Chapter 38: Truth and Tariffs

How Trump Unleashed Chaos and Called It Strategy

Since announcing his unprecedented tariffs on April 2, Donald Trump has endowed chaos with a whole new dimension. As is well known, Trump delights in calling people names. One of his favorites is “radical left Marxist.”¹ He believes universities are run by “Marxist maniacs and lunatics.”² However, the truth about Trump is that he has not studied his Marx with sufficient care. If he had, he would have come across this observation: “Ignorance has never yet helped anybody.”³

The world now knows that Trump is staggeringly ignorant about international trade in general and about tariffs specifically. Volumes will be written about his disastrous tariff policy. One observation which will be included in those volumes has already been supplied by Professor Brent Neiman of the University of Chicago. Here is what he wrote on April 7:

“My first question, when the White House unveiled its tariff regime, was: How on earth did it calculate such huge rates? . . . The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative released its methodology  and cited an academic paper produced by four economists, including me, seemingly in support of its numbers. But it got it wrong. Very wrong. . . . I would strongly prefer that the policy and methodology be scrapped entirely. But barring that, the administration should divide its results by four.”⁴

Is Trump capable of dividing by four?

On April 7, Trump said from the White House that “we’re not looking at” a tariff pause. “We’re not looking at that.” “Be Strong, Courageous, and Patient, and GREATNESS will be the result!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Presidents have changed their minds before. But never has a president flip-flopped with such startling speed. On April 8, here is what Trump said to the National Republican Campaign Committee: “I do think that the war with the world, which is not a war at all because they’re all coming here. Japan is coming here as we speak. They’re in a plane flying, lots of them. All tough negotiators . . . .” Trump later said that “countries are calling him up and ‘kissing my a**’ to try and make a trade deal. ‘They are dying to make a deal.’” Trump was essentially saying that foreign leaders were “groveling to avoid the tariffs: ‘Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir.’”⁵

April 9 was a dramatic day. The stock market was in freefall. The bond market was threatened as was the dollar. At 9:37 a.m., Trump posted on Truth Social: “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!! DJT”⁶

Trump, wrong about so many things, was right about this. Repeatedly he denied he was considering changing his tariff policy.

Meanwhile, trillions of dollars in equities were being destroyed.

Then, suddenly, at 1:18 in the afternoon of April 9, Trump announced that his tariffs would be “paused” with the exception of the tariff on China which would be doubled.⁷ The stock market skyrocketed on the basis of this news. What will happen in the week of April 14th is a perfect mystery.

What was Trump’s explanation for his dramatic retreat from the April 2 announcement of draconian tariffs? “Well I thought that people were getting a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know. They were getting a little bit yippy. A little bit afraid.” He then said, “Somebody had to do what we did.”⁸

Immediately after this shocking retreat, Trump’s administration attempted to sell this as a strategy.⁹ Such a claim makes Trump’s catastrophic unpredictability even more unforgivable.

From April 2, when Trump announced his ill-thought-out assault on the world trading system with his steep tariffs, to April 9, when he retreated from this disastrous position, the United States stock market experienced what may be the most acute volatility in a brief time in its history. As of this writing, stocks seem to have recovered from the worst of their precipitous decline. However, no one knows what may happen tomorrow, next week, or next month. The stock market is always unpredictable but not this unpredictable.

What about the bond market? The news is not good. “Investors are dumping once-reliable US government bonds, sparking fears that major banks and traders are losing faith in America as a safe place to store their money.”¹⁰

Recall that Trump declared that somebody had to do what he did. That is not true. There is no reason at all to have done what he did. In the words of David Autor, Professor of Economics at MIT, “It’s one of the largest own-goals in diplomacy and economics and trade that I think we’ve ever done.”¹¹ (An “own-goal,” is defined as accidentally scoring a goal for the competition.)

If this ridiculous tariff escapade was a disaster and if it was as completely unnecessary as it obviously was, why did Trump do this? Who knows? He enjoys dominating the headlines, which he certainly does. It is possible that he simply does not care what happens to the country as long as he and his friends enrich themselves. It is also possible that Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman is right in asserting that Trump is, quite simply, stupid. Also erratic and weak.¹²

Has anything like the bumbling idiocy of the Trump tariff taken place in American history? Has any other administration failed so completely with regard to the management of trade and of the public finances? The Smoot-Hawley tariff signed into law in 1930 by Herbert Hoover was an error. A letter signed by more than a thousand economists urged him to veto this law.¹³ This tariff is usually viewed as prolonging the great depression, although the rates were not as high as those proposed by Trump.

