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I was recently going through the Archive of Astral Codex Ten content and reread Scott’s post “The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs”. Rereading this post I had a few thoughts: 1) this is the most nakedly partisan Scott-post I can remember, 2) this is the most unqualifiedly confident opinion about the outcome of a political policy I’ve seen Scott express, 3) “Tariffs” seem like an issue from a lifetime ago when it has been less than a year since they were the number one news story.
As someone who is essentially a Trump loyalist/plan-truster, Trump II has been hard to follow. The tariffs, which Econ 101 would tell you are a disastrous idea, and were hard to rationalize even as a Trump supporter, seem to have had little noticeable effect. DOGE, despite fulfilling the boomercon dream of putting a real “businessman” in charge of reforming Washington, was fleeting if not an outright failure. Despite closing the border and significant political capital expended on deporting illegal immigrants, sentiment on the economy is poor, and anecdotally the “Great Replacement” seems to be proceeding at the same pace it was before. The right-wing pundit sphere has largely turned on Trump and anti-Israel sentiment has entered the mainstream.
My question is - is this all a repudiation of the internet-right’s political project? Would Trump be popular if not for the Iran war? Does the Trumpian paradigm have any hope of continuing post midterms?
Well if you ignore the long running small businesses that say they had to close because of the tariffs, the big industries that still had to pay billions of dollars and the prices increasing (or profits decreasing hurting competition and slowing growth) on many tariff impacted industries like canning, then yeah I guess you could say that nothing has happened. AI is pretty much singlehandedly carrying the American economy in growth now (this single sector making up >50% of GDP expansion) because everything else is struggling.
Even the Trump admin themselves is clearly aware that their tariffs raise prices given that they'll reverse them in more politically price sensitive areas.
If there is no such thing as a free lunch, then where does the tariff lunch come from?
It's hard to buy that DOGE was even a halfway sincere effort when Musk was trawling around disrupting petty and widely considered to be highly successful programs like PEPFAR for pennies while going on Fox News and promising to increase social security one of the very few things anyone with any understanding of government knows is the actual drain on budget now.
To absolutely no one but a bunch of Internet retard's surprise, social security checks did not go up because of DOGE, the deficit is not solved, and one actually smart guy made a massive return on his whole life savings betting on the obvious.
They made the same mistake that the Biden administration and progressives did, they thought being better than the other guy meant they were popular and everything they did justified. That they could ignore the basic fundamentals of politics and public relations in pursuit of their petty culture war grievances.
And because they're selected for the most extremist culture war obsessed retards, they're also all delusional along with that, like Greg Bovino's belief that there are >100 million illegal immigrants. The extremist idiocy combined with the firehouse effect and the average familiarity meme inevitably leads to bad PR moments cause even their best attempts to be moderate might look insane to the general public. They all start to think "Well certainly the general public agrees at least 50 million need to be deported right?"
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His polling was suffering before because of other errors and his general off-putting and erratic nature.
This is just the bit that Trump loyalists can't really digest or rationalize.
DOGE is either, as @aeqno says, an attempt to punish clients of the ancien regime in which case I suppose it could be said to have put them in some pain (until a post-Trump White House restores their position) or it's an attempt to cut the deficit meaningfully.
If it's an attempt to cut the deficit (by $2 trillion according to Elon) it was always retarded populist slop because we know where the budget goes. The Boomercon businessman plan seems to imagine some ruthless guy who will cut other people's social spending while leaving the Boomer and their social spending alone. There's a reason the Paul Ryan fiscal wing is dead: boomer Republicans killed them.
If it didn't work for Ryan, why would it work now? Elon can't cut anything that'd make Trump unpopular and Trump has a) given up on fiscal conservatism and b) not really going to push through laws to fix his position anyway.
This is just the mirror image of the progressive-technocrat plan: people who know their policies are unpopular and so are trying to do an end-run around politics.
As both a formal and practical matter the "internet-right" doesn't have a political project. Trump has a political project and the internet-right's job is to try to cajole that elephant in the direction they want.
But a stubborn elephant is hard to move. Most people didn't foresee that Trump had such a durable pre-existing fascination with things like tariffs.
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The 'weak' version of tariffs slightly increased inflation and the cost is almost entirely borne by American consumers and companies, as expected. Also, very predictably, SCOTUS struck down his use of 'emergency powers' which means that the government has to pay back hundreds of billions to companies.
The other problem with the tariffs is that they were retardly overbroad. This US tire plant had to shut down because Thai rubber was tariffed, even though rubber can't be grown in the US. The salutary effect of tariffs is supposed to be onshoring, but nothing much has happened; companies will just pinky promise Trump that they're totally planning to build more factories at home and quietly cancel once he's out of office. It's also worth bearing in mind that the US does have a strong manufacturing sector with extremely high productivity and value-add, like assembling airplanes.
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DOGE was a great illustration of how the world actually works. Elon's boys effortlessly pushed their way past the weather nerds at NOAA, but they sure as hell didn't try that at CIA or the Pentagon, despite the billions vanishing into thin air at those two places. The whole project was a way to punish the faction of Trump's enemies that would respond to bullying with angry op-eds, not the ones that would actually kill him if he ever came after them. And the whole thing fell apart when Elon the extreme autist actually thought he was there to "transform Washington", lol.
Anyway, MAGA supporters are finding out (just like all of Trump's previous business partners and political allies) that Trump only looks out for Trump. He's now in full legacy mode. He couldn't give a fuck less what his supporters in Oklahoma are paying for gas and groceries when he could be the guy that makes Cuba a new US territory.
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The thing with the tariffs is that the reaction (as measured by the stock market) was so strong and so swift that Trump instantly buckled. That makes it hard to tell how much the actual long-term economic or political damage would have been. It's almost a perfect paradox- We can be perfectly safe that he'll never do tariffs, because the reaction would be so horrendous, so he's free to threaten them all he wants.
But also, yes, if there's anything to make a trade war look trivial, it's an actual shooting war. The Iran war is taking up so much space that it's hard to think about other things.
It was the bond market reaction that started the panic inside the admin.
I really wish I knew the specific lines they used to pull Trump back from the brink in whatever way would be least damaging to his ego. It couldn't have been easy considering that tariffs were his lifelong obsession (yes, Trump actually has some political principles).
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