Trump’s Trade War Is Not Over

The illegal war in Iran—and whatever illegal war the president will launch next with the acquiescence of that gutless, mindless rump that still has the bad taste to call itself the Republican Party—has drawn the spotlight away from Trump’s trade war. But the economic bellum Americanum contra omnes into which our nation, its entrepreneurs, its workers, and its capital have been dragged by this senescent gameshow host is very much a going concern. Tariffs remain high by historical standards, and they remain in place without any intelligible legal authority: Trump is supposedly acting under the authority of the Trade Act of 1974, which permits tariffs to address a balance-of-payments crisis—but there is no balance-of-payments crisis at this time and none on the horizon. (A balance-of-payments crisis is what happens when a country lacks funds to pay for necessary imports or is unable to meet its debt-service obligations. We’ll get there, someday, if we keep going in the direction Trump et al. are leading us at the moment, but we are not there at this time, and Trump’s recourse to the 1974 law is, as one might have easily predicted, entirely pretextual.) Trump has for 50 years been hostage to the incredibly asinine notion that the great economic problem facing Americans is that, when foreigners sell us stuff, they don’t charge us enough money, and that the government therefore must find ways to raise the prices of imports. (That ectoplasmic sound you’re hearing is the ghost of every president, prince, or emperor who ever went to the expense of building an army or a navy to keep the trade routes open smacking his incorporeal forehead in disbelief.) Of course, Trump would not put it this way, but what he is doing is waging war on abundance and choice.

That becomes clearer the nearer one gets to the real world of American business, which is not very much at all like the make-believe boardroom Trump inhabited as the host of The Apprentice. Ask Ed Schweitzer, until recently the president of SEL, a multi-billion-dollar company that designs and builds systems that help keep electric power systems running smoothly around the world, equipment that prevents blackouts, among other things. Schweitzer’s name is right there on the door—SEL stands for Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, and he is the firm’s founder and the inventor of the first microprocessor-based instrument for protecting transmission lines and locating faults in them. He started the company in 1982 and made his first sale soon thereafter, to the Otter Tail Power Company in Fergus Falls, Minnesota. A certain kind of populist malcontent will rage, from time to time, that “we don’t make things in this country anymore.” SEL does, operating five major factories in the United States along with regional assembly facilities and other outposts. It also operates facilities in Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil and maintains field offices around the world. The firm carries no meaningful debt and is jointly owned by its more than 7,000 employees. It is one of those quintessential American success stories: A guy who received a first-rate state-college education (PhD, Washington State) had a big idea and started a business in his basement, and now his products help keep the lights on everywhere from Oakland to far-flung Saudi Aramco facilities.

All that work and innovation can be turned on its head with a stroke of Trump’s pen, and it has been.

When Trump announced his so-called Liberation Day tariff scheme on April 2, 2025, Schweitzer and his team began calculating the cost—or began trying to, at least: As Trump lurched from one tariff regime to another based on his interactions with imaginary worldwide figures such as the Swiss prime minister, keeping up with the damage estimates became a full-time job. “We estimated tariffs would cost us up to $140 million a year. At the time, that would have been about 7 percent of our sales and about half our profits confiscated.” Because of the nature of his clients’ operations, Schweitzer runs a very conservative business. “We use profits to fuel our growth. We don’t borrow money. We do it what used to be the American way and save it before we spend it. We’re in a conservative industry. Electric power utilities and major industries around the world depend on us to run our business in a very, very solid way.”

As such, political risk is a constant concern for SEL. Schweitzer once challenged his team to come up with a program for manufacturing certain products entirely in the United States but found that doing so would not only be uneconomical but impossible—there are some microprocessors and other necessary inputs that simply are not available from American sources.

“We encourage our suppliers to make what we need from them closer to home—preferably somewhere we can drive a truck to, like the United States, Canada, or Mexico, partly to reduce sovereign risk, war, that sort of things, but also disasters, earthquakes, tsunamis, whatever. And now we’re having to respond to domestic sovereign risk created by the White House,” Schweitzer told me. “One thing I now wonder about is what do our international customers think about sovereign risk in buying products from the United States, including the stuff we make?”

There is no such thing as “Made in the USA.” There are firms making cotton balls out of U.S.-grown cotton in North Carolina and Ohio, but even these domestic factories processing domestic material are part of a vastly complex global supply chain—that cotton may come from the Texas Panhandle, but those cotton crops are fertilized with Canadian potash along with other imported materials. And with all due respect to my friends and family in the cotton business, the stuff that SEL makes is a hell of a lot more complicated than a cotton ball. (Though don’t let the simplicity of the end good mislead you about the simplicity of the production ecosystem: You can I, Cotton Ball this stuff all day and never really get a handle on it.) Slapping a sales tax on U.S. importers is not the way to remake global supply chains—which, the pointy-headed libertarian here will point out, may not actually need remaking, a process that is almost certain to impose costs far in excess of any real economic benefit. Trying to get that kind of complex geoeconomic work done under the leadership of a guy who couldn’t figure out a way to make money owning a New Jersey casino with a strip-joint in it is pretty much the definition of a fool’s errand.