There is an intriguing similarity between the Trump fiasco and the administration of Liz Truss in the United Kingdom. She became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on September 6, 2022. She proposed a budget which was as ill advised as the Trump tariff. On October 25, 2022, she was forced from office. It was her 45th day as Prime Minister, marking her tenure as the shortest in the history of the United Kingdom. “Since Truss’s resignation, the U.K. has suffered permanently higher bond yields and higher debt-servicing costs than its European peers. At the same time, interest rates on household mortgages have remained painfully high—a phenomenon dubbed the ‘moron premium’. . . .”¹⁴

The Truss story is a dramatic illustration of the superiority of the British Constitution to the American. Neither Truss nor Trump have any business running a country. However, the British could rid themselves of Truss when her incompetence became undeniable. We are stuck with Trump until 2029 and perhaps for longer than that.

The Trump administration is conducting a war against science and truth. Such a war is often waged in totalitarian countries, but it has not been common in America’s history. Here is one example:

“The Trump administration has canceled funding for an ongoing 30-year, nationwide study tracking patients with prediabetes and diabetes, researchers said, at a time when top officials have emphasized their determination to curb the incidence of such chronic conditions.

“Investigators working on the landmark Diabetes Prevention Program found out last week that the National Institutes of Health has halted funding for the project. While they have not yet received confirmation from the agency on why the grant has been canceled, the decision appears likely related to the Trump administration’s cancellation of federal grants to Columbia University on the grounds that it had failed to adequately address antisemitism on campus.”¹⁵

This brings us back to a topic touched upon in the previous Chapter in this Substack dealing with Trump’s assault on America’s research universities. Like his ham-fisted tariff regime, this is a battle that did not need to be fought. Trump either does not know, or more likely he does not care, about the contribution that America’s universities make to the nation and the world.

Why, then, has Trump gone to war against American universities? On April 14, he was quoted as casually saying, “What if we never pay them? Wouldn’t that be cool?”¹⁶ The reason he has offered for destroying the capability of America’s research universities to create new knowledge is the claim that these universities are dens of antisemitism. As noted in the previous Chapter, the problem with the letter that Alan Garber, President of Harvard, wrote to members of the Harvard community is that it seems to take Trump’s charge about the university’s complicity in antisemitism at face value. But it is obviously a pretext, and a particularly unworthy pretext at that.¹⁷

At 1:07 p.m. on Monday, April 14, President Garber issued a more powerful letter which members of the Harvard community can applaud. He wrote that “the intention [of the Trump administration] is not to work with us to address antisemitism in a cooperative and constructive manner,” but rather to institute “direct governmental regulation of the ‘intellectual conditions’ at Harvard . . . . The University will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights.”¹⁸

Trump’s problem with the leading universities in America is that, with all their many faults, they strive to seek the truth. It is not an accident that Harvard, the nation’s oldest university founded in 1636, has as its motto Veritas. Truth.

Trump, in stark contrast, is about lies. In the words of Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an historian who is an expert on totalitarianism:

“[W]ho would Trump be without his lies? . . . [A]s autocrats consolidate power, they become more dependent on their lies. And that is why they go after journalists, they go after critics in the academy, the same groups over and over again.”¹⁹

It should also be said that the universities have not done a sufficiently good job in presenting themselves to the nation. They have not made clear what they stand for and what they will not stand for. Some have been more effective in this regard than others. Michael Roth, President of Wesleyan, and Christopher Eisgruber, President of Princeton, belong in this category.²⁰ With Alan Garber’s most recent letter, he and Harvard have moved into this category as well. University Presidents are coming to understand that Trump cannot be accommodated. He must be opposed.

University presidents are faced with a difficult choice: Either, 1. To manage the conflicts with the Trump administration with the focus solely on the best interest of their institution; or, 2. To place their institution in a broad leadership role in dealing with the governmental challenges facing the nation.

The temptation to choose the first option above is powerful. In these times, preserving the university intact will prove difficult enough. On the other hand, if people in prominent positions don’t play a role in dealing with the political crisis the United States is facing right now, who will? Moreover, it is at least possible that thinking exclusively of the good of the institution and not more broadly of the survival of democracy and the rule of law in the United States might eventually mean losing both.

