Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and said the quiet part out loud: “The president is reordering trade… we are shedding excess labor in the federal government… that will give us the labor we need for the new manufacturing.”
At any other time, that kind of language would set off alarm bells across the political spectrum. Are laid-off NIH cancer researchers really going to find jobs in the iPhone factories that are being relocated to America? But today, it barely registers on the MAGA meter.
To be clear, Trump himself remains motivated by the same half-baked economic ideas he’s always had: a fixation on trade deficits, rooted in the zero-sum notion that if we buy more from a country than we sell to them, we’re being “ripped off.” It’s been told repeatedly that trade deficits aren’t inherently bad—that they often reflect strong domestic demand or a robust service economy. He doesn’t care. The misunderstanding is the point. And he’ll drag the global economy into a ditch rather than learn how it works.
But those around him—the far-right think tanks and political operatives shaping this agenda—are playing a longer, darker game. Trump’s tariffs aren’t just bad economics. They’re a declaration of economic war on the half of America that didn’t vote for him. This is deliberate and strategic. It’s a cultural counter-revolution disguised as industrial policy. And we know it’s not about economic leverage because Trump isn’t even pretending these tariffs are a negotiating tactic—he intends to make them permanent.
As I said last month, the project is about deskilling America: reducing white-collar work through AI and remote job cuts, destroying universities, starving higher education, using tariffs to wall off the country as a manufacturing-and-extraction island, gutting the cities, and pushing men into manual labor while nudging women into domestic roles. It’s not incoherent—it’s a plan being implemented methodically.
This isn’t about economic efficiency. It’s about political control. Education has always been a democratizing force. It creates citizens who are harder to intimidate, likely to demand fair treatment, and less willing to obey autocrats. It delays childbirth, disrupts patriarchal family structures, and builds civic coalitions that threaten right-wing hegemony. That’s why it’s under attack. The goal isn’t to elevate the dignity of manual work—it’s to eliminate choice, to collapse the pathways that allow people to escape precarity and assert autonomy.
A key pillar of this reactionary movement is masculinity politics—an obsession with control over women and the restoration of a pre-modern vision of gender roles. Right-wing pundits are now proudly declaring that Trump’s tariffs will “end the masculinity crisis.” Fox News chyrons bluster that his “manly” economic policies will “make you more of a man.” The idea is that factory jobs and closed borders will somehow restore a lost sense of masculine authority that was never actually economic but cultural and social.
Much of the MAGA worldview is built on the grievances of conservative men: angry that women increasingly don’t want to date them, that younger generations are abandoning the religion that once gave them automatic status, that they are no longer guaranteed a high-paying job out of high school without having to compete with the “nerds” in their class—or with immigrants, or with workers of color overseas. Trump’s tariffs are imagined as a cure-all: destroy the livelihoods of the educated men they resent, displace women from the professional fields where they thrive, and reassert dominance over a labor force they believe was rightfully theirs.
That’s what’s behind the economic shock therapy now underway. It’s similar to the disaster economics that the U.S. used in Chile and post-Soviet Russia, and Javier Milei is inflicting on Argentina today. But it’s inflected with the fervor of a Cultural Revolution—ironically more reminiscent of Mao than Pinochet with its war on intellectuals and its bestowing glory on farms and factories. The goal is to destroy the professions that make resistance possible—this is why you start with law firms instead of HMOs—then tighten the screws once people are desperate enough to submit. When the unrest comes—and it always does—so do crackdowns.
The economic toll is already mounting. The S&P 500 is in a tailspin. Global markets are panicking. JPMorgan puts the odds of a U.S. recession at 60 percent. Inflation is expected to skyrocket. Growth is expected to plummet. The tariffs are making everyone poorer—especially Trump’s own base in farming, logistics, and export-heavy manufacturing. But they don’t care about that so much. The point is to make dissenters poorer first. The goal isn’t prosperity—it’s obedience.
This is the vision: take NIH scientists, coders, artists, researchers, and teachers and force them into low-wage jobs doing whatever robots can’t yet do. Not because it’s efficient. Not because the work isn’t valuable. But because they are who the far right considers dangerous—people who know how the system works—and might challenge it.
None of this is about restoring dignity to labor. It’s about stripping dignity from labor that offers autonomy, safety, or intellectual freedom. It’s about reducing workers of all kinds—whether white-collar, blue-collar, or no-collar—to servitude.
Democrats must not treat this as a misguided trade policy. It’s not a debate over economic theory. It’s an assault on the idea of an open, educated, pluralistic society. We must recognize it for what it is if we are to fight it with the urgency it demands.
The post Trump’s Tariffs Aren’t Economics. They’re a Cultural Purge appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Continue reading...