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Decades ago during my years in college and grad school, I had a strong side-interest in Soviet history, and read quite a number of weighty books in that subject. Most of these heavily focused upon the Stalin era, describing the almost unprecedented loss of life that occurred during that period from the combination of executions, Gulag deaths, and terrible famines.
But these horrifying stories were sometimes leavened by episodes so strange and ironic that I was never entirely sure whether they were real or merely invented.
For example, during the first half of the 1930s, the Great Famine caused by forced collectivization and dekulakization was widely described as having caused many, many millions of deaths. Stalin pushed ahead with this project despite the considerable misgivings of some of the other Soviet leaders, most of whom would themselves soon be purged and often shot just a few years later.
Given such horrifying famine conditions in the Ukraine and other Soviet regions, social order collapsed to the point that many of these deaths went unreported at the time. Thus, they only became apparent several years later when the Soviet Census of 1937 found that there were considerably fewer Soviet citizens alive than had been expected.
According to my history textbooks, Stalin was greatly dismayed by these Census results. But rather than admitting that his policies may have had such adverse consequences, the Communist dictator decided that the expert statisticians of the Census bureau were responsible for the problem, and had them all purged and shot as dastardly anti-Soviet saboteurs and wreckers.
Naturally, I always snickered a little at those forced to live under such a bizarre and irrational autocrat who reacted to a less than favorable message by shooting the messenger. And at least according to Wikipedia, the basic story of such Stalinist irrationality was apparently true, with the 1937 Soviet Census showing that the population was perhaps 10 million lower than had been expected and the Census bureau was indeed purged as a consequence.
But today, in the wake of the apparent economic and political consequences of President Donald Trump’s bizarre and autocratic tariff policies, I am reminded of the famous opening lines of one of Marx’s books, in which the author claimed that historical events appear twice, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” Thus, during the last week or so, we have seen our own government react in ways quite similar to those of Stalin, though so far at least lacking the sanguinary component.
Earlier this year on April 2nd, Trump had declared “Liberation Day,” unveiling a sweeping new set of tariffs against the trade goods of every other country in the world. His new tariff rates were so extremely high and seemingly arbitrary that I doubt I was the only one who wondered whether his presentation had accidentally been delayed twenty-four hours and he had originally scheduled his announcement for April Fools’ Day.
Certainly nothing like this had ever previously happened in American history. Indeed, I could not recall any foreign dictator let alone a democratically-elected leader who had ever unilaterally done anything so strange with regard to foreign trade. As I wrote soon afterward:
Tariffs are just a type of tax levied on imports, and America annually imports well over $3 trillion worth of foreign goods, so tariff taxes obviously have a huge economic impact. But Trump suddenly raised those taxes by more than a factor of ten, taking them from around 2.5% to 29%, rates far, far beyond those of the notorious 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and reaching the levels of more than 100 years ago. This certainly amounted to one of the largest tax increases in all of human history.
Trump’s policies were so strange and destructive that the broader historical analogy that immediately came to my mind was the disastrous Great Leap Forward implemented in China under Chairman Mao. A few days after Trump’s declaration I published a piece making this suggestion.
- President Donald Trump and Chairman Mao
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 7, 2025 • 3,800 Words
As might naturally be expected, our financial markets completely panicked at these huge new import taxes. The terrible blows to stock prices, bond rates, and the value of the dollar all seemed to reflect the belief of investors that our country was facing total economic disaster.
As I soon emphasized, one reason for such widespread financial fear was Trump’s bizarre claim that unlike all previous American presidents, he possessed the power to set tariff tax rates by emergency decree:
According to our Constitution, tariffs and other tax changes must be enacted by Congressional legislation. But Trump ignored those requirements, instead claiming that he had the power to unilaterally set tariff tax rates under the emergency provisions of a 1977 law that no one had ever previously believed could be used for that purpose.
Across our 235 year national history, all our past changes in tariff, trade, or tax policy—including Smoot-Hawley, NAFTA, the WTO, and Trump 45’s own USMCA—had always been the result of months or years of political negotiations, and then ultimately approved or rejected by Congress. But now these multi-trillion-dollar decisions were being made at the personal whim of someone who had seemingly proclaimed himself a reigning, empowered American autocrat.
As might be expected, Trump’s huge tax increase on $3 trillion of imports quickly led to a very sharp drop in stock prices, but Trump declared that he was unbending and would never waver. China had prepared for exactly such an economic attack, and when it soon retaliated with similar tariffs on American products, Trump counter-retaliated, with several days of those tit-for-tat exchanges eventually raising tariff rates against China to an astonishing 145%, essentially banning almost all Chinese goods. Many other countries and the EU also threatened similar retaliatory tariffs, but since their tax rates were governed by law rather than autocratic whim, their responses were necessarily much slower.
Although Trump initially promised to stay the course, the quick collapse in the financial markets soon forced him to back down, drastically reducing his new tariff rates for three months while he negotiated bilateral trade deals with other countries.