The story of Martin Heidegger should be required reading in all American universities today. Heidegger, an influential philosopher, became Rector of the University of Freiburg in Germany on April 21, 1933. He became a member of the Nazi Party “amid a blaze of publicity” on May 1. “Joining in the widespread and rapidly growing Hitler cult, Heidegger told students: ‘The Fūhrer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law. Study to know: from now on, all things demand decision, and all action responsibility. Hail [Heil] Hitler.”²¹ Note the statement that Hitler alone is the “German reality . . . and its law.” Heidegger did not think in these terms, but he was describing “prerogative law.” This is a version of law determined by the will and the whim of a dictator. “Normative law” is the legal regime that decent people want to live under.

The University of Freiburg, founded in 1457 and the fifth oldest university in Germany, survived the Nazi period and World War II. But at what cost?

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We will conclude with an episode from British history.

A noteworthy event took place in the House of Commons on September 2, 1939. Germany had invaded Poland the previous day, and it was not certain that England was going to declare war on Germany as it was obligated by treaty to do. 

On September 2, 1939, acting for the leader of the Labor Party, Clement Attlee who was in the hospital for prostate surgery, Arthur Greenwood was called to respond to Neville Chamberlain's ambivalent speech on whether Britain would aid Poland. He began by saying, “I am speaking under very difficult circumstances, with no opportunity to think about what I should say, and I speak what is in my heart at this moment.” Leo Amery, a Conservative backbencher and former First Lord of the Admiralty, was “apoplectic” at the idea that Greenwood would speak for Labor or for himself. He “dreaded [the possibility of] a purely partisan speech.”   Amery electrified the chamber when he exclaimed loud and clear: "Speak for England, Arthur!"  This “outburst stunned the House.”²²

Why recount this incident now? Because it is an example of the need to look beyond one’s institutional home (in this case the Labor Party) to the welfare of the nation as a whole.

Leo Amery, circa 1917. Source

In his immortal “Their Finest Hour” speech on June 18, 1940, Winston Churchill said, “If we can stand up to him [Hitler], all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age. . .”²³

Is it melodramatic to quote these words now? I hope it is. But I fear it is not. The stakes right now for the United States could not be higher.

1. For one example: https://www.rev.com/transcripts/trump-rally-in-wisconsin

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-pressure-universities.html

3. https://us.politsturm.com/marx-on-false-agitators-or-ignorance-has-never-yet-helped-anybody

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/trump-tariff-math-formula.html

5. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-presidency-administration-news-tariffs-04-08-25/index.html

6. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/09/trumps-morning-buy- call-nets-huge-returns-for-those-who-listened.html

7. https://nypost.com/2025/04/09/us-news/trump-pauses-tariff-hikes-for-90-days-against-most-countries-hikes-china-rate-to-125/

8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RanRrnc4gEk

9. https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-tariffs-cnn-town-hall-04-09-25#cm9a8guqv000s3b6q12fhjefm

10. https://www.france24.com/en/business/20250412-investors-dump-us-government-bonds-faith-america-falters-tariffs-trump

11. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/12/us/politics/bessent-trump-treasury-tariffs.html?searchResultPosition=2

12. https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-is-stupid-erratic-and-weak

13. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Smoot-Hawley-Tariff-Act

14. https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/archive/2025/04/trump-truss-moron-premium/682421/

15. https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/17/trump-cuts-columbia-university-nih-cancels-diabetes-prevention-program-study/

16. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/politics/trump-pressure-universities.html

17. https://snyder.substack.com/p/fomenting-antisemitism?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=40qjkx&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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19. https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/ruth-ben-ghiat-on-rising-authoritarianism/

20. https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/a-university-president-makes-a-case-against-cowardice; Christopher L. Eisgruber, “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2025

21. 1. The literature on Heidegger and Nazism is vast. It should not be. The story is straightforward and ugly. For the most accessible treatment, see Richard J Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003) pp. 419-422. Also useful is https://newcriterion.com/article/heidegger-at-freiburg-1933/#:~:text=As%20its%20very%20title%20suggests,be%20allowed%20to%20govern%20itself

22. https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/amery-churchills-great-contemporary/; Lynne Olson, Troublesome Young Men (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) pp. 208-209); https://spartacus-educational.com/2WWamery.htm; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Amery

23. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/their-finest-hour/