David Brooks:
This is like trying to cure acne with decapitation. Like, it’s just massive. And it threw the whole country, universities, nonprofits, government officials, into total chaos.
And so it seems like nobody had the sense to say, well, what would happen next if we threw out in two pages with no clarity what’s about to happen? Well, of course the world’s going to blow up at you. And, of course — and this, I hope, is the pattern for the Trump administration. When they do something that’s hurts Donald Trump standing, he pulls it back.
Then they end just today with tariffs. And G.K. Chesterton, the British writer, said that civilizations decline when they forget the obvious. And one of the obvious things is, tariffs are really bad for a country. In 1930, we had the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, we all learned this in high school, which turned a financial crisis into a global recession by cutting trade flows.
Now, this won’t be that bad, but it’ll have the effect of a financial crisis on Canada and on Mexico. All the things you want in an economy that are good get worse under tariffs. You get lower wages, you get lower productivity, you get lower supply chain flows.
So, to me, it’s another self-destructive policy. And so we have seen these two cases of just basic reasonable competence not being followed.
