Morbid Symptoms

Only a few months into Donald Trump’s new administration, the morbid symptoms are beginning to show. The Environmental Protection Agency is cutting more than half its staff and transforming itself into an engine for enabling corporate emissions and pollution, and even those parts of Biden’s IRA that sent significant funding to projects in Republican districts have been eliminated. Trump’s current administration is filled with representatives of the oil and gas industry who are tasked with “regulating” those same sectors. This was also the case in his first term, but this time, the inversion of purpose applies also to the heads of the Department of Human Health and Services, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, to name only a few.

Then came “Liberation Day”. On 2 April, Trump announced a 10 per cent baseline tariff on imports from all countries. Many, of course, were much higher; the total tariff rate on China was set at 54 per cent. Based entirely on calculations of trade surplus and deficit, and resulting in tariffs on remote Antarctic islands with more penguins than people, the tariffs reflect an increasingly autonomous executive branch, untethered from any pretension to a more technocratic rationality. The fallout has been erratic, featuring reversals, exemptions and escalations, most notably in an increase in China’s across-the-board rate to 145 per cent and, at the time of writing, temporary carve outs for parts of the tech sector. Despite some partial recovery, financial markets remain shaky and downbeat.