For those who thought the Supreme Court had ended Donald Trump's obsession with tariffs, think again. In February, the court struck down his sweeping Liberation Day levies, ruling that the president did not have emergency powers to tax imports from almost every country on Earth. Trump's response has been to search the statute books for ever more unusual, obscure, and maybe illegal ways to restore very similar tariffs. First came a temporary global tariff. When that expired, the administration imposed tariffs of 10 to 12% on 60 economies, more than 80 countries, claiming unfair trade practices. For Canada, Trump reached back to Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a provision that had never been invoked before, for the new sweeping tariffs.
The rationale, discovered suddenly in the last few months, is alleged forced labor. The administration has declared that countries ranging from Cambodia and China to Norway, Japan, and Australia have failed to keep products made with forced labor out of their markets and that this failure burdens American commerce. The charge is so obviously spurious and sweeping — Sweden is as bad as Cambodia — that it gives away the game. It was almost certainly devised because the White House needed a legal pretext to subvert the spirit of the Supreme Court ruling against Trump. This is more than ordinary political spin. The president appears to be ordering the US government to formally certify as fact something it knows is not true. Agencies must now publish findings, construct legal arguments, and affix the authority of the American state to a falsehood manufactured for the apparent purpose of evading the nation's highest court. That is how institutions are corrupted. First, they are asked to bend the truth, then to attest to the lie, and then the lies become routine, so no one thinks they are even unusual. It is the road to Orwell's world.
Incidentally, Walk Free, the human rights group that compiles the Global Slavery Index, estimates that America imports $169.6 billion worth of goods annually that are at risk of being made with forced labor, by far the highest total among the Group of 20 countries. That does not prove American enforcement is worse than that of other countries that Trump has targeted, but it makes the administration's moral posture look even more absurd than it is.
The economic case against tariffs is stronger by the day as the numbers roll in. Spending on manufacturing construction, which surged under Joe Biden and peaked at about $250 billion at an annual rate in September 2024, had fallen to about $175 billion by May of this year. Manufacturing employment is down roughly 75,000 jobs since Trump returned to office. Factory output has risen, but the gains are concentrated in advanced manufacturing and AI, much of it reflecting investments planned before Trump took office and little related to tariffs.
Consider Greg Freilley, whom the US Chamber of Commerce wrote about a few months ago. He helps run Falco, a small Arizona company that makes aluminum parts for commercial aircraft. This is precisely the kind of business Trump says he wants to help: an American factory employing American workers. Falco's aluminum costs are up 72%. The company cannot simply buy American metal. Domestic production meets only about half of US demand, and much of that output is not available on the open market. So Falco keeps importing aluminum, pays the tariff, and absorbs the damage. It has frozen hiring, postponed expansion, allowed its workforce to shrink by at least 20% through attrition, dipped into cash reserves, and added a tariff surcharge to customer bills, according to Freilley. Meanwhile, even after the so-called Liberation Day fallout, Trump doubled the tariff on imported aluminum to 50% and recently offered producers a discount if they built smelters in America. Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest aluminum producers, immediately said no. So the tariff has achieved a trifecta: higher costs for an American manufacturer, fewer jobs and less investment there, and no new smelter from the foreign producer the tariffs were meant to entice. The logic is upside down.
Aluminum smelting accounts for only a small fraction of America's aluminum jobs. The vast majority are in recycling and in the midstream and downstream industries that turn the metal into aircraft parts, cars, cans, machinery, and building materials. Trump is protecting the tiny upstream slice by taxing the vastly larger industrial base that depends on it and employs many more people.
For eight decades, the US led the world toward open markets and open trade. In barely two years, Trump has transformed it into effectively the most protectionist major advanced economy in the world. The result has not been a manufacturing renaissance. It has been higher prices, weaker investment, fewer manufacturing jobs, and a government increasingly willing to make falsehood official policy in order to defend a failed economic creed.
Democrats are facing a dilemma, and Michigan's primary perfectly illustrated it. Abdul Sayed, the charismatic progressive, defeated Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed moderate. The energy was unquestionably on his side, but a Washington Post analysis finds his support was concentrated in the state's most educated counties and college towns. Stevens, the moderate, did better in many rural and lower-income areas. So you see, the left has the passion, but the middle still has the votes the Democrats need to win in general elections.
