Make the Depression Great Again

The “day of liberation” is upon us. What's behind our would-be king's attempt at destroying the global economy?

You may well have woken up this morning, taken a look at your 401(k), and crawled back under the covers, wondering to yourself, “Why exactly does the Trump regime seem bent on crashing the world economy? Why would the richest country in history just throw it all away?”

We’ve been wondering the same, and after a morning of widespread confusion as financial analysts struggled to make sense of it all and just plain gave up, the explanations are starting to come together. So we’ll walk you through it. Below you’ll find

• What’s on the table, and why the calculations behind the tariffs should make anyone who struggled with Econ 101 blush — and should put us all on notice

• Why economists and America’s international partners are flummoxed — and why that misses the point

• What happened when the U.S. tried this before (Spoiler alert: It involved Herbert Hoover)

• What the relentless spin from the Cabinet’s billionaires obscures — and why

• How Senator Chris Murphy hits the nail on the head: It’s not a defense of the economy. It’s an attack on democracy

• And what Americans need to demand now — before it’s too late.

Follow along as we explain.

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On Wednesday afternoon, Trump took to the Rose Garden to announce his long-awaited global tariff program — the new, wall-to-wall levies the U.S. is going to charge on anything imported into the country. Payable, of course, by the Americans doing the importing, not the countries doing the exporting. The idea is to stop imports, so that Americans will turn to domestic goods instead, since they’ll be cheaper. Tariffs are an idea that can make some sense if you’re targeting some specific industry, say microchips or steel, that faces actual unfair international competition or is critical to national security. But that’s not what this is.

The supposed “Day of Liberation” is a doozy, executed with a blunderbuss rather than a scalpel, imposing a base levy of 10 percent on nearly every country in the world, including hypothetical trade partners like Svalbard’s polar bears and Heard and McDonald Islands’ penguins, and rates of up to 54 percent on major trade partners-cum-supposed adversaries like China. That’s a giant shift in the balance of international trade, outstripping even the protectionist tariffs of a century ago.