But Trump’s attitude toward his business-owning constituents is the same as his attitude toward the Supreme Court: The gangsterism is the point. An arbitrary system of trade taxation makes clients and favor-seekers out of every business in the United States, creating opportunities for political advancement and personal enrichment for Trump and his circle of sycophants. “One elected official on the Hill told us, ‘We’ve got great relationships with the White House and the trade representative, let us know what you need and maybe we can get you some kind of an exemption,’” Schweitzer related. “I politely said, ‘No.’ We’re not going to do that. It’s not right for me to be able to call him up and get an exemption. I want an exemption for everybody. Special-interest politics is not draining the swamp—it’s putting more alligators in it. It’s been a good year for alligators and K Street restaurants, but that ain’t the way to run a railroad.”

If the Iran war starts to go badly—or maybe if it goes very well, or if Trump simply loses interest in it—it is a safe bet he will turn his attention back to trade. 

Since I’ve now touched on the topic twice: Put me down with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rod Dreher who say that the growth and normalization of gambling in the United States is a social disaster. I could have told you that. And, well, I did. See “Play to Extinction” in Big White Ghetto.

“Tanty” for “tantrum” is a usage with which I was not familiar—I’m not sure I like it, but it does make the word sound more juvenile, which is, I suppose, the desired effect.

Do you know who is just as useless as teats on a boar? New York Times headline writers. I know I am late to this party, but, on the death of Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, the Times writes: “His best-selling 1968 book, which forecast global famines, made him a leader of the environmental movement. But he faced criticism when his predictions proved premature.”

Premature? Did you mofos really just write premature?

Ehrlich, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, insisted it was a matter of absolute certainty—irrespective of any policy changes that might take place—that hundreds of millions of people would die in the 1970s and 1980s from worldwide famine, that countries such as the United Kingdom would simply cease to exist because of mass starvation, etc. There is much more, of course—he was a global-cooling guy before he was a global-warming guy—and of all the things you could say to characterize his predictions, premature is just indefensible. That isn’t just stupidity—that is old-fashioned tribalism. No progressive hero can ever be wrong (Ehrlich) or a crank (Margaret Sanger) or a crackpot (Linus Pauling) or an antisemite (Jesse Jackson) or  … You can almost hear them scratching out the “Cesar Chavez wasn’t really a progressive icon” pieces right now. When I last wrote about Sanger’s eugenics craziness, I was lectured that she held beliefs that were common at the time, which is true—and so did Jefferson Davis.

Premature–what a way to put it! I’m a New York Times and Washington Post subscriber (and very occasional contributor to both newspapers). It is, in my view, really important for a free, self-governing republic with democratic institutions such as ours to have institutions such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, guys—jeez.

Premature. Somebody ought to get sent down to the Long Island desk for that one.

Helen Lewis of That Esteemed Journalistic Institution is not wrong about this, also regarding the Times:

We should probably retire the term “trans women” along with the myth that the people described by that term are in some meaningful sense women. We can treat people with respect and kindness and offer many kinds of social accommodation without being obliged to play make-believe.

That is not what synecdoche means. Neither is this.

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A rising tide lifts all boats, the proverb goes. Sometimes, the rising tide has a name—in the case of the WNBA, it is Caitlin Clark. From the Wall Street Journal:

The upshot? A rise in the salary cap of 364 percent, which, as the Journal relates, represents “the biggest jump ever seen in U.S. professional sports history.”

I like to see hard-working people who are good at what they do get paid. 

The energy I am personally willing to expend on professional sports of any kind would not, on an average day, be sufficient to light up a 40-watt lightbulb. Labor markets in professional sports are very weird in many ways, but they are, in the end, markets. And markets really do work. You can hector people all day, as Nike for some reason insists on doing, about the importance of women’s sports, but people either buy the tickets or they don’t. And they do. 

The superstar effect is not limited to sports: From actors to CEOs to nonprofit executives, high-performing outliers command unusually rich compensation and, in the process, can—can, but do not always—raise compensation expectations and norms across an industry. Presidents of state universities, for example, have not always been paid north of $1 million. In the early 1990s, there was an attempt to make a scandal out of Elizabeth Dole’s compensation as president of the Red Cross—$200,000 a year, although she decided to forgo her salary in her first year on the job and had no problem making a multiple of that number from speaking engagements. She was very good at the job. Nonprofits were starting to discover that it makes good financial sense to spend a lot of money on talented executives and fundraisers rather than pay lower salaries to middling idealists. A billion-dollar CEO who makes shareholders $100 billion is not expensive—he is a bargain. If they deliver the goods, then that is money well spent. 

Caitlin Clark is, as I understand it, a pretty reliable deliverer of the goods. And the fruit of her success is going to show up in a lot of paychecks other than her own. Basketball franchises that used to be worth $x are now going to be worth some multiple of that. A lot of intellectual property is going to get a lot more valuable. Certain sports facilities are going to be more profitable to operate and hence more valuable real estate than they had been. Nearby restaurants, hotels, and parking garages may in some cases grow more valuable as well. I couldn’t tell you what team Caitlin Clark plays for with a gun to my head, but I am happy to stand up and cheer for shared prosperity. Sometimes, the cup runneth over.