We Don't Have Dictators In America
What's missing from the fight over Trump's tariff fiasco.
My overriding view for almost a decade has been that, for as long as he darkens our door, Donald Trump makes questions of policy design and priorities—questions that typically divide the broad left—relatively unimportant. Not meaningless or stupid, but more indulgent and diversionary than they’d be under normal circumstances.
Policy is important, vision is important. Nobody should slip into nihilism. But through sheer vice, Trump warps public sentiment and the public’s perception of need, making wise priorities hard to set. Prior to Trump, I wrote almost exclusively about the big substantive clashes that defined the post-New Deal era. After Trump became president the first time—and with a couple big exceptions in his first year in office—those debates became trivial relative to the immediate challenge of protecting the country from him: his lawlessness and incompetence, and the malign influence of his character.
There was plenty of policy infighting during the Biden years, but getting lost in the weeds struck me as whistling past the graveyard—or, worse, counterproductive. Wasting a year fighting over the details of what became the Inflation Reduction Act was harmful not principally for its effect on the legislation itself, but in making Democrats seem torpid and incompetent when they needed desperately to seem able and decisive.
Joe Biden’s presidency will be remembered differently by different people but his principle objective—the basis of his 2020 campaign—was to end the Trump era for good. His failure on that front is etched into his legacy, but the nature of that failure has, in my view, trivially little to do with policy design and much to do with allowing collective memory of the Trump years to fade. Wonks will gesture toward the American Rescue Plan for its contribution to inflation as a counterpoint, but that contribution is tiny relative to the decision to turn the page on Trump, his pandemic failures, and (thus) the global inflation he helped produce.
Trump was gone, but Biden didn’t want his presidency to be understood as a four year effort to fix Trump’s failures and wipe the stain of Trump’s presidency off the books. The connection severed, and our memories of corruption, chaos, and incompetence gave way to new memories of indecision, malaise, and Biden’s personal infirmity.
My view today, as Trump lays waste to the global economy and attempts to seize dictatorial power, is largely unchanged. When you have a liberal society, you fight over policy. When that society is under attack you regroup to defend it. This feeds my sense of what fighting Trump should look and sound like in practice today, and when and how Democrats should intervene to protect the country from the damage he’s inflicting.
‘TATOR THOUGHTS
Democrats have demonstrated broad unity of opposition to Trump’s trade war over the past several days, but beneath the surface there is some division. Most Democrats have taken a firm and direct line, blaming Trump outright for obliterating trillions of dollars in wealth and placing the U.S. on course for recession or worse. But some Democrats—a hodgepodge of labor progressives and officials representing blue-collar states and districts—have tempered their critiques with caveats about how protectionist trade policy can be wise if implemented carefully, to advance specific goals.
I am mostly happy to see unity. The opposition should welcome almost everyone who thinks and says the orange man is bad. And I don’t view these more hedged or mealy mouthed Dems to be committing some heresy against conventional economics. There’s more to politics than conventional economics. But I do think they’re succumbing to the same analytic errors Biden made when he decided the best way to beat Trump in 2024 was to pander to blue-collar rust-belt voters with a certain kind of pro-worker rhetoric and 100,000 factory jobs. In reality, it was to unleash political and legal accountability until Trump wasn’t just defeated, but vanquished.
The most important thing for everyone in America to know right now is that Trump is causing immense damage to the U.S. and the world in a completely heedless way, and Democrats want to stop him. Period. People in Michigan and Maine need to blame Trump for this disaster much more than they need to be convinced that Democrats have struck the perfect goldilocks balance between free trade and strategic protectionism. And they need to see Trump’s conduct as fundamentally illegitimate—anathema to the American tenet that our leaders serve us, not the other way around.
In Democratic Party parlance, though, opposition frequently centers on boilerplate about restoring certainty for business and “America’s working families.” Behind the scenes they have made progress building cross-partisan support for rescinding Trump’s tariff authority, and the national emergency he fabricated to justify his trade war. And surely stopping Trump, dealing him a real setback, is more important than calibrating their rhetoric juuust so. But mostly lost in all this is that Trump’s waging his trade war like a deranged tyrant.
Yes, Trump talked a lot about tariffs on the campaign trail (in confused and dishonest ways) but before November 2024 it was never presumed that winning one election by a tiny margin with a mere plurality of the popular vote entitled a president to fabricate pretexts for wrecking the global economy or upend the U.S. system of public finance without passing any legislation. Trump needs to be stopped because he’s hurting people, yes, but also because he’s acting like a dictator, and we don’t have dictators in America.
This kind of pro-democracy politics served Democrats well in 2018 and 2020 and even 2022, but 2024 seems to have scared Democrats off of it. Trump won despite promising to govern like a dictator, and so (the conventional wisdom holds) pro-democracy politics failed. Democrats can only beat Trump by homing in on prices, or health care, or abundance or (when out on a limb) making issue of the chaos he creates.
The influential Democratic consultant David Shor illustrated this conceptual mistake in a recent conversation with Ezra Klein.