Tabby Thursday
Steven L. Taylor
·
Thursday, December 11, 2025
·
13 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
Twitter and/or
BlueSky.
Paul Krugman claimed in a recent substack El Taco cannot admit there’s anything wrong with an economy he’s in charge of, even if his own policies are clearly causing problems.
It’s not uncommon for a change in policy to make things worse before it manages to improve them. Now, I don’t think the Taco Tariffs are going to lead to any kind of general improvement. they will have some effects, naturally, and there will be winners and losers, there always are even when conditions overall do improve. But even if they were, they won’t do it right away; and less so when they keep changing so one cannot plan for the next day, much less for the next year.
So, El Taco can’t even say his policies will take time to bear fruit. When a magical incantation is used, the effects are immediate. He said “TARIFFS!!111!!1” and that’s the end of it. Things are better now. Things got better the second he said it. Why do you persist in believing what you see and experience over his claims? You must have Taco Derangement Syndrome!
@Kathy: Any number of pundits lately seem to have twigged to the fact Trump could have chosen to do nothing and taken credit for the improving economy he inherited. But no, he had to meddle. Tariffs are, almost definitionally, inflationary. He could have put them in place, preferably legally by pushing them through congress, and it would be a one-shot inflation hit, soon over. But no, he has to keep screwing around. And now we’re waiting to see whether Roberts and his accomplices will bless Trump’s illegal tariffs.
So I read about how Mike Johnson is a terrible leader, and I wonder why the headline isn’t “House Republican caucus in complete disarray”. I don’t think that crew is leadable. They are gonna love to blame him, because that absolves him. Also, I still think he’s better than Kevin McCarthy.
Also, they can’t blame Trump out loud, so they complain about Johnson.
Someone–I believe it was Daryl–cited the Trump mortgage piece a day or so. Is it shocking? Well, it would be if Trump were a normal person. but he’s not. This is exactly what you’d expect him to do.
@gVOR10:
Same thing in his first term. Back then he had some adults in the room, so they didn’t let him go wild with tariffs or deportations. yet he still managed to hurt farmers enough to require a bailout (and how many voted for him in 2020 and 2024 even so?).
There are no adults left. Worse, there are some who’re even crazier than EL Taco pushing their idiot and bigoted agendas.
@gVOR10: @Kathy: Trump loves tariffs because he sees them as a power move. The fact that he’s now proposing bailouts to farmers suggests that he does realize by now the impact they’ve had on regular Americans. He just thinks he’s invincible to the political blowback for the same reason he thinks he defeated every negative news story in the past, by simply calling it a hoax. That’s just how he operates, trying to Jedi-Mind-Trick everyone into accepting his version of reality. This gambit has never been as effective as a lot of people think, but when it came to matters like the Mueller investigation or the multiple criminal and civil trials he was subjected to after leaving office the first time, at least those weren’t things that seemed to affect the average American; they were just news stories out there, concerning corruption that voters may not have approved of but which they didn’t think affected their bottom line.
The current situation is a bit more comparable to how he handled Covid, which he also alternately called a hoax and claimed to have solved. But even that isn’t a perfect match. Health and medicine are easier topics to fool people about than food prices because they involve causal relationships that aren’t as intuitive, and require some trust in experts whom large swaths of the public don’t give much credence to. The fact that Trump kept attacking the policies of his own government as well as state governments in the way they responded to Covid may not have gotten him reelected that year, but it gave him a narrative to cling to that a lot of Americans found plausible. The rate of a disease’s lethality or the effectiveness of masks or any other remedy aren’t “felt” in the same way a grocery bill is felt.
As I noted the other day, Trump’s approval ratings aren’t that different from how they were during his first term, but his approval on the economy has completely collapsed; he’s never had numbers anywhere near this bad up to now, not even during 2020 when the economy actually was in freefall. The public didn’t like his handling of Covid, but they seemed to give him a pass on the negative economic effects the pandemic led to. That was his one trump card (sorry), the idea that you may not like Trump but you have to give him credit for presiding over a solid economy until it was temporarily done in by the black swan event of the virus, and everything that happened after he left office was the Dems’ fault alone. None of this was accurate, but it was the narrative that prevailed.
He really has never been in a situation like the one now, where the public is as upset about the economy as they were under Biden and there’s no longer anything external to blame it on. Trump can say it’s all Biden’s fault, but then he simultaneously tries to take ownership of the economy and claim it’s going great. He doesn’t seem to realize that his old tricks are no longer working, not just because he’s purged all the “grownups” from his administration but because he wouldn’t even believe what they were telling him if they were still there.
@Kylopod:
If Trump had any sense (hah!) he’d be praying hard the Supreme Court nukes his “emergency” tarifffs.
That way the economic damage get minimised, and Trump gets a new cause with which to proclaim his grievances, rev-up MAGA, and bully the GoP in Congress.
@JohnSF:
If the fixer curt nukes the tariffs, I’d bet 100 to 1 that El Taco will try some other way to reinstate them. He’s already hinted at it, and he’s surrounded by people who think the law means what they want it to mean. And above all, he thinks the tariffs will accomplish all the things he claims they will, even when some objectives contradict others
If the Fixers order a refund, I’d bet even higher odds not 10% will be returned by the end of 2028. We’ll hear claims it has been spent (possibly on farm bailouts), or that it’s his money, or that importers paid it voluntarily, etc.
Maybe not even so much to hang on to the money, but to hide the fact US importers and not China paid the tariffs.
That piece on the Reagan era battles over affirmative action was amazing. It had both John Roberts and Clarence Thomas in starring roles, but on opposite sides of an issue.
Sometimes I wonder how Clarence Thomas manages to look at himself in the mirror. Also, it also looks more and more like Roberts was a political hack all along. He had me fooled for a while there.
@Kathy:
Well, yes, he’d make a big dance out of reinstating them, and rally MAGA under that banner, and blame them being revoked for any and all economic issues.
“If it wasn’t for tariffs being revoked, the AI stock vaulations WOULD have gone to infinty and beyond!”
But if anyone in the court of King Taco were clueful (hah!), they’d whisper in his (presumably still functional) ear that doing it slowly and keeping the issue on the boil but avoiding the actuallity might serve him best, economically and politically.
@CSK: Seeing that Trump claimed multiple residences is the first time it has occurred to me that this actually could be illegal. Why else would he do it?
@Jay L. Gischer: “Sometimes I wonder how Clarence Thomas manages to look at himself in the mirror. Also, it also looks more and more like Roberts was a political hack all along. He had me fooled for a while there.”
@JohnSF:
The dog wants to catch the car. It never gives any thought to what it will do if it catches it.
One doesn’t hear with the ears. One perceives sounds with the ears, but hears it with the brain.
I suppose malfunctioning qualifies as still functional.
@Barry_D:
With eyes wide shut, of course.