Trump is not correcting a trade imbalance; he’s creating one to the detriment of not just U.S. businesses and the U.S. economy but to the material lives of Americans living in that economy who will bear the brunt of the lack of job creation, possible layoffs, obstacles growing their businesses and more. And it never helps to have hostility with a nation on your border.

It’s hard to see how Trump is putting America first with these tariffs.

Trump promised during his campaign to address inflation and lower costs for Americans, particularly food and energy costs. Yet if he really wished to honor this promise, he would be advocating for swift and substantial support for Ukraine and playing hardball with Russian President Vladimir Putin, instead of swooning in his autocratic bro-mance with him.

Let’s think about it.  Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine is and has been a key cause of rising oil and gas prices, of energy costs overall, and thus of the surging prices for all goods and services. Most things we buy–groceries, clothing, etc–have to be transported via boat, plane, or truck, so rising fuel prices make the cost of just about everything rise.

The attack on American working families is real, and that attack is taking place through Trump’s efforts to undermine the economic well-being of Americans by destroying the economy and starving the government programs that provide vital services and safety nets for us all. 

Trump wants America–and Americans–in his economic stranglehold. What can make people more dependent and powerless than completely immiserating them?

Trump’s tariffs function as a tax on working families in America, even if they aren’t called that. Yes, the tariffs may bring a lot of money to the U.S. government, but it’s not being distributed back to the average working family. It will go to the wealthiest.

The tariffs are just another mechanism for Trump to redistribute wealth to the top at the expense of average Americans.

As Bruce Bartlett explained the concept in a 2007 article, “The idea is that if revenues are unilaterally reduced, this reduction will lead to a higher budget deficit, which will force legislators to enact spending cuts. Thus, using tax cuts to bring about spending cuts has been called ‘starving the beast.’”

House Republicans are no longer even trying to sell the lie that tax cuts pay for themselves by stimulating economic growth and bringing in more revenue to the federal government or that the wealth will trickle down. Instead, they are being very clear that to pay for these tax cuts they will need to make substantial cuts to important programs that have supported Americans’ health and well-being–to the tune of $2 trillion.

The fact is, if you think about it, Americans just elected the worst boss ever:  the boss everybody hates, whose style of leadership is more interested in making your life miserable and thrilling in his power to do so, than in creating a happy and productive workplace that honors people’s talents and contributions.

The transformation of hearts and minds will require a profound cultural transformation, and promoting important stories that can define and inform a national self-consciousness and identity and narrate a new direction is one key element of this project of cultural transformation.

Our nation collectively, but especially white America, needs to confront and work through psychotherapeutically the deep cultural and collective mental illness of white male supremacy to understand why it’s damaging to the interests and well-being of white Americans and all Americans. We need stories that help us work this poison out of our cultural bloodstream.

One story that comes to mind is the 1998 movie American History X, directed by Tony Kaye and written by David McKenna. 

I am not suggesting we not act with conscience per se, but I am suggesting that the call on conscience tends to root us in an individualist stance that removes us from our relationship with the many others in our world and prevents us from seriously imagining the impact of our voting behavior on their lives.  We might just need a different term, maybe something like “social justice” or the “public good” which takes us out of our individual sense of rightness to think in broader terms.  Indeed, the very problem with neo-liberalism is its evacuation of the concept of a public good, its denial of its very validity, as it insists we are motivated only by private interests.