Trump’s Lust for Power Cannot Be Satiated

Opinion|Trump’s Lust for Power Cannot Be Satiated

It is a fool’s errand to try to rationalize President Trump’s obsession with tariffs.

This is not to say that people haven’t tried. There are any number of theories that seek to explain Trump’s preoccupation with tariffs and trade wars. Perhaps he wants to revitalize American manufacturing and bring factory jobs back to postindustrial communities wracked by poverty and despair. Perhaps he wants the revenue he generates from large tariffs to reduce deficits and help address the nation’s long-term debt. Or perhaps he hopes to rebalance the global economic system, weakening the dollar in order to make the United States a more export-driven economy.

But each line of thinking shares an obvious problem: How does one accomplish any of these goals with blanket tariffs that threaten to radically reduce trade with the United States? How do you revitalize American manufacturing if manufacturers can’t reasonably import the materials they need to build factories and produce goods? Where is capital supposed to come from? How do you reset the nation’s relationship with its trading partners if those partners are forced to treat you as a bad actor who can’t be trusted? And how are you supposed to revitalize working-class communities if your trade policies will probably destroy as many blue-collar jobs as they might, theoretically, create?

There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither reason nor speak coherently about them. There is no grand plan or strategic vision, no matter what his advisers claim — only the impulsive actions of a mad king, untethered from any responsibility to the nation or its people. For as much as the president’s apologists would like us to believe otherwise, Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.

The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams, hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.

This simple fact of the president’s psychology does more to explain his antipathy to international trade and enthusiasm for tariffs and other trade barriers than any theorizing about his intentions or overall vision. It certainly is not as if he has a considered view of the global economy. It is not even clear that Trump knows what a tariff is.

This isn’t a dig. The president genuinely seems to think of tariffs as fees that foreign countries pay to the United States. “We have massive Financial Deficits with China, the European Union, and many others,” he wrote on his Truth Social website on Sunday. “The only way this problem can be cured is with TARIFFS, which are now bringing Tens of Billions of Dollars into the U.S.A.” Here, you also see his related belief that a trade deficit represents an actual absence of funds, akin to a negative balance in a bank account.