Scenes from a Trade War

Plus: Bring Kilmar Home

The unions go to bat for Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Solidarity, brother!

In my recent article on how to fight back against authoritarianism, I included a section on the key case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. I adapted that section for The UnPopulist with a brief update on the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia's Wrongful Deportation and Imprisonment Reveals the Horrors of Trump's Authoritarianism

The ruling is technically in Kilmar’s favor, but with a very slight amount of wiggle room added. A totally unnecessary, unsigned opinion added the proviso that the circuit court judge must take into account “the deference owed to the executive branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” The three liberal justice issued a firmly worded concurring opinion in which they detailed why it was unnecessary for the court to say anything at all and why it should simply have refused to consider the government’s appeal against the lower courts.

The usual explanation for this sort of thing is that Chief Justice John Roberts is an “institutionalist” who wants to preserve the Supreme Court as an institution by never having it do anything remotely controversial. This is, of course, the fastest way to destroy it as an institution.

Roberts typically does this in one of two ways. Sometimes, he caves in on the constitutional substance, hidden behind some vague rhetoric intended to make it sound like he’s still upholding American principles. This time, he went the other way: upholding the Constitution on the substance, but with vague rhetorical gestures intended to appease President Trump.

But the harder Roberts tries to avoid conflict, the faster we hurtle towards it, because his very eagerness to avoid a confrontation with the Trump administration emboldens it to seek one.

As predicted, the administration is still trying to use this rhetorical wiggle room as an excuse to completely ignore the court order. But Judge Xinis is not fooling around. She has been giving the government a series of tough deadlines and sharp questions, demanding that they reveal Kilmar’s exact whereabouts and describe the steps they are taking to return him. The government has so far been blatantly stonewalling.

I don’t think they are going to agree to the judge’s demands. They are terrified of the consequences of bringing Kilmar home, for all the reasons I explained in my article: If they can return him, they will have to return everybody. What happens from here, in a very short period of time, is that either the administration will openly refuse even to attempt to return Kilmar—or Donald Trump will be forced to claim that he is helpless before the tinpot dictator of El Salvador.

Either way, this case will come down to public pressure. The fate of an innocent man will become the central issue of our national politics, putting an individual human face on our constitutional collapse.

I don’t think we should be resigned for a moment to the idea that Trump can win this confrontation. For example, I mentioned before that the sheet metal workers’ union had issued a strong statement in support of “brother Kilmar,” who is one of their members. They were joined with an even more fiery statement by the leader of North America’s Building Trades Unions. I have a very jaded and cynical outlook on the unions, but this is exactly the sort of solidarity they promise for their workers, and I can’t help but admire it. Every union in America should be joining them.

(By the way, I have a long history of trying to cast the main characters of Atlas Shrugged out of real life, and I think we just found our Fred Kinnan. See the picture at the top of this post; at the very least, he matches the physical description. Fred Kinnan, you may recall, is the most curiously sympathetic of Ayn Rand’s villains. He’s a union leader who works by the rules of a corrupt system—but he’s still just trying to do the best for his guys.)

Look, where I come from—the Upper Midwest—if you get the unions this mad at you, you’re finished.

So we can win this.

If you want further evidence for why we have to win this, check out an article by expatriate Russian dissident Masha Gessen about the immigration police state created by the Trump administration.

“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said….

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

And here’s the part that’s really relevant to what is currently happening with the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: “It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers.” We’ll see about that point, but it’s where we are headed if we don’t stand up now.

This is all, alas, exactly as I predicted, perhaps more so. I really wanted to end up being an alarmist on this issue.

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Scenes from a Trade War

Can an authoritarian regime be simultaneously terrifying, destructive—and comical? Yes, they can, and they frequently are.

Donald Trump’s ever-shifting trade policy is a case in point.

Trump has used congressional abdication on trade policy as an opportunity to claim the power to change any tariff at his whim, several times a day. At least one organization is challenging that power in court. Think of it. On what other issue is the president’s diktat so unlimited?

But since Trump has so far been allowed to wield absolute, unchecked power over trade, it’s revealing to see what he’s done with it.

I have a piece coming out eventually in Discourse on this, but I just have to preview this description of the tariffs Trump announced with great fanfare on April 2.

Supposedly he is charging retaliatory tariffs that are half the tariff rate other countries charge against us. But that’s not what he’s doing. In his announcement, the “tariff rates” Trump listed for other countries do not correspond to any actual tariffs they charge. So where do those numbers come from? It did not take long for people to figure out that he had merely taken the trade deficit every country has with the US and divided it by the quantity of that country’s exports to us—and set this, for no reason at all, as the “tariff rate” against which we are retaliating.

Hence all the crazy results. As Andy Craig points out, “The two highest tariff rates under the gibberish formula are Lesotho [in South Africa] and St. Pierre et Miquelon, both at 50%. Population of the tiny French islands off the coast of Newfoundland: 5,819.”

I couldn’t help but note that we also declared a trade war on penguins—and somehow it’s not the penguins who are losing.

After the markets crashed for a few days, and the bond market made some particularly ominous noises, Trump suddenly pulled back his disastrous tariffs to mere Smoot-Hawley levels, and apparently just today, his people figured out it would be unpopular to put massive tariffs on laptops and iPhones from China, so they exempted those products.

