Narrative Shopping
Rusty Guinn
April 3, 2025·25 comments·Money
The administration has promoted six fundamentally different explanations for its tariff strategy: protecting domestic industry, reshoring manufacturing, reducing income taxes, pressuring neighbors on border security, forcing other countries to lower their own tariffs, and making countries pay their "fair share" on defense. These justifications contradict each other. Yet officials and their media allies keep rotating between them as if they're all simultaneously true.
- The stated rationales don't match the tariff design. The White House published a table claiming to show what other countries charge the US. But the numbers are actually just trade surplus data divided by imports. The tariffs aren't calibrated to achieve any of the announced goals.
- The structure reveals a different logic entirely. The tariffs hit countries with weak purchasing power and limited ability to retaliate hardest. They target low-income, export-dependent economies that will never become major American customers regardless of policy.
- No mechanism exists to achieve the public objectives. The tariffs aren't structured to revive manufacturing, secure borders, lower foreign tariffs, or ensure defense burden-sharing. Each stated purpose can be checked against the actual design. None align.
- The contradiction itself might be the point. Rotating explanations create cognitive dissonance and make coherent opposition difficult. If the justification changes based on who's listening, what are you actually arguing against?
- What becomes visible when you ignore the narratives and look only at the tariff design? The mechanism reveals the motive. And the motive isn't any of the six stories being told.
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Comments
Great note, and highlights the Big Question - Does Trump have a strategic plan, or are his actions a combination of Ben’s ‘pursuit of power for powers sake’ and just making it up on the fly? I am still holding out hope that it is the former - especially if that strategic plan really does involve revitalizing US manufacturing and trying to contain China’s rise to global hegemony. But it is increasingly looking like the latter. God help us all if it is…
On October 19, 1987—known as Black Monday—the DJIA fell by 508 points, or by 22.6%
I was changing flights at O’hare.
Really helpful. Thanks Rusty
Thanks Rusty,
It really does beg the question about “What’s in it for Trump?” Given his history, it seems that it’s all about him and not the USA.
I learned a long time ago that approaches like this one always have unintended consequences. I can imagine several and they aren’t good for the USA or it’s citizens. So, where does Donald win?
You know, John, I think it’s totally fair (given the history) to ask the question about personal motivations that may be at play here. For that reason I would certainly keep my eye on the sorts of “concessions” that are offered to reduce the initial tariffs over the coming weeks.
I also don’t think we must assume anything unethical or nefarious, though. I think the guy really does just like to “win” on deals. Even if any opportunity for self-serving aims were taken off the table, I’m not sure he behaves any differently. He legitimately thinks trade deficits are a winner/loser thing, and he’ll do what he can to “win” them.
Great piece Rusty, definitely helps put things in context. Some of Ben’s earliest stuff on Trump and his competitive vs collaborative nature comes to mind; I can’t imagine who in his 2nd term circle would try to explain trade deficits to him but he won’t accept a collaborative situation for long anyway. The usual Ready, Fire, Aim behavior is going to cost current and future Americans a lot.
Thanks for a great article, Rusty. As Ben discussed in an earlier piece, Trump is changing the objective function of every political game—from coordination to competition. If the new metric of power becomes how much damage I can inflict on you, then we’re witnessing the collapse of partnership, friendship, and any sense of shared purpose.
It no longer matters if I’m unhealthy, as long as I can outlast you. It doesn’t matter if I’m getting poorer, as long as I can still buy you out. It doesn’t matter if I’m confusing people with contradictions dressed up as genuine ideas, as long as I can hold a three-hour podcast with a celebrity host. The incentives are shifting toward spectacle and domination, not cohesion or clarity.
Reminds me of the scene from “The Shawshank Redemption” where the contractor is bribing the warden.
I am reading Primo Levi’s “If This is a Man” and “The Truth”. Ben’s recent commentary and Primo Levi’s observations 15 years after the end of WWII both ring true with Trump and his narrative shopping.
Levi …“Accountant Rovi had become camp leader not by election from below, nor by Russian investiture, but by self-nomination; in fact, although he was an individual of somewhat meagre intellectual and moral qualities, he possessed to a notable degree that virtue which under any sky is most necessary to win power - the love of power for its own sake. To watch the behavior of a man who acts not according to reason, but according to his own deep impulses, is a spectacle of extreme interest, similar to that which the naturalist enjoys when he studies the activities of an animal of complex instincts.”…
Ben’s; It’s the pursuit of great power for great power’s sake … good and evil have nothing to do with it. But I absolutely think this is a tragedy, because the pursuit of great power for great power’s sake transforms every American policy, both foreign and domestic, into a protection racket of one form or another.
Hey, that’s a nice country/company/career you’ve got there … be a shame if anything happened to it.
It Was Never Going To Be Me, Ben Hunt (Epsilon Theory)
I think one thing that is missing from the tariff debate and what it’s about, is that incoherency and cognitive dissonance could be part of the strategy. It doesn’t matter what it’s about as long as it normalises incoherency and cognitive dissonance. A central theme about this current administration is that it resists being predictable- or let’s say modelled. A classic Putin strategy of creating an environment where an opposition cannot form. If you can’t describe the enemy, it’s very hard to rally a group of people around it.
“Tariffs are bad for the economy?”
“But Don’s only doing it to get people to the table!”
“Tariffs piss people off at the table.”
“But they have been abusing tariffs and the trade imbalance for years!”
“But the US benefited from that arangement.”
“But hes using tariffs now to get people at the table!”
The argument changes on the current needs of any time that they need to create a scarecrow. It will loop endlessly and tire anyone out who rationally tries to bring up the incoherence.
Thus the incoherency is the effectiveness of the strategy. Remember he is a madman and he’s gonna do it! Hes gonna do it!
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