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Donald Trump’s genius has always been marketing: himself, his properties, his political campaigns. But when it comes to the effects of his tariffs, the master has either lost a step or is facing a challenge that even he hasn’t yet figured out how to spin.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are gonna be open,’” the president said on Wednesday. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, and maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more.” Americans, he said, will not “have to go out of our way.”
Presidents have asked Americans to sacrifice for the national good before. A few months after the United States entered World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extolled those resisting the Axis overseas before making a plea to those at home. “There is one front and one battle where everyone in the United States—every man, woman, and child—is in action, and will be privileged to remain in action throughout this war. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives, and in our daily tasks,” he said. “This will require, of course, the abandonment not only of luxuries but of many other creature comforts. Every loyal American is aware of his individual responsibility.”
Three decades later, two presidents had less success asking citizens to give something up. “To help save scarce fuel in the energy crisis, drive less, heat less,” Gerald Ford implored in 1974; voters bounced him in favor of Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 told the country, “All of us must learn to waste less energy. Simply by keeping our thermostats, for instance, at 65 degrees in the daytime and 55 degrees at night, we could save half the current shortage of natural gas.” The speech became a symbol of Carter’s shiftless presidency, fairly or not, and he, too, served only one term. No wonder George W. Bush encouraged Americans to consume and spend after 9/11.
Trump can’t seem to decide whether he’s asking Americans to sacrifice or not. On the one hand, he’s acknowledging that tariffs will exact a cost, and he’s framing that cost as necessary for taking on China. On the other hand, he also claims that Americans won’t have to go out of their way. It’s an easily mockable claim, and no one has mocked it as effectively as Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which ran Trump’s doll quote on yesterday’s front page with the headline “Skimp on the Barbie.”
This president is a particularly flawed messenger for this moment, because he is unlikely to personally suffer much pain from rising prices—one of the benefits of being the kind of guy who spends a lot of time in his literal gilded mansion. I’ve written before about the rhetorical agility that Trump uses to maintain his populist appeal and rail against elites, even as he is one of them. Some of Trump’s advisers lack his ability to convince ordinary Americans he’s just like them. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (Forbes estimated net worth: $3.2 billion) this week defended the tariffs by saying that the U.S. needs to onshore manufacturing. “It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past, but to do the great jobs of the future,” he told CNBC. “This is the new model where you work in these kinds of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here.” These sound exactly like the jobs of yesterday, only without the guaranteed pensions and strong labor unions that made them sustainable and desirable.
To Lutnick’s credit, he also wants his children to follow him into the same job—which is why his two 20-something sons are now leading Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank he left to join the administration. He’s the same Trump aide who wrote off concerns about a Social Security shutdown stalling checks by insisting that his own mother-in-law (whose son-in-law, once again, is worth a few billion dollars) wouldn’t be rattled to miss one.
But even Trump’s anti-elitist trick is unlikely to work so well here, because Trump promised something very different on the campaign trail. He promised to end inflation, give Americans free in vitro fertilization, and slash taxes. Instead, the retail price of basic staples such as eggs continues to rise; these tariffs represent the largest tax increase in recent U.S. history, and Trump is now warning of a straitened Christmas. He presented tariffs as a way to pay for everything and anything, such as child care, and pretended that China, not American consumers, would pay the tariffs. Perhaps it’s a good idea for Americans to cut back on cheap imported plastic goods, but coming from Trump, it’s a bait and switch.
Trump appears to be inducing an entirely voluntary economic slowdown and asking voters to bear the brunt of it, but he doesn’t give any indication that, like Bill Clinton, he feels their pain. His sliding approval on the economy shows that Americans have started to wonder why any of this is happening.
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Today’s News
- The Trump administration proposed cutting $163 billion from the federal budget next year. The plan includes decreasing spending for the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and education, and increasing funding for defense and border security.
- President Donald Trump renewed his threat to take away Harvard University’s tax-exempt status.
- Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson condemned the attacks on judges from Trump and his allies.
Dispatches
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Evening Read
‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’
By Tom Bartlett
In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and downvotes—in other words, being shaped by actual people.
So earlier this week, when members of a popular subreddit learned that their community had been infiltrated by undercover researchers posting AI-written comments and passing them off as human thoughts, the Redditors were predictably incensed.
Read the full article.
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Culture Break
Watch. The new Marvel film Thunderbolts* (out now in theaters) poses a surprising solution to the franchise’s aimlessness problem, David Sims writes: stop trying so hard.
Stream. Streamers such as Zack “Asmongold” Hoyt have more political influence than ever, Spencer Kornhaber writes. What are they really saying?
Play our daily crossword.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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