The progressive answer is that Democrats can solve this by becoming more economically populist, attacking billionaires, expanding benefits, and thus appealing to the working class. But these ideas don't appeal to the actual working class. Among Democrats, a Pew survey shows 41% of college graduates say they like politicians who call themselves democratic socialists, compared with only 26% of those without degrees. Upper-income Democrats are also much more favorable toward democratic socialists than lower-income Democrats, 40% to 24%.
Democrats have spent years dreaming of a working-class restoration. Joe Biden mounted the largest effort to court them with economics in decades. His administration poured hundreds of billions of dollars into infrastructure, factories, clean energy, and semiconductors, much of it flowing to Republican counties. Yet in the next election, 2024, Donald Trump won voters without college degrees and those earning less than $50,000, while making gains among working-class Hispanic and Black voters. You see, over the last 30 years, the Democrats have moved left on economics consistently. Obama was to the left of Clinton, and Biden was to the left of Obama. And in that same period, the working class has steadily abandoned the party.
The lesson is not that economics don't matter, but the Democratic Party's problem is not that it is seen as too centrist on economics. Democrats routinely lead Republicans on issues like healthcare and even now the cost of living. Their liabilities are cultural and social issues: crime, immigration, the border, and the so-called woke agenda.
One example: according to Pew, 43% of voters agree with Republicans on crime policy, while only 29% agree with Democrats. When Democrats come under pressure, they find it much easier to move left on economics than toward the center on culture. If they could speak plainly and say that the border must be controlled, repeat offenders punished, standards of merit defended, or that biological sex matters, they risk revolts from activists, advocacy groups, and highly educated staffers. So instead, Democrats offer a larger subsidy, a new benefit, or a fiercer attack on billionaires while leaving untouched the cultural attitudes that are actually alienating many voters.
The evidence suggests that this strategy is backwards. One study tested Democratic shifts across 29 policy issues and found that the largest electoral gains tended to come from moving toward the middle on social and cultural questions. Another report found that working-class voters placed far more emphasis than liberal college graduates on securing the border, reducing crime, and adding police. Liberal college graduates placed far more emphasis on resisting authoritarianism, protecting trans rights, climate change, and abortion. The divide widened not because working-class voters simply lurched to the right, but rather because college-educated Democrats moved left further and faster. In 2000, according to an analysis by American politics scholar Nicholas Jacobs, only about 8% of both Democrats and working-class voters favored increasing immigration. By 2020, 48% of Democrats did, compared with 24% of working-class voters. A three-point gap over abortion in 1980 became a 30-point gap by 2024. Large gaps also opened up over religion, family, and trust in government not to waste taxpayer dollars. Trump understands the political force of this estrangement. Listen to what he rails against in his campaign rallies: transgender athletes, DEI bureaucracies, elite universities, crime, and an out-of-control border.
There's never been a border in the world like this.
He knows that these issues hit voters in their gut.
The answer is not for Democrats to imitate Trump, abandon minorities, or become reactionary. It is to stop imagining that Medicare for All and wealth taxes will restore the New Deal coalition. That world and that coalition are gone. The good news is that the party already has a formidable modern coalition: college-educated voters, women, minorities, younger Americans, and many working- and middle-class voters in metropolitan America.
These voters want not a socialist revolution, but effective liberal government that delivers affordable housing, good schools, accessible healthcare, safe streets, a controlled border, legal immigration, and economic growth. And perhaps this will help Democrats to make inroads with the rest of the working class again too.
Democrats just need to show culturally moderate voters that liberalism can distinguish compassion from permissiveness, openness from disorder, and equality from ideological conformity.
Michigan showed where the party's energy lies for its base, the fraction of Americans who vote in primaries. The test is whether Democrats can turn that energy into a politics of common sense that appeals to the rest of the country.
Last week, a minor geopolitical earthquake shook the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and Turkey, two nations that have been openly hostile toward each other for much of the last decade, pledged to go to war in each other's defense. Along with Pakistan, they signed the Mecca Joint Defense Agreement, declaring NATO-style that an attack on one would be treated as an attack on all. Now, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have long had close security ties, but Saudi Arabia and Turkey have been bitter regional rivals, clashing over Qatar, Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, and most explosively the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, which Turkish leader Erdogan appeared to blame directly on the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. So what brought them together?
