Effective April 3, US president Donald Trump announced on March 26, Americans will pay a 25% tax (above and beyond existing taxes) on imported cars.

The measure includes “temporary exemptions for auto parts” while tax vultures “sort through the complexity” of implementing Tariff Man’s latest scheme for picking your pocket, but the massive tax hike will eventually also hit US auto manufacturers who rely on imported parts for cars assembled domestically and sold as “Made In America.”

Undetermined: Whether United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain believes the workers he claims to represent are idiots, whether he’s an idiot himself, or both. “These tariffs are a major step in the right direction,” Fain says in a UAW press release, “for autoworkers and blue-collar communities across the country.”

The release refers to the misnamed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a “free trade disaster” that has “has devastated the working class.”

Wrong on all counts.

NAFTA isn’t “free trade,” it’s government-managed trade with slightly fewer restrictions and barriers than prior to its 1994 implementation.

Far from a “disaster” that has “devastated the working class,” both US manufacturing output and the real US median wage are far higher since NAFTA than before — the former by about 36%, the latter by about 30%.

US auto industry employment increased for nearly a decade after NAFTA’s implementation, came down with increased automation, then increased again to about the pre-NAFTA level.

In 1993, the US produced about 11.2 million motor vehicles; in 2023, 10.6 million. That may have something to do with the 100,000-mile average lifespan of a car built in 1993 versus the 200,000-mile lifespan of a car built in 2024.

Yes, many auto workers had to find new jobs once imported vehicles were allowed to compete with American-built vehicles. Yes, that made some of their lives harder and left some of them worse off, at least temporarily and sometimes long-term.

Welcome to the real world, where auto workers aren’t unique and special snowflakes who never have to change careers like the rest of us. The average American changes jobs 12 times in his or her lifetime … and the average American, including one who worked on a Ford assembly line at some point, is more prosperous now than he or she was in 1993.

Trump’s cockamamie tariff schemes might well have been intentionally tailored to undo all that.

Shawn Fain’s fantasy — hordes of new dues-paying UAW workers — will remain a fantasy.

Average car prices, adjusted for inflation, are already nearly 30% higher now than they were in 1993. Trump’s 25% tax on imports, which will result in a near-25% price increase on domestically produced cars and a massive increase in the price of used cars, will have the following result:

Americans will buy fewer cars. Not just fewer imported cars, fewer cars, period. They’ll coax longer lives out of their old beaters and look into other modes of transportation.

Those Americans, including auto workers, will also be paying more for groceries and the various necessities of life.

Enjoy your “victory” bash, Shawn. Neither you nor your union’s members will enjoy the hangover.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

President Donald Trump meets with his cabinet in the Cabinet Room of the White House, Thursday, March 6, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)

“As I heard it, the president was clear,” someone thought to be deputy White House chief of staff Steven Miller allegedly texted to a Signal chat involving several cabinet members and inadvertently including Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic.

The clarity: US president Donald Trump had supposedly given the “green light” for US military strikes on Yemen, a country upon which Congress has not declared war.

At 11:44 a.m. on March 15, someone purporting to be US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted a “TEAM UPDATE” to the Signal chat, revealing (Goldberg claims)  “operational details of forthcoming strikes on Yemen.” Two hours later, as predicted in the “TEAM UPDATE,” US strikes on Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, began.

Goldberg’s disclosures, after the fact, triggered a combination of “circle the wagons, deny everything” and “condemnation of lax security” responses from within the administration.

Members of Congress are already calling for hearings. Not hearings on the illegal planning and execution of an undeclared war, just hearings on how a journalist got looped into sensitive internal discussions over an application not seemingly approved for use by government actors.

But let’s rewind to something just as important as the illegal US war on Yemen or lax opsec by national security adviser Mike Waltz, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, and other top administration officials: Donald Trump’s responsibility for the whole mess.

