What The Hell America!

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” goes the old saying ascribed to P.T. Barnum. It turns out that most of them live and work in Washington, where they are helping to lead our nation into the abyss. Wednesday featured a circus of suckerdom on Capitol Hill, where for the past decade lawmakers have performed acts of wild shapeshifting and contortionism at the behest of their mad ringleader, each time abasing themselves more enthusiastically than the last.

Days reminiscent of television shows set on Capitol Hill are common, but this was one of the most ridiculous in quite some time.

Former Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), now a high-powered lobbyist after losing a gubernatorial race (in part for having admitted to being involved in a prostitution ring), scurried back and forth on the underground trams connecting the office buildings of the Senate seemingly all day. He frequently had the look of someone relieved to no longer be stuck in this mess, complete with eye rolls, shrugs, and exasperated gasps.

Nearby, a gigantic Siberian Husky–German Shepherd service dog, whose sheer size brought to mind recent news about the genetic resurrection of the dire wolf, wandered around with his veteran companion. The halls swarmed with eighth grade class trips and Boy Scout troops, as they do every spring.

Around them, lawmakers scrambled to keep pace with events. It had been a whirlwind week. To recap:

• Last Wednesday, Trump announced sweeping global tariffs that would go into effect in one week. Using a shoddy formula, the new levies targeted China with a 34 percent rate (which grew to 84 percent within a couple days, and then to 104 percent the night before they were scheduled to go into effect) while numerous other countries—including important allies, countries with whom the United States enjoys a trade surplus, and islands that are not inhabited by humans—received a flat 10 percent rate or landed somewhere in the 30–50 percent range. (Some countries were also conspicuously excluded.)

• Over the following days, the stock market crashed, evaporating large portions of Americans’ retirement savings and eliciting comparisons to the losses that took place on some of the worst days in U.S. history.

• On Tuesday, the White House insisted the tariffs would be permanent and justified them as a way of reshoring American manufacturing.

• By Wednesday morning, ten-year bond yields—a measure of how much interest the government was offering to those willing to lend it money—had started to climb rapidly, prompting concerns that the coming tariffs were already causing long-term damage to the American economy.

Then on Wednesday, just as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer was testifying before Congress that tariffs are good, Trump ripped up his plan and embarked on a new one.

Trump announced a 90-day pause, during which a universal 10 percent tariff would instead be applied on all of the original tariff recipients except China, whose rate is instead growing to a whopping 125 percent, which the White House later clarified is 145 percent. And while no deals have been struck, the White House claims 75 countries have approached the United States to negotiate. The market rebounded significantly, but uncertainty still remains (as evidenced by how bad things look at the time that this newsletter is arriving in your inbox).

The few Republicans who criticized the administration’s protectionist trade policy—a dogmatic no-no according to normal Republican free-market orthodoxy—welcomed the news, but they still don’t like the way things are going.