Things that are not invented
According to a Gallup poll, 81% of Americans believe that foreign trade represents an opportunity for economic growth. Only 14% sees him as a threat to the economy. Thus, these are the highest and lowest values, respectively, in the last 30 years, which has not prevented Donald Trump from presenting with pomp and circumstance their tariff package, whose calculations, by the way, are unbelievable. To investigate the level of tariffs imposed on American products, the Trump team has divided the commercial deficit that sustains each country by the latter exports to the United States.
With the new ‘reciprocal’ fares, the global weighted average fare, according to an Evercoreisi estimate, climbed to 29%. By way of context, with the implementation of the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930-also created based on the illusion that protectionism would be the response to a decaying economic period-this indicator was 20%. In short, from April 2, 2025, the US has the largest tariff load of its last century.
It is well known that Trump looks at President McKinley with some reverence. In the inauguration speech he said that the latter, through tariffs, made the country « very rich ». Well, in the short (very short) period, yes, but the negative effects of customs rates quickly felt and the Republicans ended up losing 93 seats in the camera of representatives, offering a comfortable majority to Democrats. McKinley presented his grand economic plan under the slogan “prosperity at home, prestige abroad”; Trump, following the same strategy, is threatening national consumers and giving a disregarding image to the world, especially to historical allies. And it should also be noted that in the 1890s the United States still aimed at becoming an industrial superpower. Today, the American economy is the largest in the world and is naturally oriented to the service sector, at a conjuncture where global economic interdependence is incomparably higher.
« If the imposition of protective tariffs and barriers made poor nations, » Trump said in his « declaration of economic independence, » then all Earth countries would be running to eliminate these policies. » Well, that’s precisely the order of the post-World War I, which strongly settled on multilateralism (highlighting the creation of Gatt, now WTO), set out to do, a process that was deepened following the fall of the Soviet Union. And suggest that tariffs make countries richer is ignoring data and economic history. The correlation between the percentage of tariffs and per capita GDP is negative-the higher the rates, the lower the per capita GDP-with some outliers, of course, for which other factors and specificities are important for the calculation. Trump is discarding decades of effort, focused on decreasing barriers to harmful trade that undermines development, innovation, prosperity and, ultimately, peace.
If the Liberal International Order was already crawling, death wound, on Wednesday was definitely buried. Curious – or tragic – mind, it was not China, nor Russia, which subverted it, as several predictions pointed out; It was its main architect, and with the additional irony of having called “Liberation Day” to the funeral. There are things that are not invented.
