When President Donald Trump ordered the implementation of his so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs on April 2, he proclaimed that it was “now our turn to prosper.”
Exactly four weeks later, Trump delivered a very different message to the American people: You’ll get less and you’ll pay more.
“Somebody said, ‘Oh the shelves are going to be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” Trump said Wednesday during a cabinet meeting open to the press. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”
Some prosperity, huh?
You might conclude that the costs and consequences of Trump’s global trade war are becoming impossible to ignore—even for a president who has stubbornly refused to acknowledge the reality of his own tariff policies. Even though Trump has previously warned about the possibility of some economic “pain” associated with the tariffs and retreated from the more aggressive plan he initially outlined on April 2, Wednesday’s comments are the most direct admission yet that tariffs will directly reduce Americans’ standard of living.
Did Americans accidentally elect Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), who once railed against the wide variety of sneakers and deodorant?
Like Sanders, Trump is wildly out of touch here. “Suck it up and make do with less” is the sort of message you’d expect from a Soviet commissar or a Venezuelan dictator, not an American president whose whole identity is built around being wealthy.
But, of course, the tariffs were always going to sap Americans’ standard of living. No matter what internally inconsistent and self-defeating logic Trump and his allies used, it was always true that tariffs are nothing more than taxes and it’s impossible to tax your way to prosperity.
Unfortunately, the consequences won’t be limited to fewer children’s toys—though that is one sector that could be particularly hard hit by the dramatic slowdown in imports from China. “The alarm in the [toy] industry is palpable, with the companies predicting product shortages and higher prices,” The New York Times reported this week. “Some business owners, citing how crucial holiday sales are to their bottom lines, are consulting bankruptcy lawyers.”
“Now do this for clothing, shoes, food, appliances, consumer electronics, energy, construction materials, etc etc, and you start to see the problem,” Scott Lincicome, vice president of general economics for the Cato Institute, posted on X in response to Trump’s comments. “Forced scarcity is not a pathway to prosperity.”
Scarcity is the path that Trump has chosen, despite warnings from hundreds of economists. Now, having unilaterally created supply chain disruptions on a scale not seen since the COVID-19 pandemic in pursuit of supposedly populist goals, Trump is delivering an elitist shrug. If basic household necessities end up costing “a few bucks more,” that won’t be a serious problem for our elected leaders—or the lobbyists who are getting rich as businesses seek special favors within Trump’s tariff schemes.
It will, however, be a problem for lots of other Americans, many of whom are more sensitive to price hikes after years of high inflation and rising interest rates. No wonder Trump’s tariffs are deeply unpopular, and dragging his approval rating down with them.
