What Trump Doesn't Know Will Hurt Him (and us)

The government is not a business, despite what the smartest man in the world thinks

Donald Trump is the smartest, most successful businessman who ever lived. Just ask him.

That fact is, though, that most Trumpian convictions often collide with reality, with fearsome results. Let’s take a closer look at some of Trump’s greatest hits and see where they’ll lead.

Trump’s Inability to Understand the Difference Between Business and Government

The administration will be a hodge-podge of sycophants who have no idea how government works, but who believe it can be run like a business. People who actually think know this to be nonsense.

The first time around, Trump had plenty of people in positions of responsibility who knew better. These quacks know nothing except uncreative destruction.

There are a lot of differences between the two organizations. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to fire all manner of government employees, resulting along with other big ideas in a reduction by $2 trillion in the federal budget. But those people will still be part of the economy and will result in an increase by millions in unemployment. The reduction in their spending will tank growth in no time-growth depends on consumer spending.

They’ll need to live somehow, but Musk would tear the safety net out from underneath them. Elon Musk may be able to do that to Twitter (or X), but government can’t. This is terrible (and unspeakably cruel) management, designed by small minds who couldn’t distinguish macroeconomics from home economics. It is entirely antithetical to the proper function of government.

The more they double-down, which they will, the worse it will get. Services will disappear and the MAGA army, faced with no subsidies and nothing else on which they previously depended will howl to the heavens. They will complain to their elected representatives. We’ll see who answers the phone. An aside: the red states are by far the largest recipients of federal dollars. This should all play well in those red counties across the heartland.

Tariffs

But wait, there’s more. Much more. The unparalleled business mogul will impose new tariffs on goods entering the US from Mexico, Canada and China on “day one.” Day one shapes up to be busy.

He will sign an executive order calling for a 25% tariff (which is a tax on imports paid by consumers) on all goods coming from Canada and Mexico, His objective: to persuade them to take on illegal immigration and narcotics trafficking.

Why stop there? He would add another 10% to China until it does something about fentanyl smuggling. Want more? He has a promised a 60% rate, and has even suggested he might levy a 200% tax on car imports. Sticker shock for new cars is already traumatic. Imagine how well it would go over when you add another $12,500 on a $50,000 car.

Trump claims that the tariffs will be paid by the recipient countries. This is unadulterated rubbish. The costs will be passed on to the consumer by the affected companies. We know what they did when they had the chance. The price gouging went on unabated for several years. Working Americans will pay somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 in additional costs a year.

In 2018, Trump imposed a 50% tariff on washing machines. The result: Americans paid more than $1.4 billion more than usual for washing machines. That’s how this works in real life.

The non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics said that these tariffs would lower the incomes of Americans, 4% for the poorest fifth to around 2% for the wealthiest fifth. A middle-class household would lose around $1,700 a year. This is lower than other estimates, as noted earlier.

Then there is inflation. There is no way these tariffs will fail to dramatically increase inflation. Trump claims the tariffs would create new American jobs. We saw how that worked out last time. Trump imposed 25% tariffs on imported steel in 2018, ostensibly to protect US producers. Within two years, steel jobs were still lower than they had been.

Trumpanomics isn’t just an impending failure, it is a looming catastrophe.

Immigration

Donald Trump plans to deport 11 million people. These are the so-called undocumented people working in the US at present, many of them undertaking agricultural jobs and other positions that Americans choose not to do. Aside from upsetting a lot of farmers who will lose unpicked crops, he will anger well-off individuals who rely on these individuals to clean their houses and take care of their kids. Then there is the problem of who will take them.

Trump assumes that, like his employees, the deportables will no longer be his responsibility. He would be dead wrong. Mexico and other countries in the southern hemisphere will resist taking them back.

Assuming Trump succeeds in deporting them, the Peterson Institute said that it would be “destructive economically,” and that people don’t realize the extent to which that will be the case. These workers constitute nearly 5% of the total workforce. Most of them work in agriculture, construction, hospitality and leisure. The number of restaurants that would close would dwarf the number that shuttered during COVID.

The “mass deportation of millions of people will cause reduced employment opportunities for U.S. workers, it will cause reduced economic growth in America, it will cause a surge in inflation, and it will cause increased budget deficits—that is, a higher tax burden on Americans,” said Michael Clemens, an economist at George Mason University who studies international migration.

Trump’s ideas come from his prejudices-against immigrants, against government spending and against the right to live unencumbered by tyranny. The policies that stem from those ideas will cause untold damage.

The Democrats need to keep score and point fingers-in plain English and in harsh terms. Make him pay for what he does. While the courts will keep him occupied, some of these abominations will make it through the flimsy guardrails. It is up to us to hold him accountable, every month, every week, every day and every hour. Exposed properly, Trump’s hysteria will be his undoing.