The tariffs that tilted the world

Rows of shipping containers at the port of Miami on Nov. 22, 2024. (Damon Winter/The New York Times)

By Ross Douthat

There are two reasons “Liberation Day,” President Donald Trump’s declaration of a trade war, looms large among the forays and controversies of his first 100 days.

The first is that it represents the consummation — or an attempt at consummation, at least — of the entire 21st-century populist project. Since its emergence in the mid-2010s, right-wing populism in both America and Europe has often amounted to rhetoric and gesture rather than to sweeping policymaking, or at least to cultural rather than economic conflict. But with the tariffs, Trump made a real attempt at bringing about the full populist revolution originally promised by his 2016 campaign — not just a tweak or correction of globalization but a repudiation of the entire neoliberal project, and an attempt to institute a radically different vision of political economy and world order.

The second reason for its importance is that it seems likely to fail, and fail badly, with the scale of the debacle limited only by Trump’s willingness to reverse and retreat. And such a failure would do far more to undermine the Trumpian project than backlash against, say, DOGE cuts or deportations.

Trump has never presided over an economic downturn, other than the brief COVID recession. He was elected again on a promise to restore the good times that preceded the pandemic; his appeal to many swing voters depends on material promises, not just mystique. So no form of public protest or moral outrage threatens to unravel his power as rapidly as a recession would — and Liberation Day has made such an unraveling more likely.