King Midas’ tariffs

Corruption in poor countries is called a bribe, and in rich countries, it’s called a tariff. These days, we’ve been talking a lot about the destructive potential for the economy of the tariffs that Trump announces day in and day out. But we’ve overlooked their greatest perversity: they formalize preferential treatment for cronies. The arbitrary dispenser of tariffs (in this case, Trump) establishes himself as a King Midas, turning some economic sectors into gold. And others into coal.

Directly or indirectly, the government extorts businesses. If you support me (with money or whatever I want), I will impose tariffs on your international competitors; if you stop supporting me, I will remove them. I, the king, always win. The current wave of tariffs isn’t a transactional view of power (as Trump is so often said to see it), but a corrupt one. It’s not typical of a businessman, but of a mobster. It’s not anecdotal that the MAGA merchandising during the election campaign included T-shirts depicting Trump as Vito or Michael Corleone, or that he has sometimes compared himself to Al Capone. Trump’s inspirational model isn’t Reagan’s minimal government or McKinley’s maximal empire, but the mafia. A group of enterprising and unscrupulous men who seek personal gain while claiming to respect honor, family, and God. Or so they say.

If we can draw a lesson from the universal history of the mafia that serves as a prediction of what may happen with Trump, it would be this: it’s very difficult to defeat the mafia, but mafias defeat themselves. They’re the opposite of religious congregations. It’s very expensive to assemble a group of people dedicated to a noble purpose, but once assembled, it lasts a thousand years. Ignoble purposes build societies overnight, but they dissolve like sugar cubes.

The United States, a country that has been fighting since its origins against the mafia, that sinister shadow of the capitalist skyscraper, will react. Sixty percent of American stockholders are seeing how the perfume that rose from the stock markets after Trump’s election has turned into a fetid stench. The effects of tariffs are piercing the well-being of millions of Americans: they are driving up inflation, disrupting supply chains, and unleashing retaliation in affected countries that will impact U.S. companies. A trade war, like any war, impoverishes everyone, especially the one who starts it.

But the one who will suffer most if he doesn’t change will be Trump himself. Mafia bosses end up alone and crazy. Like King Midas.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition