October 22, 2024 | Reading Time: 3 minutes
Trump tariffs would be world’s biggest protection racket
He politicized tariff waivers in his first term, writes Lindsay Beyerstein.
You wouldn’t expect a presidential candidate to make a massive middle class tax hike the centerpiece of his economic platform, but that’s exactly what Donald Trump is doing.
Trump has vowed to slap a 20 percent tax on all imports, a 60 percent tax on all Chinese imports and a 2,000 percent tax on imported cars.
These taxes are known as tariffs. Everything from tequila to video game consoles would cost more. Trump’s tariffs would cost the average family nearly $4,000 a year and rising prices would accelerate inflation.
The second time around, he will vastly increase the amount of goods subject to tariffs and purge the civil service of anyone who might oppose his bid to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
Trump claims that other countries will pay for the tariffs, but consumers paid for nearly all of the tariffs he imposed in his first term through higher prices.
And then we paid billions more to bail out the farmers who were ruined by the tariffs our trading partners imposed in retaliation.
So why is Trump so keen on taxing imports?
Because the Trump tariffs would create the greatest engine of corruption in history, an institutionalized kleptocracy where import-based business lives or dies by Trump’s favor. Elon Musk’s imported parts might be exempted while GM’s are not.
Congress has given the president sweeping powers to impose tariffs, and critically, to waive those tariffs for a favored few. US imports totaled $3.8 trillion in 2023. The thought of a 34-time convicted felon wielding that kind of power is terrifying. Powerful interests at home and abroad want to save money and gain an edge over their competitors by dodging tariffs. Trump is just the man to make that happen, for a price.
Trump’s business empire creates limitless opportunities for would-be tariff dodgers to convert cash into official acts. In all, Trump’s businesses raked in nearly $2 billion in revenue during his first term, including millions from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. If emoluments won’t suffice, there’s always bribery. Trump is credibly accused of taking 200 pounds of cash worth $10 million from Egypt in exchange for a friendlier diplomatic posture towards the autocratic regime.
Trump politicized tariff waivers in his first term.
The Brookings Institution found that “a bewildering array of politically favored importers won tariff relief” during that time. Bibles from China got a waiver because the religious right insisted, but textbooks are still taxed. Now the Trump Bible is made in China, too. Salmon and cod got waivers because powerful Republican senators threw their weight around. Chinese tiki torches got the nod for reasons that remain as murky as a bad fish farm. Governments including China, Russia and Argentina are suspected of granting Trump and his family trademarks worth millions of dollars in the hopes of securing more favorable trade relations.
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Technically, the Commerce Department grants the waivers. These concessions are supposed to be based on the national interest, but the process is notoriously opaque and politicized at the best of times.
In a second Trump term, it would become completely corrupt. In the name of fighting an imaginary “Deep State,” Trump plans to purge career civil servants and replace them with maga hacks who will do his bidding. The Heritage Foundation, home of Project 2025, is already flooding federal agencies with Freedom of Information Requests to find out which civil servants aren’t Trumpy enough. Heritage shelled out $100,000 for Project Sovereignty 2025 to draw up a McCarthyite list of civil servants that Heritage President Kevin Roberts considers to be a “deep state of entrenched Leftist bureaucrats.”
If you wondered why JD Vance called on Trump to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” there’s your answer. It’s the mid-level bureaucrats in every federal agency that stand in the way of turning the federal government into a Trump protection racket.
Trump’s tariff plan would give him discretion to play favorites over trillions of dollars of trade. We know he’d follow through because he played favorites with tariffs in his first term. The second time around, he will vastly increase the amount of goods subject to tariffs and purge the civil service of anyone who might oppose his bid to reward his friends and punish his enemies.
Lindsay Beyerstein covers legal affairs, health care and politics for the Editorial Board. An award-winning documentary filmmaker, she’s a judge for the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Find her @beyerstein.
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