Good judgment comes from experience, it’s been said, and experience comes from poor judgment. Donald Trump has never been a repository of wisdom, but his policies are serving the unintended purpose of generating it among the American people. He is teaching the value of some previously underappreciated assets by depriving us of them.
The first is free trade. For decades, the general goal of U.S. policy, championed by presidents of both parties, was lowering barriers to international commerce to foster both prosperity and peace.
But lately the concept has fallen into disrepute, blamed for battering American industries, destroying jobs and desolating once-prosperous regions. President Barack Obama’s biggest trade pact, the Trans-Pacific Partnership with 11 other nations, died in 2016 thanks to opposition from congressional Democrats and Republicans, as well as Trump and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Trump’s embrace of brutally high tariffs, however, is reminding both consumers and business people of the benefits of access to everything other nations have to offer. The duties will gouge Americans on cars, food, appliances, electronics, furniture, clothing and — well, nearly everything. They would also decimate U.S. industries, many of which use imported parts and material in their own products.
The dangers are not lost on Americans: A recent Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found that 64% disapprove of Trump’s tariff policies. That reaction comes even though the effects of his import taxes are only starting to bite.
The second is capable government. Ineptitude, arrogance and disdain for expertise have been the signature of Trump’s Cabinet — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s reckless sharing of war plans to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s attempt to downplay the measles epidemic in Texas to Attorney General Pam Bondi’s claim that recent seizures of illicit fentanyl have saved 258 million lives.
This clownfest dramatizes the importance of something Americans previously had but didn’t fully appreciate: a functioning system administered by people with knowledge, experience, competence and a nonpartisan ethic.
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency is a manifestation of right-wing contempt for federal programs and employees. Besides being massively ignorant, Musk and his minions are drunk on ideology. He boasted that he would cut federal spending by $2 trillion, a figure he later reduced to $1 trillion, and then $150 billion — a largely fictitious figure.
Musk grossly overstated his savings, a New York Times analysis concluded, “by including billion-dollar errors, by counting spending that will not happen in the next fiscal year — and by making guesses about spending that might not happen at all.” The libertarian Cato Institute mournfully agrees that “Elon and DOGE are failing to meet their objective to deliver major spending cuts.”
Most people may not mind if Trump wrecks the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides help only in foreign lands. But Americans will not be so blase when mass firings at the Social Security Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Veterans Affairs make it harder to get benefits they are entitled to.
Nor will visitors be pleased when they travel to national parks this summer to find trails closed, trash uncollected and rangers absent. Yosemite National Park in California, which has locks on hundreds of structures and safes, saw its only locksmith fired; a court later ordered his reinstatement.
Limited government, funded with a carefully designed budget, is a good thing. But Trump’s reckless approach won’t restrain federal power and reach. It’s likely only to sabotage government operations, including legitimate ones, in ways that serve nobody.
Finally, there is due process — an ancient and vital check on the power of the government over individuals. Trump and his accomplices claim the right to deport foreigners to a brutal prison in El Salvador without giving them any opportunity to challenge the grounds for their removal. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident who had been convicted of no crime, was among the victims.
Before, due process sounded like a dry abstraction. But when Immigration and Customs Enforcement ships migrants to a foreign gulag for alleged membership in a Venezuelan gang, even though 90% of them have no criminal record, the abstract becomes vivid — and the need for it becomes undeniable. The guilty deserve punishment, but due process requires the government to first prove their guilt. Otherwise, the innocent will also suffer.
Trump insists it would take too long to grant unauthorized migrants due process — which the Constitution guarantees to every person, not just every citizen. But a majority of Americans, a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll found, reject the policy of “sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected of being members of a criminal group to a prison in El Salvador without a court hearing.”
It’s probably too much to hope that Trump will see the grave damage he’s doing and reverse course on any of these matters. But Americans are getting an education that may inoculate them against future folly.
Steve Chapman was a member of the Tribune Editorial Board from 1981 to 2021. His columns, exclusive to the Tribune, now appear the first week of every month. He can be reached at stephenjchapman@icloud.com.
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