Trump’s Tornado of Tariffs Vindicates Madison’s Warning That ‘Enlightened Statesmen Will Not Always Be at the Helm’

After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different. President Franklin Roosevelt’s legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. President Trump’s legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint (e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers) can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power.Mr. Trump’s ever-shifting and contradictory rationales for tariffs (curing trade deficits, strengthening national security, punishing ingratitude, etc.) disclose that protectionism is not an economic policy but a political strategy for aggrandizing personal power. His tornado of tariffs-by-whim produces an endless auction as businesses bid for beneficial whims: intensifications of, or exemptions from, tariffs.As the American Enterprise Institute’s Dalibor Rohac says, when tariffs are multiple and malleable, private rent-seeking (bending government for preferential treatment or for injurious treatment of competitors) displaces entrepreneurial talent and shrewd management as the path to economic success. Rent-seeking has always been with us, but not on today’s scale as innumerable factions become genuflecting supplicants, groveling for presidential favors.The most statist administration in American history has replaced capitalism with what economists call “economic repression”: Government supplanting the market by restraining or compelling economic activities for political objectives.Campaigning in 2024, Mr. Trump called price controls “socialist,” “communist,” “Marxist” and “fascist.” This year, he promises price controls on prescription pharmaceuticals and vows to “investigate” noncompliant companies. Under the personalist rule by an unfettered executive, the process is the punishment: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards,” said such an executive, the Queen of Hearts in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”After a 18-month administrative-state farce involving faux “national security” worries, the government has allowed the sale of United States Steel to a private corporation headquartered in a close ally, Japan. Mr. Trump has, however, in effect nationalized U.S. Steel, which must give to presidents, in perpetuity, a “golden share” in the corporation. The New York Times explains: “U.S. Steel’s charter will list nearly a dozen activities the company cannot undertake without the approval of the American president or someone he designates.”The ban on TikTok is a misguided law passed by large congressional majorities and unanimously affirmed by an excessively deferential Supreme Court, its intelligence perhaps bewitched by presidential solemnities about “national security.” The law, which went into effect January 19, stipulates that to facilitate the sale of the app to a non-Chinese entity, the president can grant one extension, up to 90 days, of nonenforcement.Trump has now ordered two more extensions, while disregarding the law’s stipulation that he justify an extension to Congress by certifying concrete progress toward TikTok’s divestiture. This is not enforcement discretion, it is nullification of a law — a veto without an opportunity for Congress to override it. In 1838, the Supreme Court termed “entirely inadmissible” the idea that the president has (as English kings once had) a “dispensing power” to “license illegal conduct” or the power “to forbid … execution” of laws. Never mind constitutional morality. Mr. Trump is not mistaken in regarding laws as mere whispered suggestions from Congress until it rediscovers its pride and grows a spine.Speaking of the invertebrate: The president filed a risible lawsuit against CBS for an editing decision he disliked and extorted a $16 million settlement from a network that is as purely transactional as he is. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, seemingly decided it was economically sensible to buy him off, lest he cause an administrative agency to block a merger Paramount desires. The company’s civic irresponsibility is just another accommodation to personalist rule under a Putinesque presidency.Today’s administrative state, suffocating society with enveloping laws and regulations, can be wielded like a cudgel by a president enjoying seemingly limitless discretion as congressional majorities choose to be ciphers. A president without constitutional scruples is not limited by institutions that are theoretically, but not actually, rivalrous.The subtlest of the Founders, James Madison, used nine laconic words (in 10 Federalist) to express the most memorable understatement in U.S. history: “Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Those who in 1787 framed our system of checks and balances had this in mind. They could not have imagined the desuetude into which their system has decayed 238 years later.Today’s shambolic civic life, with the public sector dominating and corrupting the private sector, discloses this: The Founders’ elegant architecture of institutions for liberty under limited government guarantees nothing when the institutions are inhabited by the unenlightened.The Washington Post

Trump’s Tornado of Tariffs Vindicates Madison’s Warning That ‘Enlightened Statesmen Will Not Always Be at the Helm’

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