President Donald Trump‘s new round of tariffs are indicative of something deep and pathological within him, conservative commentator Charlie Sykes told MS NOW’s Jackie Alemany on Friday afternoon.
The president has imposed new charges on Canadian goods, as well as 10 to 12.5 percent duties on 80 countries and entities the administration accuses of not excluding forced labor products from their supply chains and markets. He had initially sought to impose emergency “reciprocal” tariffs on essentially the entire world, but the Supreme Court slapped this down.
“This is a fetish for Donald Trump,” said Sykes, who argued Trump has been obsessed with the policy “going back to the 1980s” and it is “fixed in his head.”
History, however, shows how bad an idea this is, said Sykes.
“I would like to throw in two words: Smoot-Hawley,” he said. “One of the most extraordinary things about the new tariffs is that Donald Trump is the workaround of the Supreme Court decision is going back to authority that was included in the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act” — the infamous legislation under former President Herbert Hoover often blamed for exacerbating the Great Depression.
“What’s really interesting, what I’m fascinated by, is this a couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump was saying that one of the reasons why he was so anxious to sign that memorandum of understanding with the Iranians was that if the war went on, it would create a global economic catastrophe. And then he specifically said that he did not want to be remembered like Herbert Hoover,” said Sykes. And yet, Hoover is thought of as such a bad president because of the very policy Trump just invoked.
Ultimately, he said, “this is just another indication, I think, of where Donald Trump is allowing his ideological fetishes to make him tone-deaf to the political and economic realities of the moment.”
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