To get an idea of the actual impact of these tariffs, check out the lament of an entrepreneur who invented a cheap kitchen gadget that uses materials that can only be obtained economically overseas.

This passage struck me as economically important:

When you hear of an American company making a product abroad for $5, it sounds like America is sending money away and just getting a doodad in return. In reality, that $5 buys us a product plus the fuel to power $20 of domestic economic activity.

Because the $20 gap between my manufacturing cost and my sale price flows to Americans, American companies and other American entities: to the Amazon warehouse workers and delivery people I help fund through my Amazon seller fees; to Peter, my US Postal Service parcel carrier; to software platforms, like Google, Intuit, and ShipStation, which I use to run my business; to the freelance designer working with me on a new product; to the lawyers who protect my patents and trademarks; to my advertising and marketing partners; to the coffers of the US Treasury, New York State, and New York City; and, hopefully in the end, also to me and my family. It seems an awful waste to torch $20 of domestic economic activity to get at $5 more.

This may be madness, but it is a specific kind of madness. I’ve seen two different sources call it “MAGA Maoism.” What they are identifying is the way Trump apologists keep telling us that it is good to destroy white-collar “e-mail jobs” and move everyone back to gritty industrial jobs where we will all work with our hands.

Here it is in the Washington Post:

What we’re seeing is a kind of MAGA Maoism, remixed for the algorithm age. Like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, it glorifies physical labor as moral purification, only now the purification is from the supposed “wokeness” of desk work, filtered through TikTok, X and Twitch. It’s not about creating jobs. It’s about creating vibes: strong men doing hard things, reshared until they become ideology. As one MAGA influencer put it, “Men in America don’t need therapy. Men in America need tariffs and DOGE. The fake email jobs will disappear.”

This style, what some might call online pastoralism, is no longer fringe. It is a governing strategy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently hinted to Tucker Carlson that the administration plans to restock America’s factories with recently fired federal workers. It’s a sharp evolution of the old MAGA line, which claimed elites abandoned the working class by offshoring jobs and hoarding the degrees that powered the new economy. Now, those same college-educated liberals once seen as the future of work are being recast as its obstacle.

As an example, watch Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick gushing about an economy dominated by “high-school educated Americans” working in “high-tech factories” where they will be “screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones.”

A perceptive post by blogger Drew Pavlou takes the analogy farther.

My argument that MAGA is best understood as a Third World Ideology rests on the following:

- The MAGA movement’s neo-Maoist personality cult

- Trump’s embrace of Juche economics

- The MAGA movement’s embrace of a cult of sacrifice and poverty

- The MAGA witch doctor/shamanist approach to public health

- The MAGA movement’s hatred and resentment towards the West

- The MAGA movement’s embrace of clientelism and patronage networks that look like Russia in the 1990s

Honestly, the right way to think about MAGA is through the lens of Maoism and other Third Worldist political movements and personality cults.

Read that whole post. It presents several ideas I will return to it in future articles.

This kind of deeper analysis is necessary, because when you think about it, this is not just about some kind of return to an idyllic industrial past. The lifting of tariffs on laptops and iPhones is telling. Trump has not lifted tariffs on the inputs of American manufacturing—imported parts and materials. If you work in a factory making things out of steel, your costs are still much higher than they were two weeks ago. But Trump has lifted tariffs on the importation of complex finished goods. So it’s clear this is not really about reviving American manufacturing.

Trump has, in fact, told us what it’s all about. He explained to us why he lifted a bunch of the tariffs only a few days after imposing them (for the second time).

Trump claimed: “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal.” Mocking the pleas of foreign leaders, he parodied: “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir!”

You could view this as bluster, as his way of covering up a cave-in. And maybe that’s part of it. But the form of the bluster is still revealing. What he views as an optimum outcome is that people are paying attention to him, making him the center of attention, and groveling before him.

Another blogger captured this.

I firmly believe that for Trump, it’s all about getting other leaders to call him up and grovel. It’s true that he’s long supported tariffs and has railed about being ripped off. But he doesn’t know anything about trade. As that headline above reveals, he and his team appear to have no interest in trying to distinguish between the majority of trade which is legitimate commerce between willing trading partners, and unfair trade, where other countries manage currencies or dump overcapacity to capture market share. Ergo, the sledgehammer versus the scalpel.

He knows nothing about trade, but he knows everything about pressing his advantage to get other leaders to kiss his ass, “dying to make a deal.” That not economics. It’s not governance. It’s not sustainable foreign policy. It’s his twisted psychology, which, he—and here’s his genius—masterfully conveys to MAGA voters who, like him, feel similarly dismissed by “elites.”

Trump and his core sycophants see him as the “greatest show on Earth.” That’s literally what one aide told Politico last month: “It’s the greatest show on Earth. We’ll put tariffs on tonight, but tomorrow we’ll tell you we may negotiate and take them off. But stay tuned, because you never know what tomorrow’s gonna bring.”

It’s the same psychology as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It is rule by whim in service to whim—in service to a single man’s pathological black hole of self-esteem.

Welcome to authoritarianism. You can construct all sorts of theories of authoritarian rule, and court intellectuals will construct all sorts of rationalizations for it. But by its very nature, authoritarianism is just a system that takes an entire country and wraps us all up into the personal psychodrama of a deeply damaged mind.

That’s why we bind down leaders with objective rules that limit their power. We might want to start doing that again.