Ronald Reagan would have abhorred Trump’s tariffs. He believed presidents should rein in the Leviathan, not direct markets.

When it comes to economic policy, Donald Trump is a statist menace. Full stop.

His obsession with tariffs isn’t grounded in just classic protectionist aid to domestic industries, but actually embodies a much grander and more dangerous Caesarian notion: Namely, that America is a giant corporation and Trump its all-powerful CEO, empowered to gallop around the globe cutting great big beautiful deals to bring investment, jobs, production, societal uplift and foreign policy victories, too, pouring into America’s hinterlands.

In that context, the Donald has tortured the nation’s poorly drafted trade statutes into economic battering rams, thereby enabling him to deploy tariffs for any purpose that suits his momentary fancy. Thus, his initial 25 percent “reciprocal” tariff on Japan was reduced to 15 percent in trade for $550 billion of ill-defined Japanese investments in the US. Likewise, the BRICS were threatened with a 100 percent tariff if they didn’t use the dollar to conduct trade with each other, and India got clobbered with an additional 25 percent tariff because its refineries found it economically expedient to buy the cheapest crude on the market — Russian Urals — in defiance of Washington’s nix on the latter.

In a similar manner, consumers of Chinese imports such as toys and kitchen cabinets got nailed with a 20 percent “fentanyl tariff,” a tax on American buyers, but allegedly to punish Beijing for not stopping the export of the drug’s chemical precursors. Of course, the next one-step-removed intermediates for making precursors like NPP and ANPP can be sourced from almost any chemical industry on the planet, while the only reason there is a US market for synthesized fentanyl in the first place is that Washington’s war on drugs has driven prices of other illicit drugs sky high.

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