Donald Trump — or rather, the two countries' diminishing faith in him and his word. The Iran war has been a masterclass in how to squander credibility. Recall that Saudi Arabia and Qatar both received security guarantees from Donald Trump only last year. But Trump's word is as solid with his counterparts abroad as it was with his bankers in New York. He has repeatedly declared that a deal with Iran was just days away. By mid-June, one tally counted at least 38 pronouncements that a deal was near or Iran desperately wanted one. Yet this week, an Iranian source told Reuters that negotiations had made absolutely no progress. The world has learned to treat his Truth Social announcements as a kind of mix of fact and fiction, like some of the AI-generated videos he posts.
The same pattern is visible in Europe. In May, Trump announced that 5,000 American troops would leave Germany and suggested more cuts were coming. The Pentagon then scrapped a planned deployment of roughly 4,000 troops to Poland. Days later, Trump announced that an additional 5,000 troops would go to Poland. Sometimes he threatens not to defend Europe against Russia. Other times, he says he will. Imagine being a European defense minister trying to construct a 10-year military plan around this.
Trump declared this week that the United States had total control of the Strait of Hormuz. Yet ship-tracking data recorded just 14 vessels transiting in one day recently, compared with more than 130 a day before the war. This is not simply a matter of presidential style or rhetoric. It goes to the heart of American power. For eight decades, the United States built up something as powerful as aircraft carriers and squadrons of F-35s: credibility.
Allies believed American commitments would endure from one administration to the next. Adversaries understood that American threats, while sometimes exaggerated, carried real weight. The system was not perfect. Washington did break promises and make mistakes. But there was a broad presumption that the United States was a predictable actor and the president's words meant something.
Trump treats promises and threats as if he's playing a grand game of bluff. But unpredictability is a very different thing in an alliance than in a real estate negotiation. If allies cannot know whether troops will arrive or leave, whether the tariffs will rise or fall, whether an agreement signed today will survive until tomorrow, they do not become more obedient. They become more independent.
Countries are building insurance policies. Denmark chose a Franco-Italian air defense system rather than the American Patriot. Canada is reconsidering its F-35 purchases. European governments are investing heavily in their own arms industries. South Korea has become the second-largest seller of arms to NATO countries in Europe and is helping supply the Gulf's air defense with systems cheaper than Patriots. The Dutch Central Bank has moved critical cloud services to a European provider to reduce dependence on American technology. And now Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan are constructing a security architecture of their own. None of these moves by themselves amount to a rupture with Washington, but they show a deepening loss of faith in America's word. The same is happening with American threats. If Washington threatens tariffs, extracts concessions, and then threatens tariffs again, governments conclude that accommodation does not produce safety. To paraphrase Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney from earlier this year: if countries hope that compliance will buy safety, it won't. So the rational response is to build alternatives.
This is how great powers decline. Not necessarily through some dramatic defeat, but as other nations quietly stop organizing their world around them.
America remains immensely powerful. It has the world's strongest military, frontier technologies, vast capital markets, formidable alliances, and the dollar. But credibility is an asset, too — painstakingly accumulated over generations and astonishingly easy to spend and squander. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy sent former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to Paris to brief Charles de Gaulle on the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. Acheson brought reconnaissance photographs to prove the case. President de Gaulle, hardly an American supplicant, waved them away. He said he did not need the evidence. The word of the President of the United States was enough.
That scene is unimaginable today. I went to see Christopher Nolan's new movie, The Odyssey, to watch a summer blockbuster, and it more than delivered. I did not intend to comment on the various controversies around the movie, from the attacks that it is woke to the historical inaccuracies in it. For goodness' sake, it's a nearly 3,000-year-old yarn that is filled with gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants, and lots of magic.
But Ezra Klein's commentary on the movie did lead me to think about the broader issues the movie raises, which strike me as interesting and important. Klein argues that the critique of Nolan's Odyssey as woke because he casts a Black actress to play Helen is trivial and superficial, but that the movie is liberal in a more profound sense. Nolan fundamentally inverts the morality of the ancient world, in which conquest and victory were celebrated unabashedly, and replaces it with a morality that is more nuanced.
While Homer's Odysseus was constantly lauded for his clever, guileful ways, Nolan's Odysseus is haunted by the ravages of the war and by his own deceit that was at the center of the victory: the Trojan Horse.
Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion, and empathy. "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," says the Gospel of Matthew. Words that no Homeric hero would ever utter.
Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days as the populist right, often joined in by a new cadre of tech billionaires, look back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination, and victory mattered more than empathy or equality. For Donald Trump, winning is all that matters, justifying all means. He uses the word incessantly. In a 60 Minutes interview in 2018, when asked about his demeaning comments about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Trump said simply:
"We won. It doesn't matter. We won."
