The Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act

Dear Palmer Report readers: it's Bill Palmer. I'm as sick of Trump as you are. I'm expanding Palmer Report's operations so we can lead the fight against Trump. Click here to donate $25 or $50.

In April of 1929, two Republican morons, Senator Reed Smoot of Utah and Senator Willis C Hawley of Oregon, assembled a stupid bill that raised tariffs on more than 20,000 imported goods. It was signed into law in 1930 by one of American history’s dumbest presidents, the Republican Herbert Hoover.

What came to be known to history (and bored high school students and fans of the movie Ferris Bueller’s day off) as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, inspired retaliatory tariffs by many other nations. Economists and economic historians agree that the Act and retaliatory tariffs imposed by America’s trading partners were major factors ushering in the Great Depression — in all its awful majesty. It’s one of the reasons America took much longer to recover from the Depression than Germany.

It was a paranoid time, a time when post World War I isolationist sentiments were the order of the day. The Act was one of many stupid, childish, petulant lashings out of angry children gathering up their marbles to go home and pout. It’s the thing that ruined the lives of many of your parents and grandparents.

While Trump’s tariff lunacy isn’t as bad as the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, he could easily fix that. All that needs to happen is for someone to tell him that it’s nowhere nearly so comprehensive. Naturally, it goes without saying that Trump has no idea what the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act was. I don’t even have to check. I’m confident the man who constantly brags that he graduated from the Wharton School of Business doesn’t know what it is.

One thing that has seemed to have finally penetrated the pea brain of the MAGA toad-god is, “Tariffs, BAD.” So Trump posted to “Truth” Social on Sunday a child’s model of spineless equivocation: “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!).” In other words, the “stable genius” hasn’t got a clue.

It’s a little like being tied to a chair and watching a toddler play with a loaded revolver, is it not, brothers and sisters? Every day I wake up wondering to myself what stupid shit the Cretin-in-Chief has pulled now. Something tells me that by the time this madness is over — if it ever ends — the early days of Trump and his tariffs and his political firings and his pardons and his cabinet-level appointments will seem quaint. I hope not. But if he can do this much damage in fourteen days, imagine what he can do in fourteen hundred.

Dear Palmer Report readers: it's Bill Palmer. I'm as sick of Trump as you are. I'm expanding Palmer Report's operations so we can lead the fight against Trump. Click here to donate $25 or $50.