A lot of folks seem to think Donald Trump knows what he’s doing when it comes to the US economy, where that means there’s more to tariffs than Trump’s decades-old contention that America’s somehow a victim (as opposed to the main beneficiary) of a post-War economic order Washington created, and more to DOGE than Project 2025’s vindictive civil service purge.

I doubt it. I think what we’re seeing in tariffs is raw mercantilism consistent with Trump’s “everyone’s taking advantage of us” narrative, a woefully simplistic understanding (if you can call it an understanding at all) of international trade which betrays exactly no familiarity whatever with the key pillars of dollar hegemony. In DOGE, I think we’re witnessing a bid to “purify” the bureaucracy (and exorcise the “deep state” demon) dressed up as cost-cutting.

On that latter point, if Trump actually doesn’t know he’s implementing a key pillar of Project 2025 in DOGE, he’s being played for a fool by his own movement, which is hell-bent on turning America into a giant version of Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary. Here’s a question for Wall Street analysts and strategists implicitly cheering Musk on, and pronouncing confidently on the merits of DOGE’s “efficiency” efforts: How many of you have read Project 2025? The actual document? Any of you? (Bueller? Bueller?) I didn’t think so. Then how do you know that DOGE isn’t what people who have read Project 2025 — people like me — say it is? Because Elon told you what it is, and he said it isn’t that? Hmmm. Maybe you’re too gullible?

On the tariffs, and more generally on the idea that America needs to wind the clock back six or seven decades, I occasionally run out of patience: It’s just dumb. Manifestly stupid. Why everyone doesn’t see that’s beyond me. Setting aside that you occasionally need the industrial capacity to arm yourself for war in a world where, unfortunately, large-scale violent conflict’s still at thing, why would you want to put everyone to work in hard, manual factory labor if you didn’t have to? What kind of sense does that make? Go watch the first hour of The Deer Hunter. Is that really what we want to make “great again”? Dangerous, dirty, hard labor followed by hard drinking in dangerous, dirty bars? Give me a break.

This reminds me of young African American males who rise from poverty, petty drug trafficking and gang culture to become millionaire entertainers only to be arrested later, as celebrities, for petty drug trafficking and gang affiliations. That is: Why’d you work so hard to “make it out,” so to speak, if all you were going to do is go right back to what you were doing? If you wanted to sell relatively small quantities of coke as part of a gang, you could’ve just done that rather than go through all the trouble it took to become a successful rapper. If all we wanted to do in America was make steel and dig up coal, nothing was stopping us. We could’ve kept right on doing that. Hell, we could’ve put everyone to work making steel and digging stuff up out of the ground. By now, we’d be a nation of Thors, those of us who didn’t die of black lung disease, anyway.

I don’t know if this has occurred to everyone lately, but there’s a reason China’s working so hard to transition away from a smokestack economy towards a more sustainable, consumption-driven model. There’s only one major, advanced economy still running on heavy industry in the 21st century: Germany. How’s that working out these days? That’s a rhetorical question. It’s not working out. The German economy’s mired in a kind of perpetual quasi-recession with no real silver lining other than, I suppose, that in the event Russia gets even more acquisitive, the Germans will presumably prove to be just as adept as they were “last time” at arming themselves in a hurry.

Even if you wanted to argue we need to make America’s economic model primitive again, it’s not going to work. Trump can talk about it all he wants (and Biden talked about it all the time too), but American manufacturing as we knew it in the mid-20th century ain’t comin’ back, folks. Rant, rave and complain as you will, and elect a dictator if you must, but I swear to you it’s not going to make any difference. American manufacturing’s dead, or at least the kind of manufacturing Trump envisions when he has someone Photoshop his 80-year-old head onto the body of an inexplicably shirtless, 30-year-old steel worker holding a sledge hammer so he can post it on TruthSocial and sell it as an NFT.

Also, deficits are not (not, not, not) indicative of any sort of “losing,” nor surpluses of “winning,” or at least not in and of themselves. That contention — that a deficit means you “lost” — doesn’t even make sense, and more importantly, we seem to have lost the plot entirely on the link between the dollar’s reserve currency status and imbalanced trade. In simple terms: Trump’s mistaking a feature of the system for a bug.

Everyone who stayed awake even for a few minutes of a college-level economics course can sketch the contours of that system which is set up, literally, around a quid pro quo whereby America enjoys all the advantages we associate with the term “exorbitant privilege” in exchange for accommodating global savings and surpluses. It all starts from that.

Part and parcel of the arrangement is the unfettered movement of goods and capital. When Trump threatens to, for example, put 100% tariffs on the BRICS if they don’t use the dollar in trade, he may as well just shout, “I don’t get it! I don’t understand any of this!”

The irony of America’s exorbitant privilege is that it’s contingent on a cooperative view of the world. Trump understands every quid pro quo except, apparently, that one, which is in many respects the most important quid pro quo for any US president to understand.

“America first,” to the extent it manifests as draconian protectionism, deportations, implicit demands that the rest of the world fund tax cuts for America’s wealthy and the scrapping of the post-War global security architecture in favor of strongman-to-strongman bilateral relations, is a platform that doesn’t just abuse America’s exorbitant privilege, but does so as a matter of course.

And that’s to say nothing of the fact that underneath it all is a foundation which assumes the rule of law’s sacrosanct in America, even if it isn’t anywhere else on Earth. Trump’s not just challenging that assumption, he’s a living, breathing affront to the rule of law in America. Musk too, frankly.

What happens if America loses its exorbitant privilege? Well, nothing good. Yields could reset structurally higher from the belly of the Treasury curve on out. Treasurys would become actual debt, not just “debt” with scare quotes. The country’s external liabilities would be newly-subject to FX volatility. Households could face acute bouts of FX pass-through inflation (i.e., explosive cost increases that’d feel entirely foreign to American consumers). OFAC sanctions would become increasingly less effective. And on and on and on.

Put this all together and you’ve got a recipe not for any “golden age,” but in fact for the accelerated demise of an empire that many insisted was already in decline. Trump’s policies may well succeed in rolling back the clock. All the way back to a time before America was a superpower.

Could I be wrong? Sure! That’s really the best part of this whole crazy drama. Often enough, it feels like Trump’s supporters — and even Trump himself — prefer to think of themselves as somehow still outside the government. They chastise critics in terms that suggest it hasn’t dawned on them that there will be a verdict in this trial. Trump’s president again. It’s not a hypothetical, and I think we’re staring at a pretty binary situation. Either it’ll go well enough that he can lay claim to his “golden age” or it’ll be a total train wreck, on every score.

Either way, “This is gonna be great television.” “I will say that.”