The Blunt Force Trauma of the Trump Tariffs

It’s an interesting tactic, to start a bar brawl and ask everyone not to punch back in case someone gets hurt. It’s not working. China has already vowed to retaliate; the EU suggested that it could as well. (New Zealand is officially chill.)

Set the economics of this aside for a moment, though. The insult on top of that looming injury is how sloppy this all is. It’s the same blunt-force destruction that DOGE has implemented within the US government, that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has imposed on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, now projected on a global scale. Yes, Elon Musk and DOGE have taken a blowtorch to federal agencies. But the tariffs are a helpful reminder that it's Trump who's fiddling while it all burns.

It’s the instinct to measure wins in units of pain and suffering. It’s an assumption that the only way to help yourself is to hurt other people. This is just what America is now.

The optimist’s case is that this is all a feint, that other countries will capitulate or at least make enough of a show of it that things will go back to normal. Seems unlikely. First of all, they’re already doing the opposite, all apologies to Bessent. But even if they weren’t, even if this is just posturing from the US, that posturing has consequences. Whatever equity the US has built up over the last century as a reputable trade partner has been largely wiped out by a businessman-president best known for his bankruptcies.

And then there’s the pessimist’s case, which also seems increasingly like the realist’s. The US is barreling toward a recession for no good reason, and dragging the world—and a few thousand penguins on remote Antarctic islands—down with it.

The Chatroom

Will these tariffs lead to a US manufacturing renaissance, or a prolonged recession?

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WIRED Reads

• The CDC Has Been Gutted: Thousands of CDC employees who worked on things like preventing HIV and lead poisoning have been told they were subject to a reduction in force. Experts say people will die.
• The DOGE Axe Comes for Libraries and Museums: The Institute of Museum and Library Services has long received bipartisan support. But after years of trying, President Donald Trump has delivered it a crushing blow.
• Federal Judge Allows DOGE to Take Over a $500 Million Building for Free: It’s the culmination of a weeks-long standoff between Elon Musk’s DOGE team and the United States Institute of Peace.

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What Else We’re Reading

? Trump Tells Inner Circle That Musk Will Leave Soon: Elon Musk increasingly feels more like a liability than an asset to the Trump administration. Still, we’ll believe this when we see it. (Politico)

? DOGE Official at DOJ Bragged About Hacking, Distributing Pirated Software: A dive into the checkered online past of a SpaceX engineer now working in the Deputy Attorney General’s office. (Reuters)

? Fired Health Workers Were Told to Contact an Employee. She’s Dead: Some reduction-in-force notices told people to contact a woman named Anita Pinder with discrimination complaints. Pinder died last year. (The Washington Post)

The Download

WIRED business director Zoë Schiffer and senior politics editor Leah Feiger joined Shumita Basu last week on the Apple News in Conversation podcast to talk about our big DOGE feature. Listen now.

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