Missing the Point – ‘The Art of the Steal’
There’s an expression in business… “Never write a check with your mouth that your tush can’t cash.” That’s where President Trump and Republicans in Congress find themselves. The “check” I’m talking about are Trump’s tariffs.
As you can see, the title of this op/ed is a play on President Trump’s famous book, “The Art of the Deal.” Mr. Trump didn’t write that book. I’m not sure he’s ever read it. He had a ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, who has since regretted ever working on the project, which grossly mischaracterized and exaggerated the President’s skills as a negotiator. Recent behavior suggests that Donald Trump wouldn’t know a good deal if he fell over it. To President Trump, deals are about threatening people and governments if they don’t comply with his self-serving view of a favorable outcome. Very authoritarian. No finesse or diplomacy. He’s all about brute force. There’s no “art” to it.
His problem? To stay with an analogy he seems to enjoy, he doesn’t have the cards he thinks he’s holding. The European Union has a population of just under 450 million, not including Great Britain’s 68 million. That’s 518 million consumers, well more than our 340 million. We should be working with our allies in Europe rather than betraying our mutual history and encouraging their collective European economy to get along without us.
President Trump is a con man. It’s all he knows. He’s telling us that his massively reckless use of tariffs is about bringing manufacturing back to the United States. The next Congress in 2026 and new Democratic President in 2028 will cancel the Trump tariffs, if they’re still in effect, and return sanity to international trade. Every corporate executive knows that. Trump is short-term and has no idea what he’s doing. None of those executives is going to make permanent, expensive, long-term company-altering location decisions based on nonsensical international trade policies that won’t last long enough to make the changes Trump is demanding.
The tariffs will not return the glory of manufacturing back to America, but that’s not the point. Trump’s ploy for favorable public opinion is a distraction.
President Trump’s favorite concern is that half the new cars we buy are imported. He wants to fix that, for American workers to produce all the new cars we consume. That sounds good enough, but begs the question, “Why do we want to manufacture any cars in the United States in the first place?” The answer is, for several reasons, but one of the most important is to provide jobs for workers whose education and training is such that they aren’t prepared to produce new generation devices and services. Without leadership from Washington, they are forever stuck making widgets.
A revamped, rather than canceled, Department of Education might have helped lay the groundwork for next-generation production, but education isn’t something Trump values. The transition is happening already, one way or another, with or without careful planning. It’s only a matter of time before our auto workers are replaced by AI and robotics.
The United States didn’t become and certainly won’t continue to be the world’s leading economy and superpower by living in the past. It’s tomorrow’s science and technology that should be our principal focus. Let’s invent and perfect alternative means of transportation and, in the meantime, let the ordinary cars we drive be made by less developed, less productive economies. We need to do what we do best, relative to which we have the greatest “comparative advantage.” And then, we must constantly position ourselves to have that competitive advantage for whatever future pursuits promise to be of the greatest benefit to our people and our planet.
America is now and has always been all about the future. Trump is intellectually and legally corrupt and stuck in the past. The past is where great nations go to die. He’s not making America great again. He’s dropping anchor somewhere in the 1900s and holding us back.
Trump doesn’t get this point, nor does he have a clue what to do about it. But then it doesn’t make any difference what he does or doesn’t get. Telling workers that tariffs are going to provide job security makes his voters feel good and gives them the false impression that what he’s doing is in their best interests. He couldn’t care less.
What he’s doing is stealing money from middle and lower-income families to justify reducing taxes paid by wealthier Americans, himself included. That’s what’s going on. Hence the headline, “The Art of the Steal.”
Make up some garbage explanation to distract the mark, that’s you and me, while he gets away with the con. It’s what President Trump does best and why I recommend to Democrats that they aggressively accuse him of what I’ve been calling “Grand Theft Government.” It should be the theme of their campaign against the Republican Party. Imagine a poster featuring a grinning President Trump booking photo, holding up his name in front of the “height lines” behind him.
President Trump wants you to think he’s some kind of business/economics genius. He’s not. Do you know why so many pundits and other smart people have so many different explanations of his behavior, none of which are a good fit? It’s because all those analysts keep missing the point. Trump isn’t the rational player featured in Economics textbooks. He’s a con man and a thief in serious need of therapy before he does irreparable harm to our country and the American people who hired him to run their government.
Les Cohen is a long-term Marylander, having grown up in Annapolis. Professionally, he writes and edits materials for business and political clients from his base of operations in Columbia, Maryland. He has a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Economics. Leave a comment or feel free to send him an email to [email protected].