Blarping the Trumpet

So Trump ‘pauses’ (most of) the tariffs for ninety days. The most likely explanation of which part of the brick wall of reality his Truss-like endeavour has hit its head against is the US bond market, which is how the US government raises a major slice of its income; if people, companies and foreign governments stop buying US bonds – once the safe place to store money on the assumption that the US would never default on them; now, not so much – the US is in trouble. And money backing out of US bonds looks to be the chief reason why Trump has blinked.

But there are plenty of other bricks in that wall, and that reduces the likelihood that the tariffs will be reintroduced after ninety days. Trying to cover the retreat, Trump blew the usual trumpet: foreigners are ‘kissing his ass – please please sir stop the tariffs’ etc. – proving as nakedly as possible that the intention was indeed to bully and blackmail. But there is little evidence that, big as it is, the Trump ass was being kissed by other than the likes of Zimbabwe and Cambodia, whose lips are too small to be felt. Instead China, Canada and the EU have called Trump’s bluff, and something approaching voices of sanity in Trump’s own inner circle of sycophants might be floating up from the region of his trouser-seat.

Just how screwy Trump’s tariff idea is, is beautifully illustrated by David Frum in The Atlantic. Picking up on remarks made by one of the most enthusiastic of Trump’s sycophants, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick (spell-check gives ‘lunatic’) that ‘the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones – that kind of thing is going to come to America’, Frum deconstructs the something-worse-than-ignorance thus manifested. Leave aside the fact that Lutnick said these little screws will be inserted by robots – so: goodbye to the idea of jobs for American workers, if the dream of a Ford assembly line had been in anyone’s mind – and contemplate the following.

Each iPhone is held together by two tiny five-headed screws called pentalobes. Half a billion pentalobes, most of them manufactured in China, are used by Apple every year in their production process. An individual pentalobe screw does not cost much, but tariffs on half a billion of them add up – providing that China does not ban their sale to Apple manufacturing hubs altogether. But suppose they did the latter; the US would have to manufacture its own, starting from scratch because no pentalobes are currently produced there. Although it might not be hard to raise the capital to build production facilities – factories, machines, screw-making robots, recruiting and training workers, at costs permitting returns at US prices – made-in-America screws would not appear on the market for some time, a costly hiatus for Apple.

But even this MAGA-style scenario does not quite get to the nub. Where does the metal for the screws – and the machines that make them – come from? For example, the nickel for the anti-corrosion coating of the screws? Answer: tariffed imports. The sophisticated lathes on which such screws could be turned are manufactured in the US, but in them are metals and parts imported from outside the US. Whereas tariffs are said by Trump to be taxes on consumers, they thus constitute taxes on US producers too. From raw materials through to finished products US manufacturers will be paying more to turn out their goods. Trump claimed that there is no tariff on a US-made car. Frum responds, ‘No? What about the steel that goes into the car? The glass for the windscreen? The fabric for the car’s upholstery? The speakers for the car’s sound system? Tariffed, tariffed, tariffed – to the point where the car itself costs far more for a worse product than what is available in all of the world’s other markets.’

Frum’s conclusion is that ‘Even when you reach a seemingly final product, the chain of self-defeat does not end. Imagine that the United States somehow survives the immediate crisis and arrives at a place where Americans use American-made mobile devices sealed by tiny “Made in the USA” screws. In that scenario, all you’ve done is inflict permanently higher costs on every U.S. business that uses mobile devices, while pricing them out of world markets in turn. The whole U.S. economy will run slower than its competitors, like a sprinter who volunteers to wear a weighted vest that none of the other runners has to carry.’

His final word is, ‘This administration has a screw loose.’ Well: we knew that already.

Even if, as is more likely than not, the tariff ‘pause’ proves permanent, the damage has been done. Stock markets – sites governed by the two emotions of greed and fear, volatile in their simplicity – rebounded at the ‘pause’ news, without yet regaining their pre-‘Liberation Day’ (!) levels. At least some of the push-back to Trump must have come from oligarchs witnessing the loss of billions in net worth. Musk’s ‘moron’ comment on Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade advisor (the term ‘trade advisor’ seems Orwellian in the context), though specifically about Navarro’s remark that Tesla cars are not manufactured but only ‘assembled’ in the US, is evidence that even the boy-genius feels disquiet over Trump trade policies – for the very good reason that in this instance Navarro spoke truth.

But more importantly, the level of distrust created by Trump’s veering and wobbling, bullying and conceding, rushing, reversing, blackmailing and retreating, not just over tariffs but over Russia and Ukraine, NATO, indeed everything, has smashed international arrangements, lost the US its standing, made the world jerk back in distaste and horror at having the mega-machine of MAGAmerica being so wildly driven down the oncoming lane of the world ex-freeway by an anencephalitic man-child with acute ADHD and delusions of grandeur. If the only thing predictable about the US is unpredictability, and Unpredictability is Trump’s middle name, trust and an appetite to do any form of business with it vanishes. That is why the world is such a different place from what it was a mere three months ago.

To quote again Alfred Jarry’s description of Ubu Roi – ‘ fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil’ – and apply it to Trump is tempting, and scarcely amounts to hyperbole, but Ubu Roi was not in charge of what is still, though now not for long, the world’s biggest economy and military. Likewise the yurodivy of Old Russia was not dangerous because he did not have a Kalashnikov. A wandering madman with the equivalent of a billion assorted Kalashnikovs, material and figurative, under his command is an entirely different matter. Thanks to Trump, the role of ‘world’s biggest economy and military’ is rapidly being conceded to China, whose middle name is Predictability, and we therefore already have an all-too-clear idea of how, with the equivalent of a billion material and figurative Kalashnikovs under its command, it would run things.

Yet all it would take is half a dozen Republicans in each house of Congress, and/or two Supreme Court justices, to stop Trump in his tracks and bring him under control. Is there a handful of such people so placed with enough sanity and principle to do it? Perhaps the most amazing, indeed stunning, fact of all is that it does not so far seem so.