Trump and friends are all-in on the “unitary executive” theory, under which the president can do pretty much anything he wants because, per Article II of the US Constitution. “the executive Power shall be vested” in his office.

Over time, presidents have increasingly exploited the “unitary executive” theory to build a more “imperial” presidency. Congress, and (if Trump has his way) the courts find themselves relegated to an advisory capacity, especially but not only on foreign policy. Presidents rule as kings, using executive orders and declarations of emergency to have everything their way.

The theory and its results aren’t Trump’s inventions. He’s just building on past practice. If, as some claim, Trump aims for checkmate  and “the end of “American democracy,” the initial pawn to king 4 move was probably Harry Truman’s order for US military intervention in Korea in 1950. Congress quickly backed Truman’s play with funding, letting him get away with war by presidential order rather than congressional declaration … and it’s been a downhill roll ever since.

There’s another side to the “unitary executive” coin, though. If the president’s “executive power” extends so far, so does the president’s responsibility for both the details and the consequences. The Constitution, after all, also charges the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Apart from Goldberg, the participants in the alleged Signal chat all seem to have been chosen  by Trump — vice-president JD Vance as his running mate, the cabinet secretaries as his nominees.

If they messed up, Trump messed up. And just as he should hold them accountable, Congress should hold him accountable.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for Congress to notice the emperor’s unclothed state.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

I might have missed Grover Cleveland’s 188th birthday on March 18 if Paul Jacob hadn’t pointed it out in his own column on the man who (as Jacob mentions) many libertarians consider “the last great president of these United States.” I don’t consider the presidency a venue for greatness, but as presidents go “Big Steve” was arguably one of the least bad.

Cleveland, of course, has been noticed lately for some of his similarities with Trump. He was the first, and until Trump the only, president to serve two non-consecutive terms. Like Trump, he was a New York Democrat. And, like, Trump he won his first presidential election despite a sex scandal — although unlike Trump he openly admitted his past conduct (he’d fathered a child out of wedlock, something more scandalous then than now).

The differences between the two, however, are more interesting.

On foreign policy, Cleveland was an anti-imperialist who opposed the US annexation of Hawaii. He never seems to have considered adding, say, Greenland or Canada to the constellation of American states. Trump’s an imperialist in practice who occasionally talks a not very convincing non-interventionist game while somehow managing to escalate every conflict he inherits and who couldn’t be bothered to complete his negotiated withdrawal from Afghanistan before leaving office the first time.

On tax policy, Trump calls himself “Tariff Man” and seems determined to wreck the US economy with his capricious demand-then-back-down approach to foreign trade. Cleveland worked to lower tariffs, and laid out the irrefutable case against them to American workers who thought such taxes “protected” their jobs:

“Those who buy imports pay the duty charged thereon into the public Treasury, but the great majority of our citizens, who buy domestic articles of the same class, pay a sum at least approximately equal to this duty to the home manufacturer. … with slight reflection they will not overlook the fact that they are consumers with the rest …”

Perhaps the biggest differences, both of which informed Cleveland’s opposition to high tariffs and Trump’s support for them:

First, in Cleveland’s time, the federal government enjoyed an increasing budget surplus rather than continuing deficits, while Trump inherited a government $20 trillion in debt and left office the first time with that debt at more than $28 trillion.

Second, Cleveland opposed the “spoils” system under which the party in power rewarded its supporters with government jobs and contracts. He wanted a “civil service” based on competence rather than partisan loyalty, and considered the tariff-fueled budget surplus a problem because it made so much money available to pay for those “spoils.”

Trump, on the other hand, clearly sees government employment as “spoils” candy to be handed out on the basis of personal loyalty.  And since his biggest supporters are among the American wealth elite, he gets a “two-fer” by taxing your purchases of foreign goods to their advantage (revenue) while rewarding less well-heeled loyalists with those government jobs (spending).

We could use a man like Grover Cleveland again. Too bad we got another Herbert Hoover.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY