Why the Liberation Day tariffs were faintly terrifying and why it is probably good that Trump has walked the greater part of them back

First, the good news.

Five days ago, Alternative für Deutschland pulled dead even with the Union parties in an INSA poll. Now, an Ipsos poll has AfD one point ahead of CDU/CSU. They are now, officially, the strongest party in Germany …

… and they will only get stronger, as the coalition negotiations have ended and the result is an all-too-predictable catastrophe – but more on that in the coming days.

First, I must say some things about tariffs. What I’m going to write will irritate some of you, and I’m sorry about that. Here at the plague chronicle I try to speak honestly about politics regardless of my personal sympathies.

Donald Trump is among the most significant political figures of my lifetime. I was happy he won the November election and I think his presidency represents a necessary correction to years of escalating progressivoid absurdity.

That does not mean, however, that I think Trump is infallible, correct in all things, or incapable of making mistakes. At base, Trump is a Caesarist figure – the leader of a populist backlash against an increasingly discredited American liberal elite. He is a showman and a brilliant if relentlessly underestimated political strategist with remarkable antifragile qualities. He is also fearless, aggressive, erratic and slightly crazy. If he weren’t all of these things at once – the good qualities together with the indifferent and the bad – he wouldn’t be where he is now. I say all of this to explain why you cannot expect Trump to be right about everything. Trump’s success and the success of his movement will depend upon the capacity of his advisers and his allies to nudge him away form the kinds of crazy things to which the great men of history are prone and which can be their undoing – things like marching one’s Grande Armée into Russia or issuing Edicts on Maximum Prices.

At first I hoped the tariff thing would go away. It sounded nuts, but the plague chronicle is not an economics newsletter, and so while the stock markets crashed I threw up an open thread and hoped for the best. Then I read all of your comments on that open thread, and I read all of the other essays and articles you linked in the comment section, and I started to get a bad feeling. The more I read about Trump’s tariffs, the worse that feeling got. I’d now like to apologise. I should’ve written more forthrightly about Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs in the very beginning. In this post I will try to make that up to you. Below the fold, I will explain why I think the blanket tariffs were a bad idea and kind of scary, and why it is good that Trump has stepped away from the brink.