Trump's lust for power cannot be satiated

It is a fool’s errand to try to rationalize President Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs.

This is not to say that people haven’t tried. There are any number of theories that seek to explain Trump’s preoccupation with tariffs and trade wars. Perhaps he wants to revitalize American manufacturing and bring factory jobs back to postindustrial communities wracked by poverty and despair. Perhaps he wants the revenue he generates from large tariffs to reduce deficits and help address the nation’s long-term debt. Or perhaps he hopes to rebalance the global economic system, weakening the dollar in order to make the United States a more export-driven economy.

But each line of thinking shares an obvious problem: How does one accomplish any of these goals with blanket tariffs that threaten to radically reduce trade with the US? How do you revitalize American manufacturing if manufacturers can’t reasonably import the materials they need to build factories and produce goods? Where is capital supposed to come from? How do you reset the nation’s relationship with its trading partners if those partners are forced to treat you as a bad actor who can’t be trusted? And how are you supposed to revitalize working-class communities if your trade policies will probably destroy as many blue-collar jobs as they might, theoretically, create?

There is a hypothetical President with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual President cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the President’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.

The fundamental truth of Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams, and hostile litigation is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

This simple fact of the President’s psychology does more to explain his antipathy to international trade and enthusiasm for tariffs and other trade barriers than any theorizing about his intentions or overall vision. It certainly is not as if he has a considered view of the global economy. It is not even clear that Trump knows what a tariff is.

This isn’t a dig. The President genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the US. “We have massive financial deficits with China, the European Union, and many others,” he wrote on his Truth Social website Sunday. “The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing tens of billions of dollars into the US.” Here, you also see his related belief that a trade deficit represents an actual absence of funds, akin to a negative balance in a bank account.

“I spoke to a lot of leaders  European, Asian  from all over the world. They’re dying to make a deal, but I said, We’re not gonna have deficits with your country,” the President told reporters on board Air Force One over the weekend.

Of course, a trade deficit is not a loss any more than it is a loss when you, as a consumer, spend your hard-earned cash at a restaurant or a movie theatre or a grocery store. When American businesses buy raw materials from foreign countries to make their own products  when they buy finished products and sell them on their shelves — they aren’t incurring a loss. They are exchanging currency for something of value, which they will go on to use or sell for a profit. As a statement of economic policy, Trump’s pronouncement makes no sense. But as an expression of his zero-sum instinct  of his desire to dominate  it is perfectly coherent.

Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration. His obsession with territorial conquest  seen in his effort to coerce the Canadian government into relinquishing its sovereignty as well as his calls for both the acquisition of Greenland and the Panama Canal  is an obvious product of his predatory approach to human interaction. On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the President had floated the illegal and unconstitutional idea to send incarcerated American citizens to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador. His authoritarian attempts to cow and coerce key institutions of civil society into compliance with his agenda and obedience to his will are, likewise, a kind of dominance game.

Viewed in light of the President’s psychological need to dominate, it is almost certainly true that his flagrant abuse of the rights of migrants, asylum-seekers and foreign-born students in the US — snatching them off the streets to be imprisoned or, worse, sending them to an unaccountable foreign prison with no practical legal recourse — is just the beginning. In the same way that there was nothing that could stop Trump from imposing a tariff regime that, in his mind, humiliates America’s rivals, there is nothing that can dissuade him from using the coercive power of the state to dominate those he disfavors at home.

Trump is a winner, and he’ll show it by making all of us the losers.

The New York Times