Can there be a feminist reading of Donald J Trump’s tariff war against the whole universe? Yes indeed, and since nothing else has helped to clear the world’s brain fog, here goes. Those who saw him up close describe Trump as a kind of blundering Hugh Hefner of politics. A raucous, all-American Alpha male dream playing in the highest office, with a blonde secretary always in tow, if not the “hundred women” of campaign lore. Outside of his own power trip, he’s also a petulant, 78-year-old ‘WhatsApp uncle’ with woolly ideas about the world. Put the two together, and you can actually derive the phenomenon we have today. A comic-book despot who thinks the world is just another blonde.
Now for other readings. In November 2016, the German magazine Der Spiegel had greeted Trump’s first appearance on the world stage with a very striking cover. It had the US president’s face as a screaming meteor hurtling towards a peaceful Earth, his own blond mane blazing behind him like solar flares. ‘Das Ende Der Welt (wie wir sie kennen)’, said the words on the cover. The End of the World (As We Know It). It took nine years for that promise to be truly fulfilled. When the meteor hit, even the penguins of McDonald Islands were startled out of their peaceful Antarctic reverie. Yes, no humans live there, and that cluster of volcanic icicles have been slapped with a 10 percent tariff! Internet memes were soon showing a delegation of its black-coated avian elite waddling away to White House to plead mercy, while blue-collared penguin citizenry marched in protest.
The most charitable explanation is that the tariff rate chart Trump held up on a windy ‘Liberation Day’ was the handiwork of ChatGPT. This is very likely not a joke. That ‘almost real’ zombie effect, with degrees of separation from reality, perfectly fits AI. Not to mention how closely it matched Trump’s scattershot approach to problems. Madagascar, the closest human habitation to Heard and McDonald Islands, has earned a crippling 47 percent tariff. Its crime is that it exports raw vanilla beans to the US and is too poor to import anything American, so it is adjudged to be sitting on a tyrannical trade surplus, thus making itself deserving of punishment.
Simply put, everyone got burnt. We don’t know how many gem workers, slaving away at their workshops in Surat, will have to get on a train back to their native Odisha. For the shrimp farmers of coastal Andhra, what befell them could be worse than a cyclone. Sharing the grief of penguins and humans is Trump’s billionaire friend Bill Ackman. Among those slick hedge fund bosses who are now ruing their enthusiastic backing of his presidency, Ackman sees an “economic nuclear winter” on the horizon. Even Elon Musk, nearly half of whose Tesla car batteries and other components come from China, snarled on X: “A PhD in Econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing.” His target? Trump advisor and tariff hawk Peter Navarro. “He ain’t build s**t.” That’s how palace conflict goes when translated into ‘American’.
The more serious analysts soon got to the nub of it. No one really thinks of Trump as the Keynes of the 21st century, but he has a team of bona fide gurus behind him. Well, sort of. His treasury secretary Scott Bessent read political science at Yale, but went back there to teach economic history. That subject seems to loom large over this present scenario of devastation. Those knowledgeable about the discipline, from Paul Krugman to our own Montek Singh Ahluwalia, were quick to spot the echo of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a quick-fix for the Great Depression that greatly worsened it and ultimately became a factor for World War II.
Trump is himself said to be rather fond of 19th century American protectionism that helped develop its manufacturing potential. Old Oprah footage from the 1980s has him raging about the same theme that he’s agitated over today. Which is, cruel foreign nations robbing America of its manufacturing testosterone. Then he had a different Oriental enemy in mind. It was Japan, then flooding the world with its cars and electronics. Today, of course, it is China. What if America literally wrote Japan’s constitution after the war, and built it up as a politically defanged factory yard? Or that Nixon’s meeting with Mao set up our present world of global value chains that China dominates? So, the problem with the plan is that it worked too well?
If one fact stands out in stark relief today, it is how inextricably economics is tied to politics and how that’s in turn conducted like an extreme case study in game theory class. Those who point to the ‘method in the madness’ are all going back to a paper written by another Trump man, Stephen Miran. He was part of the team during the first term, and wrote this while peddling his skills at Hudson Bay Capital in the interim. Yes, another fund manager and bright spark from Harvard. Titled ‘A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System’, the document is clearly the blueprint for the Great Tariff War and contains the endgame that Bessent has spoken of. Shorn of its gobbledygook, it’s a strange mishmash of jingoistic alarmism and high financial analysis.
America’s root problem, the paper says, is the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. That means even when “Polynesia and Melanesia” trade with each other, Miran writes, they do it through the dollar. Every country wants some in its forex reserves, so the demand stays high and inelastic, and the currency itself stays at a high valuation. This has a disabling effect on American exports, since they remain costly. Therefore, over a period of time, this handicap emasculated American manufacturing and left it with the Rust Belt. So a return to the Golden Age is possible only by demolishing the status quo. But that’s not all. Chinese factories also pose a military threat! They can be easily turned over to defence production if war strikes. The absence of factories, in Miran’s worldview, leaves the US militarily weaker. Yes, that’s what all that Harvard sophistication amounted to.
Miran, if one reads between the lines, seems smart enough to know in his heart that the answer is to ‘de-dollarise’. But that’s the most hateful word in Trump’s English dictionary, so he plays along. And lays out a plan that feeds his boss’s love for the most beautiful word. ‘Tariff’, by the way, was imported via Italy and is originally a product of the Arabic language factory.
How about a retrospective 34 percent tariff on all cultural imports into America?
Santwana Bhattacharya | Editor