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IT’S ABOUT ONE THING: TRUMP’S THIRST FOR ONE-MAN RULE  
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E.J. Dionne Jr.
April 17, 2025
The New Republic
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_ The tariffs, the treatment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the DOGE
moves—they’re all fundamentally about the same thing. It's time to
shed flawed assumptions about who Trump is and make sense of what he
is doing. _

"Donald Trump - Caricature", by DonkeyHotey (CC BY-SA 2.0)

 

President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have indeed had the
effect of freeing the country—not from the global economy, as Trump
claims, but from a series of flawed assumptions about who Trump is,
how he operates, and how to make sense of what he is doing.

Above all, the tariffs have made clear how all of Trump’s policies
fit together: Every step he takes is aimed at concentrating the power
of government in his own hands as he seeks to intimidate opponents and
move aggressively to eliminate alternative sources of public influence
in the legal system, the universities, and the media.

The most conspicuous moment of truth has been for Trump’s supporters
in big business and other advocates of a loosely regulated free
market. They thought they could get what they wanted out of Trump,
mainly lower taxes and less regulation, without having to worry about
his very explicit campaign promises to impose tariffs, let alone to do
so in a madcap way that now threatens their own wealth. They
couldn’t imagine that Trump would happily wreak such havoc in the
national and global economies or demolish the entire post–World War
II economic system.

Why did they miss this? The fact that Trump lies regularly and has few
fixed principles has, perversely perhaps, been a source of his
political strength. Those who rally to him fool themselves into
thinking they can have Trump à la carte. They assume he really means
his pledges to policies they like and that he’s lying to the masses
when he promises policies they don’t like. All the old nonsense
about taking Trump “seriously but not literally” was a way for his
apologists to assume he couldn’t really mean the more outlandish
things he said.

His supporters in business and among the wealthy like to view
themselves as gimlet-eyed realists, so the ease with which they were
bamboozled is quite remarkable—and is easily measured. In its first
quarter survey of 134 CEOs from January 27 to February 10—that is to
say, during the very early days of Trump 2.0—the Conference
Board’s
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CEO confidence rose by nine points to reach its highest level in three
years. “CEOs were substantially more optimistic about current
economic conditions as well as about future economic conditions—both
overall and in their own industries,” said Stephanie Guichard, a
senior economist at the Conference Board. They have since undergone a
remarkable change of heart. An April survey of 329 CEOs by _Chief
Executive
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62 percent of them predicting a slowdown or a recession within the
next six months, up from 48 percent in March.

The big thing the CEOs missed, pre-Liberation Day, is that Trump is
not a capitalist in the strict sense of the term. He’s a kleptocrat.
Webster’s defines
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as “a government by those who seek chiefly status and personal gain
at the expense of the governed.” That’s a rather good definition
of the Trump regime.

His rationales for his tariffs change regularly. At some moments
they’re about returning manufacturing to the United States, at
others they’re just a bargaining tool. But one justification is
constant: They are designed to force business leaders and other
nations alike to deal with Trump. And he wants to humiliate them in
the process, as his most revealing comment on this mess made clear.

“These countries are calling us up kissing my ass,” Trump told a
Republican gathering
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dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please, sir, make a deal, I’ll do
anything, sir.’”

He also took a shot at those Republicans who finally found their
voices in raising doubts about his tariffs. “I’ll see some rebel
Republican,” he said, “you know, some guy who wants to grandstand,
say, ‘I think that Congress should take over negotiations.’ Let me
tell you, they don’t negotiate the way I negotiate.”

That last sentence is entirely true. No one who had the interests of
his country in mind would negotiate like he’s negotiating. This is
precisely why Congress _should_ strip this reckless, self-absorbed,
petty man of the power to put the entire world economy at risk out of
a desire to turn everyone into a supplicant subject to his will.

Not only does Trump’s approach to tariffs shake the confidence of
the world in the stability of the United States; it also opens up
limitless opportunities for grift. This or that industry will have to
come to Trump for exceptions to his ever-changeable tariff schedules.

Last weekend, the administration excluded phones, chipmaking, and some
computers from his tariffs. Then Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
went on television and muddied the waters, casting doubt on exactly
what would be exempted and what would not. Who knows where that issue
will stand by the time you read this.

The pandemonium that is Trump’s policymaking process is why the
world now sees our country as unreliable. But the consistent message
was: The bazaar is open. Come and get Trump’s special blessing by
kissing his … well, you know where. And you can bet that the
deepest-pocketed actors in our economy will have a better chance of
cajoling the exemptions and concessions they want from Trump than will
a small business threatened with bankruptcy because an imported
component it needs to make its product remains subject to tariffs and
enormous price increases.

Since Trump took office, his opponents have struggled with the
blinding speed of his wrecking crew. How, his foes have asked, can we
keep focus when he is doing so many bad things
simultaneously—ignoring the Supreme Court by keeping Kilmar Armando
Abrego Garcia, an entirely innocent father of three, in an El Salvador
prison to which he should never have been sent; lawlessly closing
agencies and laying off workers through Elon Musk’s DOGE; violating
the First Amendment by deporting legal residents because they exercise
their free speech rights; attempting (with some, but fortunately not
universal, success) to intimidate universities and law firms into
submission to the president’s diktats; going after the Associated
Press for refusing to go along with Trump’s whim in unilaterally
renaming the Gulf of Mexico; and undercutting our democratic allies,
notably Ukraine.

The answer is that all these abuses are about the same issue
implicated in his tariff overreach: the danger to our country created
by a president who has always told us how much he admires and aspires
to one-man rule. It’s a shame that few in the GOP raised their
voices when Trump came for law-abiding fathers, legal immigrants, or
dedicated civil servants. Only when he came for big market investors
and 401(k)s did the perils of Trump’s power grab begin to arouse
cross-party opposition.        

But better late than never. Resistance to Trump is rising—most
recently in the backlash against the lawless and contemptible
treatment of Abrego Garcia and Harvard University’s defiance of
Trump’s freedom-crushing takeover attempt.

Now his tariff adventures have shaken Trump’s own electorate and
begun to crack GOP solidarity. Will Republicans finally contain him
before he bankrupts us all? If it takes a threat to our bank accounts
to save our constitutional rights, so be it. 

_E.J. Dionne Jr. is a professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt
School of Public Policy and co-author (with Miles Rapoport) of 100
Percent Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting._

_The New Republic [[link removed]] was founded in 1914 to
bring liberalism into the modern era. The founders understood that the
challenges facing a nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution
and mass immigration required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

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* Donald Trump
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* dictatorship
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* Tariffs
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* DOGE
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* Diego Garcia
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