What The Hell America!

LAST WEEK, WHEN DONALD TRUMP announced his plan for steep new tariffs, governments around the world were shocked and perplexed. Trump slapped levies on nearly every country, based on wildly inaccurate claims about their trade barriers against the United States. He attributed all U.S. trade deficits with individual countries to cheating, and he vowed to extract enough money from each nation to erase its purported trade advantage over Uncle Sam.

Even after “pausing” his harshest tariffs on Wednesday—in a turnabout forced by plummeting stock markets—Trump said he would impose a 10 percent minimum levy on nearly all countries. And he threatened to hit them with much heavier tariffs if they didn’t offer sufficient trade concessions within ninety days.

Why is Trump doing this? Because he’s operating from the same mental pathologies that drove his behavior after the 2020 election. His tariff lunacy is an extension of his election denialism.

In every state Trump lost in 2020—that is, where he had a deficit of ballots—he blamed his loss on cheating. He based these accusations on bogus numbers, and he demanded to be given enough additional votes—or to have enough votes subtracted from Joe Biden—to cancel out his deficits.

When that didn’t work, Trump sent a mob to the Capitol. And when Americans responded by re-electing him in 2024, he pardoned the insurrectionists and set out to rectify another system that he thinks is rigged against him: global trade. He’s more confident than ever in his delusions of persecution and in his power to reshape history. His madness has engulfed the world.

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ON ELECTION NIGHT 2020, as battleground states slipped away from Trump, he dismissed their official vote counts as “a major fraud” and insisted that he had won. Four weeks later, on December 2, 2020, he declared that “the Democrats had this election rigged” and that in every swing state he had supposedly lost, the margin was due to “major infractions or outright fraud.”

Trump leveled specific allegations, all of which were phony or grossly exaggerated. But his underlying dogma was that his deficit in each state he lost, relative to Biden and to down-ballot Republicans, could be explained only by cheating. “The tremendous success we had in the House of Representatives, and the tremendous success we’ve had so far in the Senate,” he argued, made it “statistically impossible that the person—me—that led the charge lost.”

Two weeks later, Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, released a document claiming that “Democrat Party government officials cheated and gamed the electoral process across all six battleground states.” Navarro cited “statistical anomalies” such as 1) “Joe Biden received a disproportionately high percentage of the mail-in and absentee ballots,” 2) Wisconsin “reported abnormally high voter turnout,” and 3) in one Arizona precinct, “the vote percent for President Trump dropped dramatically relative to 2016, from 67.4 to 58.5 percent.”

In a tweet announcing his January 6th rally, Trump touted Navarro’s mathematical speculations. “A great report by Peter,” he proclaimed. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Trump insisted that his vote deficits had to be negated. “The results of the individual swing states must be overturned—and overturned immediately,” he demanded. In a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, Trump specified how many votes he needed to erase Biden’s lead. “The current margin is only 11,779,” he told Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”

That line sounds a lot like Trump’s formula for erasing trade deficits. And the intervening history explains why.

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IN THE YEARS AFTER JANUARY 6TH, Trump and his henchmen clung to his delusions about the 2020 election. In 2022, Navarro said his 2020 document “proved that the election was, in all likelihood, stolen.” In testimony to the House January 6th Committee, another Trump loyalist, Stephen Miller, said he still believed that the election was fraudulent and that Trump was the true winner. Trump repeated his falsehoods about 2020 and signaled that he would pardon the January 6th insurrectionists.

Trump’s re-election in 2024 further emboldened him. He paid no price for January 6th or for his pardons of the assailants. At least nineteen times since returning to the White House—most recently, on Wednesday—he has repeated his allegations that the 2020 election was “rigged,” “stolen,” or swayed by Democrats who “cheated.” “We had a rigged election. And we can say it and say it loud and say it proud because the election was rigged,” Trump seethed on Tuesday night in a speech to the National Republican Congressional Committee. “They stole it from us by illegally rigging the election.”

Some voters, politicians, and reporters seem to think Trump’s deluded view of 2020 can be set aside as moot. But the underlying pathology—reflexively claiming fraud—affects everything he does. It’s why, despite having been repeatedly corrected, he keeps peddling the fiction that millions of long-dead people are getting Social Security checks. And members of his inner circle have picked up the habit.

“Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, who’s 94, she wouldn’t call and complain,” said Howard Lutnick, Trump’s billionaire commerce secretary, on a podcast two weeks ago. But “a fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.” Lutnick went on: “Elon [Musk] knows this by heart, right? Anybody who’s been in the payment system and the process system knows the easiest way to find the fraudster is to stop payments and listen. ’Cause whoever screams is the one stealing.”

That’s how Trump and his toadies think: Anything they don’t like is fraud or theft.

ONCE YOU UNDERSTAND THIS MENTALITY, the administration’s tariff lunacy becomes more intelligible. The language Trump, Navarro, and Miller now apply indiscriminately to foreign trade partners—“cheaters,” “stole,” “rig the rules”—is the same language they apply to Democrats. And as in 2020, their accusations are reckless and false.

Last week, when Trump announced his trade war, he unveiled a table that purported to show the effective tariff rates imposed on the United States (through tariff and non-tariff barriers) by more than 180 countries. On this basis, he said his new tariffs against those countries were “reciprocal.” But analysts soon found that the numbers in the table were, like the election-fraud numbers Trump and Navarro had quoted in 2020, egregiously wrong. (And that’s not even getting into the penguins.)

“The rest of the world has a surplus with us,” Lutnick asserted last Sunday on Face the Nation. “Everybody has a trade surplus, and we have a trade deficit.” That’s not true either. Several countries, including Australia and the United Kingdom, have trade deficits with the United States. They buy more from us than we buy from them. Yet Trump hit them with supposedly “reciprocal” 10 percent tariffs.

When interviewers pressed Lutnick about these discrepancies, he came up with excuses. He said our trade surplus with the U.K. wasn’t real because “they count the importing of bullion,” and Australia’s purchases of American planes weren’t “really what we need to sell” them. Trade-surplus denialism, like election denialism, requires an endless stream of rationalizations.

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ULTIMATELY, TRUMP AND NAVARRO are relying on the same dogmas they invoked in 2020. First, they say the whole system is rigged. “Institutionally, the international trade system is designed to cheat us,” Navarro declared on Sunday Morning Futures. “The only reason why we’re not” a “manufacturing nation,” he protested, “is because the world cheats us.”

Second, any trade deficit with an individual country is the result of chicanery. “Each trade deficit we have with each country,” Navarro told CNBC, “represents the sum of all cheating. The trade deficit is the sum of all cheating.”

Third, the logical penalty to rectify the cheating is a tax sufficient to erase the deficit. “The reciprocal tariff,” Navarro explained on CNN, “is that which reduces the trade deficit with each country to zero.” The administration’s written statement says the same thing: Trump is applying “the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”

Economically and morally, all of this is wrong. Trade deficits aren’t theft; they’re just an imbalance of transactions in which one side benefits from buying and the other benefits from selling. Such deficits can be caused by unfair practices, but often they’re due to simple factors such as wealth inequality. The United States is a very rich country. It shouldn’t be surprising that we buy more from poor countries than they buy from us. Reflexively slapping tariffs on these countries—let alone countries with which we have trade surpluses, not deficits—is unfounded and unjust.

But psychologically, Trump’s trade war makes perfect sense. Four and a half years ago, he declared himself the victim of a corrupt system, blamed all his losses on cheating, demanded enough compensation to cancel out his losses, and launched an assault to get his way. Then he went to his office to watch the chaos and see what would happen. And that’s what he did again last week.

On Wednesday, after the markets tanked, Trump “paused” his heaviest tariffs for 90 days. But he kept a 10 percent tariff on nearly all countries, and he bragged that his threats to hit them harder were forcing them to surrender. “These countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” he gloated in his speech to the NRCC. He mocked their offers: “Please, please, sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.”

Trump now says he’ll extract through negotiations—under the threat of resuming his full tariff war—concessions sufficient to erase America’s trade deficits with its partners. And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says countries will give in because they’ve “seen the maximum level that Donald Trump is willing to go to.” It’s the same strategy of bullying and brinkmanship Trump has used before. And he’ll keep doing it till he pays a price.