives as low taxation policies as ones that encourage a level playing field, rather than sort of “Gunboat Venezuelan Approach” of veritable Economic Terrorism that flagrantly and inadvisably seeks to stall the logical and the morally and the commercially justified advancement of countries deemed by the subject nation - that is, the United States - with the jejune and the pathologically infantile hope and the warped strategic objective of playing socioeconomic catch-up with one’s more industrially disciplined and fiscally competent rivals and adversaries.

This is pretty much what the primitivistic Trumpian MAGA regime’s so-called Agenda-2025 Ananse/Brer Rabbit-inspired strategy has been doing and has been about thus far. For example, according to Professor Stiglitz, the imposition of heavy-handed taxation on what the globally renowned and respected macroeconomics maven and former Chief Economist at the World Bank terms as “Intermediate Good,” such as iron and steel and agricultural raw materials like cocoa beans, timber and coffee, which are direly needed to produce finished good and other high-end products such as furniture and a plethora of an assortment of edibles, including but not limited to chocolate and other consumable beverages, that are not readily available right here in the United States, for climatic and geographical factors, or are simply not produced in adequate quantities, has meant that the general cost of the production of such raw material into factory-finished goods or products would be sold or marketed both locally and globally at prohibitive prices.

In short, this elementary fact and knowledge about the International and/or the Global Division of Labor appears to have woefully eluded a morbidly imperious and a self-absorbed MAGA Apostolate to such a damnable extent that the Trump-imposed tariffs have virtually and effectively become veritably and inescapably suicidal in ways that appear not to have been anticipated by a parochially minded and a hermetically insulated political Ultra-Ring-Wingers such as those that constitute the topmost echelon operatives of the US Republican Party or the so-called Grand, Old Party (GOP).

The sum total effect of such avoidable bastardization of progressive economic policies, Professor Stiglitz seems to be saying, is what has criminally resulted in an otherwise highly unlikely exponential drop in the rate and the number of blue-collar jobs created in the wake of the rabidly impetuous imposition of the Trumpian tariffs. For, as an inescapable cost-cutting measure, factory and corporate managers have had to drastically reduce the astronomical cost of labor by laying off hundreds and thousands of blue-collar workers. The implementation of the latter policy response has resulted in the rightly perceived callous betrayal of Working-Class Americans by a President and a Government that vigorously campaigned for power on the pretext of making life far more livable and comfortable for middle- and lower-class Americans.

Increasingly, the overwhelming majority of America’s Middle- and Working-Class Citizens have come to envisage the national development agenda of the Trump-chaperoned Republican Party as the proverbial Hangman. Ironically but not wholly unexpectedly, such Darwinian economic policies as religiously pursued by the Trump Administration seem to have been implemented almost wholly as an extortionate means of ensuring a bountiful financial bonanza for the country’s billionaires and trillionaires. Consequently, the nation’s political axis and pendulum have swung from a people-centered Social Democratic Angle to one of Fascist Plutocracy. Professor Stiglitz did not use the exact words as the preceding, but it can also not be objectively gainsaid that he did not half imply the same.