‘Trump Is Bringing Democracy Back’: Is Trump the Most Honest Politician in Washington?

It’s been 15 days since “Liberation Day,” the day President Donald Trump announced a slew of tariffs on foreign goods.

After unexpected movement in the bond market—bond yields rose rather than fell—Trump announced a 90-day pause on many of his April 2 tariffs. Since Liberation Day, however, the administration claims more than 130 countries have come to the negotiating table. Both proponents and critics of Trump’s tariffs can agree that the ongoing trade negotiations are a testament to the monumental undertaking the American people elected Trump to accomplish: a reordering of the global exchange of labor, goods, and services.

Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age, joined “The Signal Sitdown” this week to break down the Trump administration’s strategy to effectuate an overhaul of the American system and the challenges the administration could face along the way.

“We’ve had what you referred to as kind of a neoliberal trade order for more than 30 years now, and you’re not gonna be able to change that overnight,” McCarthy said of the difficulties the administration’s tariff policies are facing.

Nevertheless, the immediacy of the Trump tariff regime may be serving a political purpose to set the administration up for long-term success.

“The Trump administration wanted to make the most drastic change possible as quickly as possible, maybe in part to see what the reaction would be,” McCarthy told me. “But beyond that, also just to send the strongest possible signal to companies both in this country and around the world that jobs should be brought back to America. Manufacturing should be brought back to America whether or not there are tariffs because even if the tariffs are suspended as they are right now, in many cases, there is still going to be the potential that they’ll be brought back at any time.”

It’s “a very big fight, of course, but one that [the Trump administration] expected, one that it knew was going to be very difficult,” McCarthy added.

“The president has sort of two paths to success here, and you’ll see that many of his critics are very frustrated by that and they don’t like it,” McCarthy claimed.

The first option McCarthy identified as a “change the world order with respect to trade,” which emphasizes “much more trade taking place within nations rather than between them, especially in the United States, using trade barriers, using tariffs.”

“That would be a very different kind of economy than we’ve had in the last 30 years,” McCarthy continued. “Maybe a very different economy than we’ve had since about a century ago with the New Deal. So, Trump could try to do that and capitalism will adjust, markets will adjust.”

“People would have a reason to invest in domestic production and you could have a kind of golden age, a new efflorescence of American production here in this country,” McCarthy told me. Even still, late 19th-century or early 20th-century comparisons don’t do what could be coming down the pike justice: “That’s not to say that things would look exactly like they did a hundred years ago or anything like that.”

And it would be even more different than the globalized economies of the post-Cold War era.

“It would be so different from what we’ve known in recent decades that it would even be hard to compare apples to oranges here,” McCarthy said. “It would simply be a completely new economic arrangement. It would still be free market, but it’ll be free market within a country rather than as extensively between countries.”

The other path to success, according to McCarthy, is leveraging the power of the American market to facilitate a gradual turn away from a hyper-globalized economy. “Trump could simply say, ‘Look, this is a goal that we could go towards, and it would obviously involve a lot of disruption. In the meantime, if you don’t want that whether you’re leaders in foreign countries or whether you are companies, either in America or elsewhere, if you want to salvage something that is more of a global system … you’re going to have to cooperate and cut a deal and basically make sure that we have a system which may be highly internationalized, but actually does preserve a great deal of manufacturing and production here in America,’” McCarthy explained.

“America has in terms of wealth, in terms of leverage, over the world, it’s got a very strong hand,” McCarthy said. “And it hasn’t been playing that hand very well up to now because the presidents and the administrations who have been making America’s trade policies have been ideologically and intellectually locked into frameworks that are not about America first, not about America’s interest, and not even about taking in new information and then changing your approach based on that information, but rather that have said, ‘Well, this is the textbook way of doing things. We cannot deviate from it.’”

Which is why, regardless of the path Trump chooses, McCarthy told me, “the Trump administration is taking a radically different approach.”

“It’s saying, ‘Actually we’re going to try these things out. We’re going to then take the new information that’s generated based on what cards we’re holding and what cards we’re playing, and how the bluffs are turning out,’” he said.

“It’s not that there are no risks with what Trump’s doing,” McCarthy acknowledged, but “all of this was advertised on the campaign trail. The American people knew what they were getting, and they wanted it. They voted for it.”

“The honest thing to do is for Trump to give the people what he was offering them, and that’s exactly what he’s doing,” McCarthy concluded. “It’s very ironic that Trump’s critics will always say, ‘Oh, democracy is under threat.’ No. Trump is bringing democracy back, and they don’t like it.”

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