The Emperor has no clothes

After months of uncertainty, “Liberation Day” finally arrived. On April 2, 2025, Donald Trump gathered the people he loves most—his inner circle and the mainstream media—to announce his big ang not-so-beautiful tariff strategy, lauding it as a “declaration of economic independence.”

Using national emergency powers—because the word “emergency” is the executive branch’s favorite cheat-code—10% tariffs will be placed on all imports into the United States, while higher tariffs will be placed on goods from dozens of other countries which have a high trade deficit with the United States.

Yes, because in an act of spectacular statistical manipulation—or, to put it bluntly, fraud—Trump is making the argument that trade deficits—which simply means that our powerful and wealthy consumer market is importing more from some countries than we export—are synonymous with tariffs in a global trading system that is apparently hell-bent on screwing over the United States by…selling us cheap goods.

With the sound of markets crashing in the background and nations rushing to formulate alternative trade agreements, high profile figures in both the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s reliable band of online influencers celebrated what is the voluntary knee-capping of not only the American economy, but the global economy.

House Speaker Mike Johnson—whose neck is still sore after sycophantically nodding his way through Trump’s unofficial State of the Union address last month—said that “Tariffs are part of the president’s proven strategy to fix our economy again, level the playing field, and put America first."

The only thing proven about tariffs is that they fail.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise thanked Trump for “putting America's workers and innovators first with reciprocal tariffs that level the playing field and make trade fair.”

Level the playing field…by making everyone poorer.

Jack Posobiec celebrated “the return of the American Dream,” DC Draino praised “Trump’s plan to free American workers from indentured servitude to the Deep State,” while Matt Gaetz shared the grossly misleading chart of “reciprocal tariffs” while asking: “Who the f*** does Madagascar think they are?!”

It seems like Sen. Rand Paul is one of the few reliably sane politicians remaining in Washington, D.C., pointing out the obvious: that tariffs “don’t punish foreign governments” but “American families,” and that taxing imports will raise the price of everything.

The Republican Party—as well as the influencer hack class—used to hold the concept of free trade and free market capitalism as an untouchable foundational pillar of conservatism. Now, under Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, conservatism is defined by a pseudo-monarch who is treating the American economy like a game of Monopoly based on the Great Depression.

Yes, many of the people celebrating this economically illiterate move by the president are simply ignorant. But then there’s a greater danger: those who are smart but are pretending to be dumb, cheering on an absurd and self-destructive policy because Trump wants it to be so.

As J.D. Vance obsequiously put it, “We just can’t ignore the president’s desires.”

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