However, just a week after he announced those gigantic tariffs against the entire world and repeatedly promised to maintain or even further raise them, Trump suddenly changed his mind. Although he kept the Chinese rates at those ridiculous levels, he declared that tariffs on all other countries would suddenly be reduced to a very high but rational 10% rate for the next 90 days while he decided what to do.
Thus, during the course of a single week, Trump had raised American tariffs by more than a factor of ten, then dropped them by a factor of two, representing exactly the sort of tax policy we might expect to see in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Trump’s totally unexpected reversal naturally produced a huge recovery in stock prices, which regained much of the ground that they had previously lost, and Trump boasted about all the money that his friends had made from that unprecedented market rebound. This led to some dark suspicions that our unfortunate country had just witnessed one of the most outrageously blatant examples of insider trading in all of human history.
Across thousands of years, the world has seen many important countries ruled by absolute monarchs or all-powerful dictators, with some of these leaders even considered deranged. But I can’t recall any past example in which a major nation’s tax, tariff, or tribute policies have undergone such rapid and sudden changes, moving up and down by huge amounts apparently based upon personal whim. Certainly Caligula never did anything so peculiar, nor Louis XIV nor Genghis Khan nor anyone else who comes to mind. Lopping off the heads of a few random government officials was one thing, but drastic changes in national financial policies were generally taken much more seriously. I don’t think that Tamerlane ever suddenly raised the tribute he demanded from his terrified subjects by a factor of ten, then a few days later lowered it back down by a factor of two.
What will our tariff rates on $3 trillion of imports be like in a few months? I doubt that anyone can say, even including the current occupant of the Oval Office. For example, late Friday night the Trump Administration apparently exempted smartphones, computer equipment, and other electronics from his Chinese tariffs, hoping that the timing would help hide that further abject surrender from the American population.
Consider America’s major business corporations or even its small mom-and-pop operations. Nearly all of these have some substantial connection to international trade, even if they merely rely upon ordinary products that they buy at Costco or Walmart. On April 2nd, Trump announced his huge new tariffs that would greatly raise the price of those products or possibly lead to their disappearance, then on April 9th he changed his mind and suspended those tariffs for 90 days, but still proposed to afterward enact them, while essentially banning nearly all Chinese imported goods with a 145% tariff that may or may not continue.
Under those circumstances, how could any rational corporate planner—or even sensible small-businessman—formulate any long-term investment plans? For at least the next 90 days, virtually all business investment will surely remain frozen, except perhaps for a little panic-buying. It’s hardly surprising that consumer sentiment quickly reached the worst levels since record-keeping began.
- Donald Trump’s Looney Tunes Trade Policy
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 14, 2025 • 3,800 Words
Trump’s dramatic U-turn a week after his initial tariff announcement did allow the financial markets to stabilize and regain the ground they had lost, though his many critics began to ridicule him with the acronym TACO—“Trump Always Chickens Out”—using it to describe our president’s regular response to strong challenges. Even so, most observers predicted that the higher tariff rates that remained together with the tremendous uncertainty and the sharp decline in consumer sentiment would probably result in serious economic problems whether or not Trump ever made good on his threat to revisit the tariff issue after ninety days.
But contrary to those plausible concerns, the employment numbers released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) over the next several months remained surprisingly strong, puzzling those who had warned that economic uncertainty would sharply reduce the willingness of businesses to expand and create jobs.
Then on August 1st the other shoe finally dropped, as the estimated new job numbers for July proved far below expectations while the revised data for May and June revealed that job creation had hit a wall soon after Trump’s tariff announcement, reduced to almost nothing. The chart shown in the New York Times was quite telling, certainly justifying the headline:
Our president’s striking response to these gloomy economic results was absolutely Stalinesque. He immediately declared that the official jobs statistics were “rigged” and fired Erika McEntarfer, the professional statistician who served as commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for providing such unwelcome news. Although he didn’t have her arrested by the NKVD and shipped off to the Gulag as a Trotskyite saboteur, his reaction otherwise seemed quite similar to that of the notorious Soviet dictator.
Prior to this shocking incident, I’d never heard of McEntarfer and I’m sure that the same was true for almost all Americans. As a professional labor economist and statistician, she had quietly toiled in government service for decades, never arousing the slightest bit of controversy. When she had been appointed to head the BLS last year, she had been confirmed by an 86-to-8 vote in the Senate, with nearly all the Republicans supporting her.
But with Trump having declared her a Trotskyite spy, most of the cowed Republican officeholders quickly fell into line, seconding the accusations of our erratic president. Meanwhile, both liberal and conservative economic experts defended and praised McEntarfer as a nonpartisan professional who diligently reported the actual economic data gathered by her bureau.
Among many others, Prof. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, a distinguished international economist, was absolutely appalled by Trump’s Stalinesque action and the near total silence by so much of the Washington political establishment.
While it’s possible that some past American presidents have behaved in such irrational fashion, no particular examples, Democrat or Republican, come to mind. The obvious lesson imparted to our surviving civil servants hoping to keep their positions is to report favorable economic statistics even if they don’t actually exist.
This public controversy over the apparent employment consequences of Trump’s original tariff announcement came near the end of his self-imposed ninety-day negotiating window, so tariff matters have now once again reached the news headlines.
In particular, Trump and his aides hailed as enormous victories the trade agreements they had reached with some of our most important economic partners such as the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, following an earlier agreement with Britain. According to Trump supporters, our president’s negotiating strategy had succeeded brilliantly, resulting in agreements that imposed tariffs of 15% against nearly all the trade goods from those countries along with vague promises of large private sector economic investments in America, while tariffs against American imports remained low or non-existent. Trump proudly declared that these sorts of very one-sided trade agreements demonstrated the effectiveness of his bombastic threats and the American leverage he deployed.
But skeptical voices quickly raised obvious questions against this triumphalist narrative. A new tariff rate of 15% against European or Japanese goods was certainly many times higher than the very low tariffs previously allowed under our free-trade oriented regime. However, such duties still seemed far too low to trigger any sort of drastic relocation of global manufacturing supply chains into our own country. This was especially the case because the rates had been imposed in such arbitrary fashion by a single remarkably mercurial president, someone who regularly reversed himself from week to week or even day to day. Would any sensible corporate planner commit years of effort and billions of dollars to building new factories in America when Trump might so easily change his mind once again?
So if no reindustrialization occurred, at least not for many years to come, the only impact of a 15% tariff would be to raise prices to American consumers and business users by a like amount, thereby fueling inflation. Meanwhile, those American corporations that already produced goods directly competing with such imports could use that wall of protection to raise their own prices and profits to match that imposed tariff figure, thereby probably becoming the only obvious winners from Trump’s policy.
The Republican Party had traditionally been the party of business, so until the postwar era, Republicans had always favored high tariff rates for exactly that reason. But boosting profits of a few lucky corporations was hardly the reason Trump had given for his new tariff policies.
Meanwhile, the sheer arbitrariness of some of the much higher tariff rates that Trump suddenly began imposing upon other major countries around the world was absolutely breathtaking. Brazilian courts are currently prosecuting former right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro for allegedly plotting a coup in order to remain in office, charges that may or may not be true. This is obviously an internal Brazilian matter to be decided rightly or wrongly by the Brazilians themselves.
But since Trump likes Bolsonaro and found his prosecution disagreement, he immediately imposed a huge 50% tariff against Brazilian goods, excluding those products that he chose to exclude. This naturally outraged Brazil’s current president and most ordinary Brazilians, who hardly took kindly to such heavy-handed American bullying about domestic Brazilian politics. Trump seemingly regards himself as king of the world, freely using his tariff cudgel to beat those foreign countries that fail to conform to his orders, with Prof. Sachs having some strong words on this matter as well:
Even more remarkable was Trump’s use of tariffs to support his flailing Russia policy with regard to the Ukraine war. During his presidential campaign, Trump had boasted that once in office he would make peace between Russia and Ukraine within 24 hours, but more than seven months later the war continues, with Russia unwavering in its objectives and refusing to surrender to Trump’s demands.
Therefore, Trump announced that he would put pressure on Russia by seeking to cut off that country’s financially important oil sales around the world. He especially focused on China and India, threatening to impose enormous tariffs on their products unless they stopped buying Russian oil, utterly bizarre demands that suggested Trump regarded himself as the world’s reigning emperor.
China had already defeated his earlier tariff attacks, so he now concentrated his fire on India, recently become the world’s most populous country. Heaping crude insults upon the Indian economy, Trump imposed huge 50% tariffs, tremendously alienating the proudly ultra-nationalistic government running that country. This prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to quickly declare that he would visit China for meetings with that country’s leaders at the end of this month.
America had many spent years of effort working to enlist India as a crucial geopolitical counter-weight to China, and Trump appears to have destroyed that major strategic project in just a matter of days.
Meanwhile, there seems a good possibility that all of these tariff issues may soon be rendered legally moot. Tariffs are obviously just particular types of taxes, and all American taxes must be passed by legislation originating in the House of Representatives rather than imposed by the whim of an erratic autocrat. Past presidents often spent years persuading Congress to pass trade agreements, and this would obviously have been unnecessary if a president could set tariff rates and enact trade agreements by fiat.
So once Trump declared his new tariff policies, those financially injured by these import taxes naturally went to court to have them declared illegal. The tough questioning that Trump Administration lawyers recently faced by federal appellate judges suggests that the tariffs are likely to be struck down, with the Supreme Court being the next stop. If so, Trump will have done great economic and political damage to our country without achieving any results at all.
For many years I’d seen regular mention on right-wing websites of the 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy, telling the story of a future America in which the average IQ had dropped twenty or thirty points, and the country was run by a bombastic president bearing the memorable name of “Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.” I finally watched that film a couple of years ago, and only found it only so-so.
And upon reflection, I don’t think that identifying President Trump with Stalin is sufficiently fair to the latter. Perhaps President Camacho would be a far better analogy to our current occupant of the Oval Office.
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