Haters gonna hate hate hate

The big question is, what will it cost you?

I’m not gonna lie. My first reaction to Donald Trump’s “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!” post on Sunday was one of fury. The kind of fury one instinctively musters up when they see someone bullied unfairly on social media. And, while I may be a career national security official, I’m also a dyed-in-the-wool Swiftie who doesn’t take kindly to seeing this talented, smart, and genuinely decent woman targeted by the country’s most notorious social media troll. But I quickly realized that, coming from Trump, it’s rather a compliment. I’ve received such “compliments” from him myself. Haters gonna hate, right?

Sunday was full of drama in Trumpworld for other reasons too. Trump’s vice presidential running mate, JD Vance, openly admitted on live television to “creating stories” about crazed pet-eating migrants in Springfield, Ohio, for attention (I think that’s known as “fake news,” JD), and the Secret Service stopped a deranged armed trespasser with a rap sheet a mile long from becoming another would-be assassin on Trump’s Florida golf course. 

It goes without saying that political violence in any form is loathsome and intolerable, full stop. As Americans, we should all agree to uphold that minimum standard in a civil society. The problem as I see it, however, is the double standard. Trump is blaming the attempts on his life in July and on Sunday on the rhetoric expressed by Democrats and media about him, without any regard for how his own rhetoric has jeopardized so many others. If you’re feeling gaslit by him and some in media right about now, you’re not alone.

The other problem with this premise is, what if the rhetoric is true? If someone is a felon, based on having been duly convicted in a court of law, is it wrong to point that out? Likewise, if someone is a threat to democracy, based on having once tried to overturn a certified election, is it out of bounds to remind voters of that? Of course not. Those facts about a presidential candidate are kind of important.

Other facts are important, too. So if Trump doesn’t want his anti-democratic ways highlighted this week, fair enough. We’ll oblige him. In fact, let’s chat about one of his favorite topics—no, not Hannibal Lecter—the economy. Trump considers his economic record the crown jewel of his term, but he’s leaning heavily into Americans’ recency bias on that. There’s plenty to draw from his presidency that paints a much different picture.

I’m not going to try to convince you that you’re not paying a lot of money for gas, groceries, healthcare, and other essentials. We all are. What I will tell you is that Trump’s policies played a big role in putting us here. From his massive tax cut that raised the national debt, to his attempts to kill the Affordable Care Act that drove up healthcare costs, to his mysteriously chummy relationship with Saudi Arabia that raised oil prices (or maybe not so mysterious?), to his restrictive trade policies that predictably led to a baby formula shortage, he made life much harder for average Americans. The very people he claims to represent.

Then there were the tariffs. Oh, the tariffs. Trump’s trade war is often overcome by the cascade of chaos that was 2020, but I’m here to remind you of what we lived through before that. In the lead-up to Trump’s China tariffs in 2018, American farmers were concerned. They knew what would happen if they couldn’t export goods like soybeans and pork abroad. At the time, I was working in Mike Pence’s office in the White House. Pence is from a midwestern state (Indiana), so they figured they’d have a sympathetic ear in a vice president from the heartland. Pence understood their concerns, but Trump was gonna Trump.

The farmers were right to worry. U.S. exports of agricultural products to China plummeted by 63 percent, from $15.8 billion to $5.9 billion. In 2019, the agricultural sector had record-high levels of debt and the most bankruptcies in eight years. In July of that year, U.S. importers paid a record $6.8 billion in tariffs. Trump’s beef was trade imbalances that he believed favored U.S. trading partners, but the surge in costs for supplies forced American business owners to choose between raising their prices—and driving up consumer costs—and laying off workers. A Scylla and Charybdis choice.

Trump was forced to bail out farmers, one of his key voting blocs. It cost us $28 billion. That’s more than the Department of State. More than NASA. More than our nuclear forces. To add insult to injury, he had the nerve to beg Chinese President Xi Jinping to buy American agricultural products to pacify the farm states his tariffs decimated, “pleading with Xi” to ensure he’d win the 2020 election. Pathetic.

Let’s not forget his tariffs on steel and aluminum too. Establishment Republicans warned him that his protectionism, traditionally a Democratic policy position, would spell economic doom for the industry, but he chose to listen to Peter Navarro instead. Bad move. By Election Day 2020, steel prices were 12 percent below where they had been prior to the tariffs, and steel mill employment had fallen by 4.2 percent (compared to overall private-sector employment, which had declined by 1.9 percent). Stock prices of U.S. steel companies had lost 28 percent of their value.

Trump is on the campaign trail touting tariffs again, despite warnings from economists that they would increase inflation. This isn’t complicated. Tariffs raise the prices of imported goods, which lead to higher costs for consumers and businesses that rely on foreign imports. Other countries impose their own tariffs in response, harming American exporters. Tariffs strain international relationships, making future trade negotiations more complicated. And crucially, they did little to reduce the trade deficit, which was the whole point. It sure would be nice to have a Republican presidential candidate who believes in free trade again.

Another thing about tariffs: industries that depended on global supply chains faced huge disruptions, and boy oh boy did that come back to bite us during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020, I can tell you that dealing with shortages of masks, tests, and other medical supplies was a constant challenge we faced in those first few frantic months.

When the economy went dark, Trump panicked. He had an election to win after all, and a bad economy is never good for an incumbent. If a few hundred thousand more people had to get deathly ill, well that was a risk he was willing to take. The economic impact of the shutdown was clearly painful, but Trump’s rush to open the economy back up while simultaneously undermining efforts to do it safely caused more illness, more deaths, and ultimately, an economy in even greater turmoil. 

Now, four years later, under the Biden-Harris administration, the American economy has made a remarkable post-pandemic recovery by nearly every measure. And yesterday, the Fed announced that it is cutting interest rates for the first time since the start of the pandemic. Just like in 2020, Trump is getting panicked. Again, he has an election to win, but this time he needs to undercut the strong economic record of his opponent. So he’s making all kinds of promises he knows he won’t keep, even vowing to “get SALT back”—a tax deduction he intentionally eliminated to hurt taxpayers in districts that didn’t vote for him in 2016. Populists gonna populist, I suppose.

On a whole other note, there’s a story out of Georgia this week that deserves your attention. Please check it out. Trump is a master at sidetracking us with drama as alarming things that will impact us all in a matter of weeks are happening quietly in the background. We won’t be silent.

See you next time,

Olivia