America needs to pay attention to fundamental issues
- Natalie Elliot
- Oct 2
- 3 min read
The date is the 24th of September 2018. You log on to Twitter, a relic of a bygone era, to peruse the daily goings-on of the best political commentary the modern world (of 2018) has to offer.
Who is this premier of conservative thought, you may ask? Well, it's no other than star Info Wars contributor Paul Joseph Watson, of course! The tweet reads as follows: “The right is starting to get better at comedy and it's making lefties nervous.”
Fast forward six years, 11 months, 29 days (at time of writing,) and a presidency and a half later; here we are. Trump is back, and he has a new favorite word: “tariff,” calling it the “most beautiful word in the English language
The once “fiscally responsible” conservatives have a new vision for U.S. economics. Gone is the era of free trade under the Reagan administration. Now, the M.O. is autocracy – or is it?
When speaking to MAGA conservatives, you will typically hear one of two reasonings. The first is that to bring back manufacturing, the United States needs to be an island, geopolitically and economically. An autarchic state all to its own. The second is to make a deal.
Ah yes, Trump, the deal maker-in-chief. After all, he did hire someone to write The Art Of The Deal for him. The idea is to use the threat of a tariff as the "big stick,” so to speak, to encourage other large powers of the world such as China to come to the discussion table and reach an agreement.
I have some contentions with both, chief among them is these are mutually exclusive justifications. These two explanations cannot both be true at the same time. If President Trump intends to use tariffs to fundamentally change the role the U.S. plays on the global stage, they would have to be permanent, no?
Tariffs are the push factor in this instance; they must remain indefinitely. This is incompatible with the idea that tariffs are simply a temporary measure meant to be a bludgeon implemented with the aim of bringing China, Mexico, and Canada to the table for negation. These are contradictory ideas.
What is the MAGA messaging here? Trump says he is a dealmaker, no new wars under the first term, ended seven wars so far in the second, Trump Gaza Resort, and so on. And why should other countries trust Trump or the U.S. by extension when it comes to trade anyway? Trump called NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) “the worst trade deal ever made” and claimed his renegotiation into the USMCA (United States Mexico Canada Agreement) as a major victory for his first term as president. Now the USMCA is “no good” either and we need to renegotiate on that too?
President Trump has killed his own credibility as a negotiator and advocate for economic prosperity and partnership on the world stage.
The president fires the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics) Commissioner for publishing numbers which he disagrees with of find to be dissatisfactory in one way or another. Is this what is meant by “draining the swamp”?. The president jokes about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad. Any person of any political persuasion should be able to agree that this is unbefitting of the president of the United States of America.
The point of all of this, at the end of the day, is MAGAs stated values don’t seem to align with their ideological practice. According to Gallup, 90% of voters ranked the economy as either “extremely important” or “very important” in the 2024 presidential general election. I make a personal promise to you, the reader, that the average Trump voter cannot tell you what comparative advantage is or how tariffs work or what a trade deficit is.
There is a clear cognitive dissonance at play. We claim economics as the most important thing for the presidency but don’t actually seem to know very much about economics. Instead, we talk about Alligator Alcatraz or the Epstein files or whatever else.
We as a country, right or left, need to do something about the seeming lack of attention we pay to the fundamental issues we claim to be so important to us.
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