If anything, US President Donald Trump has made a relatively unknown and mundane word — “tariff” — one of the most talked about in recent memory. It is one of the words that appears frequently on any Google search.

However one may want to spin it, a tariff is nothing but a tax or duty that is placed by a Government on goods exported and imported into a country. It is used by governments to regulate trade and ostensibly create a sense of fairness and equity in trading practices. Tariffs can correct imbalances in trading arrangements which give one country a distinct advantage over another. But they are seldomly used in international trade, largely because of their punitive nature. Thus, they have to be sensibly and strategically allied with well worked out targets and goals.

Trump believes that America is being raped and pillaged economically by the rest of the world. For him to make America great and prosperous again, this trend has to be reversed. The rest of the world has to pay its fair share, whether people like it or not. Even the poorest countries of the world are not spared in this effort of “normalisation”.

In his shambolic, expansive, and chaotic roll-out of tariffs, there is no economist of merit who believes that this approach is good for America or the world economy. It is only those who want to toe the ideological line with Trump, or who are otherwise in cultic fealty to him, who would believe that this broad and obviously reckless approach will redound to America’s benefit. And many who support him in this reckless endeavour know better, but they are prepared to sacrifice whatever intellectual integrity they have on the altars of their own self-aggrandizement. Not so Jeremy Siegel, a renowned professor and top economist at the Wharton School of Finance in Pennsylvania. He has rightly dubbed Trump’s latest effort as the biggest policy mistake in 95 years.

But many who still have the country’s interest at heart are agreed that these policies are not well thought out. They fear inflation in the prices of goods and services that can occur in the short term and possible recession in the long term. Trump’s economic team is trying desperately to show the public that they are in unanimous agreement with what Trump is doing, but it will not be long before it becomes clear that there is a wide gulf fixed between what they are saying publicly and the real drama behind closed doors.

In any event, Americans, who are already burdened by the inflated cost of goods and services increasingly, do not share the president’s enthusiasm about these “beautiful” tariffs. They sense what it could mean for them in their pocketbooks. Contrary to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s notion that the retired are not concerned about the stock market, many fear what is being done to their retirement savings and investments as the stock market responds to the inconsistencies, uncertainty, and unpredictability of these policies.

Many in the country, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike, do not seem to get the sense that Trump cares about the depredations that his policies will cause in their lives. And they have good reasons to feel this way. If he cared, his tariff policies would have been more measured and targeted in their application. No one has any argument about a country’s right to address trade imbalances with other countries. When Trump first applied tariffs against China in his first term, I applauded this effort. I had long wondered why America allowed China to get away with the high trade deficits over the years, which largely favoured the Chinese. I believed then that some redress was in order.

But this mother of all redresses in its present iteration against the entire world is as exhausting as it is unconscionable, if not unscrupulous. No one wins a tariff war, certainly not on the scale that Trump is willing to wage it. In the end, everyone loses, but it is the poorest countries that are more vulnerable and whose people suffer the most. Trump is on a crusade in which he believes that harsh medicine can lead to the desired cure. But the patient may very well die in the process.

What is equally jarring to me is that there is no rhyme or reason for the present approach. I believe that it is being driven more by Trump’s belief in his and America’s invincibility. This time around he believes that there is no one to whom he has to be accountable, not the feckless Congress that are quiescent about his present tactics, or the Supreme Court that has given him agency to do virtually anything which can be interpreted as his official duty.

Most importantly, it is ego-driven and feeds into his most self-obsessed instincts that he knows what is right and that he alone can fix things. It is this gut instinct and the fact that his name is being called all over the world, or that world leaders have to contact him to make a deal, that comprise the essence of what makes him happy. I will reiterate what I said in the last piece: Ultimately, for him, tariffs are more a psychological necessity than an economic one.

Dr Raulston Nembhard is a priest, social commentator, and author of the books Finding Peace in the Midst of Life’s Storms; Your Self-esteem Guide to a Better Life; and Beyond Petulance: Republican Politics and the Future of America. He hosts a podcast — Mango Tree Dialogues — on his You Tube channel. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or stead6655@aol.com.

No one wins a tariff war.

Raulston Nembhard