As I am a conservative, I agree with most of Trump’s policies and objectives: re-establish border integrity; curb government waste; banish D.E.I. and hire people on their merits rather than their gender, colour, sexual orientation, etc..
Yet at the same time, any rational conservative must admit that his manner of pursuing his goals is troubling, indeed suggests he may in fact be the threat to Democracy constantly proclaimed by the Left. It is a complex issue to which there is no simple answer. Trump’s declaration of Liberation Day on April 2, a day on which he seemingly declared economic war on the rest of the planet, affords significant insights into his competency as President.
On April 4, Ben Shapiro of The Daily Wire posted a lengthy video outlining his reservations with Trump’s analysis of America’s apparent economic decline. A rational, intelligent conservative, Shapiro is perfectly willing to criticize those of his mindset when they stray from the Truth. To me this makes him not a Traitor to the Cause, but a Man of Integrity.
The basic point of Shapiro’s dissertation is that Trump’s statistical evidence of the way in which the rest of the world has been taking advantage of the States, is rife with gross exaggerations if not outright lies. While Trump claims that Israel, for example, has for some time been saddling American imports with 33% tariffs, Shapiro insists it in fact imposes next to no tariffs whatsoever on U.S. goods. The same would seem to be true of South Korea with which the U.S. has had a “free trade” agreement since 2012. While Trump insists its tariff rate to be at approximately 50%, Shapiro says it is almost nil! South Korea’s former Trade Minister Yeo Han-Koo agreed, stating recently that the U.S. president seemed to have forgotten that his country’s rates were “close to zero”! The ridiculous discrepancies in the figures just cited, according to Shapiro, stem from Trump’s conviction that America’s trade deficits with various countries are unequivocally the result of some very unfair trade policies.
His neighbour to the north, shockingly, is a frequent target of Trump’s disdain. But while he suggests the States’ trade deficit with Canada to be just another example of the exploitation of his homeland, Shapiro points out that deficit to simply be the product of America’s purchase of our fossil fuels. Eliminate those products from the equation and Canada apparently has a massive trade deficit with the U.S.! Economist Stephen Tapp, in a National Post article written shortly after Trump’s Nov. election, concurs, stating “Canada is the top export market for the U.S. nationally and for 34 individual states.” As to the notion that unfair tariffs have had anything at all to do with the economic relationship between the two countries, former P. M. Stephen Harper, in a National Post article of Feb. 23, cited “the almost entirely tariff-free trade that has defined the Canadian-American economic relationship for three and a half decades.” Harper, shrewdly anticipating Trump’s April 2 declaration of a tariff war, suggested Canada not respond in kind but rather improve its economy by dealing with its own internal problems. His implication, clearly, is that Trump ought to do the same south of the border.
Trade deficits are an inevitable fact of Reality! South Korea has a healthy manufacturing sector yet a population that is only slightly more than one sixth that of the U. S.. Of course Americans, by their very numbers, will purchase more products from South Korea than the citizens of the latter will purchase from them! There is nothing innately unfair about this dynamic. Indeed Shapiro insists that economists who deem Free Trade to be beneficial to all concerned were appalled by Trump’s April 2 declaration of a Tariff War on the rest of the world. He also suggests the president’s citation of a “national emergency” as his justification for bypassing Congress in his various Executive decisions, to be decidedly questionable if not unconstitutional.
In the days following Trump’s April 2 declaration, the stock market slumped and, according to Shapiro, many U.S. investors were utterly terrified. He did however admit that Trump is a realist whose outrageous tariff threats might in fact be but a negotiation ploy. The last 7 weeks seem to have proven him to be correct, Trump backing off his tariff threats with one country after another, causing the markets to rebound and leading to fruitful negotiations such as those recently concluded with Great Britain. America’s May 8 deal with that country, ironically, was heralded by the Office of the United States Trade Representative for enhancing the country’s “economic integration” with the U.K.. So Trump’s tariff stratagem ultimately led to a closer relationship with a nation he had threatened? Is he, as is constantly claimed by the Left, an autocratic jerk or a brilliant negotiator, or some bizarre combination of the two?
The tariff rates cited by Ben Shapiro imply Trump to be little more than a brazen liar. Yet a thorough appraisal of the complexities of international trade reveals those rates to be only part of the story. Free Trade agreements, one reads, are often nothing of the kind, fraught with all sorts of qualifications utterly inconsistent with “free trade.” Countries such as South Korea, for example, in spite of their modest tariffs on U.S. goods, in fact impose other restrictions on the import of any number of products. Trump’s insistence, in other words, that the U.S. is being victimized, may have some truth to it. The U.S. saw 60,000 manufacturing facilities closed between 2001 and 2015, costing the country 4.7 million jobs. Moreover its trade deficit in 2024 was 1.2 trillion dollars, the largest in the country’s history. Yet while one certainly understands the validity of Trump’s concerns, do they in any way justify the tactics to which he has resorted?
The status of Canada’s trade relationship with the States remains unresolved. After Trump’s initial threat of a 25% hike on Canadian products, he almost immediately invoked a moratorium. While Canada did respond with counter tariffs of its own, most have now apparently been rescinded. The overwhelming majority of the economists who have offered an opinion on this situation maintain that a trade war would be devastating for both countries, that their economies are interdependent in a myriad of ways, indeed that Trump’s threats, to use Stephen Harper’s euphemism, were mere “pretenses.” Metaphorically, the U.S. president basically put a gun to the heads of those he was dealing with, threatening to pull the trigger if they did not bend to his wishes. That the deals he has concluded with China and the U.K. seem to be mutually beneficial, is to his credit. However the lies and threats he used in achieving those ends were ignorant, arrogant and morally repugnant. The ultimate irony of his Presidency is that a good many of those who voted for him saw him in this very light, yet were so disgusted with the “woke” stupidity of the contemporary Left that they felt they had no other choice.