Tariff Wars: Mr Trump will be a loser

Very rarely, ‘tariff’ is used as a verb, but such use is now more common thanks to President Donald Trump. He has ‘tariffed’ most countries of the world including two islands — Heard and McDonald — where the only living creatures are penguins, and the penguins export nothing to the United States.  

Mr Trump believes that stiff tariffs on goods imported into the U.S. will ‘Make America Great Again’ (MAGA). On April 2, 2025 he unveiled a table of tariffs. As the table unravelled, it became clear that the ‘calculation’ of tariffs was based on a simple formula that was adopted to make sense to simpletons. The tariff for a target country was one-half of the trade deficit with the target country divided by the value of the goods exported to the U.S. by the target country.

In 2024, it was Republican red in the vast swathe of America between the two coasts minus four states. The 2024 American presidential election was reduced to one question: who will win the seven swing states or most of them? Mr Trump won all the seven states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, and took their 93 electoral votes. Mr Trump’s constituency is the seven swing states. They share common characteristics: deindustrialized, high unemployment, and political discourse around issues like inflation, immigration and white male industrial workers’ preferences. Since Mr Trump won all the seven states he believes that the issues that concern the seven states are the issues that concern the United States and he is obliged to address those issues.

Trump believes that stiff tariffs will ‘Make America Great Again'

In the 80 years since the end of the Second World War, the world has greatly benefited by the free movement of labour, goods and services, and the greatest beneficiary-country is the United States. It is the wealthiest, mightiest, most innovative country in the world. It has among the best companies, best universities, best laboratories and best athletes of the world. The U.S. dollar is universally accepted and is the world’s reserve currency. The U.S. green card and the U.S. passport are the most coveted documents. Most countries, including China and India, invest significant portions of their foreign exchange holdings in U.S. bonds making the U.S. the only country in the world that does not worry about the fiscal deficit.

Unfortunately, the only people who apparently believe that all these ‘superlatives’ have brought no benefit to their lives are the voters of the seven states. Mr Trump is loyal to them than to facts.