Unlike the rest of social media, which last month was filled with experts on social security and the month before experts on air traffic control and off-and-on experts in foreign policy, I have not suddenly become an economics expert with a specialty in tariffs over the last couple of weeks. I never commented on the stick (tariffs) and I am not now going to comment on the carrot (pausing the tariffs against those countries willing to negotiate).

My earlier post about the war against American workers waged by pre-Trump economists was not about the economics but about how the tariff regime in place before Trump, as described by its supporters was really a war against workers worldwide. It benefits countries that deliberately keep working conditions so poor as to be practically slavery. That is inherent in the design of our currently global economic system. While it isn’t something politicians talk about directly, it is obvious every time some beltway elite denigrates American workers, small towns, and anyone who says or even just implies that we can bring lost industries back to the United States.

They’ve never bothered to use the weapons at their disposal to negotiate a level playing field because why would they? No one thinks it would help. No one in their right mind thinks that the American worker can compete even on a level playing field.

Trump talks and acts as if he does think that, which is probably part of why the beltway says he’s not in his right mind.

What interests me most about this latest social media panic is the intense lack of understanding of Trump as a politician that characterizes so many of these newly-minted economics experts. They seem genuinely confused about Trump’s goal here, and that is, I think, because they see him as a standard politician. He’s not. For most politicians, if you want to know what they want to do, you ignore what they’re saying and you focus only on what they’re doing.

I have, too. But at some point you have to realize there’s a war going on agains American workers, and choose a side.

If you want to know Trump’s goals, you have to listen to what he says, and process what he does in light of that. Trump has always said that his goal is to level the playing field for American workers and industries. He’s always been clear that tariffs are a means to that end, to the goal of a level playing field. That’s why he announced the tariffs. It’s why he paused them for countries willing to negotiate that level playing field and for industries willing to bring industry back to the United States. His tariffs and then tariff pause wasn’t some random collection of contradictions nor even a retreat. It’s an obvious step toward what Trump said he wanted: negotiating a level playing field for American workers.

If you listen to what he says, Trump really does believe in America. He believes that on a level playing field American workers and American industry will win. Most politicians, left and right, don’t believe that. They never have, at least since the start of the Cold War. They believe that it is inevitable that American workers and American industry will lose in any global economic competition. They believed that the Soviet Union’s flailing economic model was superior to the United States, and they believe today that the Chinese model is superior to the United States.

Right and left, every politician except Trump and, earlier, Ronald Reagan act as if a planned, top-down economy where every industry is run as a monopoly is superior to a bottom-up worker-focused and entrepreneurial economy. It’s in every government-created monopoly from their opposition to the AT&T breakup to requiring that union representation be monopolistic. Without an enlightened bureaucrat running an industry, industries are bound to fail.

Too often, our national economic policy has been a modern echo of Lincoln’s observation that:

…although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself. — Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln and the American Founding^•)

I’ve never seen anyone who writes about the inevitable export of American jobs overseas write that about their own job. It’s always other Americans whose jobs are better off overseas. It’s always other jobs that are better performed by automation and little more than slave labor.

Trump says he believes otherwise and acts as if he believes otherwise. I’d certainly like him to be right, and I believe he is. I believe that if we free Americans to work and to create new industries that we will both make the best things in the world and create new industries the likes of which the world has never imagined. As we have in the past.

Trump may be wrong. It’s still extremely refreshing to once again have an American president who believes in America rather than one who says that all we can do is manage our decline. Especially as we head toward the Sestercentennial.