How Fascism Explains Trump’s Tariffs

Nothing else really does

Last week Trump announced a barrage of massive tariffs on imports from virtually every nation in the world, including on islands which are home to only penguins not people (but not including Russia.) Trump claimed the tariffs were “reciprocal”, but his rate for calculating them relies on a bizarre gobbledygook formula—"dividing trade deficit of each nation with the value of its imports” and then cutting that number in half, according to ABC News. “What extraordinary nonsense this is,” financial news journalist James Surowiecki wrote.

Humans are meaning-making creatures, and so, inevitably, people have been trying to figure out why Trump has decided to crash the markets, wiping out more than $11 trillion in value and likely plunging the US into a recession.

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One common suggestion is that billionaires and the mega-wealthy somehow benefit from the tariffs and the economic collapse. Trump, one argument goes, is trying to replace the progressive income tax with regressive tariffs, ultimately shifting huge amounts of wealth to the wealthy. People have also floated the idea that recessions are essentially buying opportunities for the very rich, who can hoover up stocks/land/etc at a discounted rate during downturns.

One problem with the theory that the Trump tariff recession is designed to benefit the wealthy is that the wealthy are reacting to the downturn with absolute terror. Billionaire Bill Ackman, a rabid Zionist MAGA stooge, warned that the tariffs would cause an “economic nuclear winter” and begged Trump to reverse them; Trump’s billionaire co-president and executive branch hatchet man Elon Musk has been attacking pro-tariff advisors like Peter Navarro. Moving down from MAGA billionaires to MAGA millionaires, Barstool media founder Dave Portnoy, says he has lost $7 million because of Trump; he was not pleased.

Not oligarchy, but fascism

So if Trump’s tariff aren’t benefiting the wealthy, why is he so wedded to them? Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein suggests that there doesn’t have to be a reason; Trump’s just a clown. “Trump is initiating ruinous tariffs because, as he keeps telling everyone, he really likes tariffs. He seems to think they’re magic.” Bernstein adds, “Oh, there’s presumably an origin story – he apparently hates wind power because of something having to do with one of his properties once. But it doesn’t really matter why he loves tariffs. He just does, and that’s all there is to it.”

I think this is pretty persuasive. Trump is a fool who hoovers up foolish ideas and then never questions them because he’s convinced that his every orange synaptic blurp is a testimony to his own stable genius. He loves tariffs because he loves tariffs, and no one can stop him from fucking his tariff love until he’s fucked the US and the world to fucking death.

Still, I do think that Trump’s tariff enthusiasm has…not a coherent logic exactly, but a familiar structure. And that structure, broadly speaking, is not oligarchy, but fascism.

Trump has offered various explanations for his tariffs, but the core theme to which he continually returns is grievance. He believes other countries are ripping us off and that tariffs can force them to treat us fairly. He claims his tariff formula is a way to capture “the sum of all cheating” by other countries in their trade relations with the US. In an interview on CNN, he explicated/babbled further:

I spoke to a lot of leaders -- European, Asian, from all over the world. They are dying to make a deal, but I said 'we're not gonna have deficits with your country' ... to me a deficit is a loss. We're gonna have surpluses or at worst we're gonna be breaking even.

The core idea here is that other nations are filled with perfidious schemers working to undermine the United States, and that the US needs to subjugate them before they subjugate us.

This is very much in line with Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism, which states in part:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity….

For Trump, the world is victimizing the US; tariffs and trade wars demonstrate strength and power. Trump is obsessed with the idea that the US should force other nations to pay us (remember Mexico and the wall?) Because he is an ignorant butthead who doesn’t understand how anything works, he sees tariffs as one cool trick for taxing our enemies and making them pay tribute. Inflicting pain on his own nation is a small price to pay for the chance to engage in this nationalist dominance display.

Reverse colonial tariffs

You could also see Trump’s tariff obsession as an exercise in reverse colonial thinking. As David M. Higgins explains in his book Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-victimhood, fantasies of colonial victimhood have been central to recent right movements—and not just recent ones.

Hitler was convinced that international Jewry was plotting to take over the world and genocide the Aryan race—which became the Nazi justification for taking over the world and exterminating Jewish people first. Jean Rapail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints is a racist fantasy that frames immigrants as invading imperialist hordes swarming out from the colonial periphery to conquer the colonial center. It’s a major influence on Trump advisor Stephen Miller, and on the way Trump discusses immigration in general.

This kind of fascist reverse colonial rhetoric of paranoia and projection is also all over Trump’s discussion of trade policy. Trump has justified tariffs on Canada and Mexico by claiming that those countries are allowing fentanyl smuggling; “they have allowed fentanyl to come into our country at levels never seen before,” he said, “killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people, destroying families. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it.” Again, Trump presents other nations as destructive invaders, infiltrating the US and sowing destruction and misery, undermining the nationalist volk and the American way of life.

The latest tariffs are presented via the same reverse colonial logic. The international trading system is unfair in many ways—but that’s because it benefits the US at the expense of formerly colonized nations.

During Covid, for example, the US and other Western nations failed to make good on vaccine donation promises and refused to waive patents, protecting pharmaceutical profits at the expense of saving lives. US massive agricultural subsidies also distort markets, kneecapping farmers in Africa and Latin America and increasing greenhouse gas emissions that threaten the planet. And there are numerous other examples; the US has traditionally had great wealth and great power, and has used it to manipulate the global trade system in ways that harm much more vulnerable countries and people.

Per the reverse colonial fascist playbook, Trump sees these examples of injustice through a mirror world of conspiracy theories and projection. Instead of the US rigging global trade on its own behalf, for Trump the global trade network is rigged against the US. Trump’s tariffs are nationalist policy for a fascist fool high on his own victimhood—putting a shotgun in his mouth and pulling the trigger to spite all the other people he’s already shot.

Conspiracy theories turn you into a fool

It’s common for people to argue that being uneducated or ignorant makes you vulnerable to conspiracy theories or leads you to embrace fascism. As I’ve mentioned before, though, the inverse is I think closer to the truth: embracing conspiracy theories turns you into a fool who swallows ridiculous bullshit.

Trump is an instinctual, gutter fascist. He loves fascist narratives of endless victimization; he loves seeing himself as an indomitable underdog who forces others to knuckle under through sheer belligerence and strength of Will. His tariff regime isn’t based on material calculations; it’s not really meant to shift wealth to oligarchs, or to enrich billionaires, or to boost US industry. Instead, tariffs are a response to his own endlessly repeated self-aggrandizing fascist lies.

The rest of the world is out to get us. We must conquer them. It’s a story Trump likes to tell himself. And because the American people, in their wisdom, have made him the most powerful man in the world, he’s in a position to make us all participate in his horrific, fascist fever dream of revenge, strength, and global depression.