ANN ARBOR, MI — On March 26, 2025, I sat in front of a camera, looked directly into the void, and did that thing labor journalists do when we’re both correct and deeply uncomfortable about it: I argued with someone I mostly agreed with.

Shawn Fain was right about the crime scene. I was arguing about the weapon.

NAFTA gutted the Midwest. That part is not controversial. Ninety-thousand manufacturing facilities gone. Whole towns hollowed out. Workers scattered into service jobs with worse pay, worse hours, and better antidepressants. Fain called every plant closure “a bomb dropped on working-class communities,” which is not hyperbole if you’ve ever driven through Flint at sunset.

And I remember thinking: Yes. All of this. Every word. Then I did the thing I always do. I started squinting at the fix.

Because tariffs feel like action. They sound like justice. They scratch the same itch as slamming a door or flipping a table. But they don’t actually rearrange the room. They just make noise and then hand you the bill.

At the time, I said tariffs would raise prices. I said they wouldn’t stop corporate offshoring. I said CEOs would reroute supply chains while workers got a more expensive grocery receipt and a patriotic press release.

Which, in hindsight, was not exactly a brave prediction. That’s like warning people the stove will be hot while it’s actively in use. It was also equally obvious to anyone who paid attention to Ben Stein in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when he said:

“In 1930, the Republican controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the… Anyone? Anyone?… The Great Depression passed the… Anyone? Anyone?… A tariff bill, the Holly Smoot tariff act, which… Anyone?.. Raised or lowered? RAISED tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work. And the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression.”

It makes sense that the kids in class are staring blankly forward. Keep in mind that generation is MAGA.

Back to 2026.

Grocery prices didn’t come back down. Inflation cooled, sure, but prices don’t reverse just because the Federal Reserve clears its throat. Food at home is still dramatically more expensive than it was pre-pandemic. Meat, eggs, processed foods,  all stubbornly elevated. And while tariffs weren’t the sole cause, they were absolutely part of the scaffolding that kept prices high.

This is the part where cable news loves to jump in and yell, “Tariffs don’t cause inflation!” which is technically true in the same way saying “gravity didn’t kill him, the fall did” is true.

Tariffs raise baseline costs. They make shocks worse. They stack with everything else.

Steel and aluminum tariffs didn’t just hit cars and washing machines. They hit cans. Packaging. Machinery. Transport. Processing equipment. Fertilizer inputs. You don’t need to tariff a banana directly to make guacamole more expensive; you just have to tariff the system that moves, packages, refrigerates, and sells the banana.

And that’s before we even get to the threat of tariffs.

On February 4, 2025, Trump announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then paused them, then declared victory, then wandered off like a toddler who’d unplugged the TV and expected applause for fixing it. I called it political theater. That assessment has aged like milk left on the hood of a Ford F-150.

Because the pause didn’t undo the damage. Businesses still panicked. Supply chains still froze. Prices are still adjusted in anticipation. Risk got priced in. Uncertainty always is. You don’t need the tariff to hit, you just need companies to believe it might.

Which brings me back to my own footage.

Watching myself now is… humbling. I’m doing that earnest labor-guy thing where I over-explain, cite programs, name acts of Congress, and then end with a rousing call for a modern New Deal like I’m about to pass out clipboards.

I still stand by the substance. A federal jobs program is a better answer. Workforce investment does lift wages without spiking prices. We’ve literally done it before, at scale, without the economy collapsing into socialist rubble.

But I’ll admit this: I was too polite about how much worse Trump’s approach would make things.

Tariffs didn’t cause every price increase. They didn’t invent inflation. They didn’t personally raise the cost of eggs while twirling a mustache.

What they did was lock in pain. They made recovery slower. They made shocks sharper. They made everyday goods more expensive than they had to be.

And they did it while pretending to help the very workers already bleeding out.

So yes, past me was right. Again. Also a little smug about it. Also, insufficiently angry.

Because this wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a choice. A choice to treat economic policy like a branding exercise. A choice to substitute spectacle for structure. A choice to tax Americans indirectly while insisting someone else was paying.

Free trade wasn’t free. But neither is economic cosplay.

If we want cheaper groceries, stable supply chains, and dignity for workers, we don’t need louder tariffs. We need boring competence, aggressive investment, and leaders willing to do the unsexy work of building capacity instead of announcing penalties.

And this is why the noise keeps getting louder.

ICE raids. Forever wars. Border panics. Strongman fantasies about invading countries, abducting leaders, “showing strength.” None of it is accidental. It’s not a strategy. It’s cover.

Because strip away the spectacle and Trump is exposed as what he’s always been: a man who sold himself as a genius businessman and then governed like someone who never learned how systems actually work. Tariffs instead of planning. Threats instead of policy. Chaos instead of capacity. He treats the economy the same way he treated his companies: extract, brand, blame, repeat. And then acts shocked when the numbers don’t care about his feelings.

The economy isn’t struggling because of immigrants or foreign plots or imaginary enemies. It’s struggling because you can’t run a modern nation like a casino and expect stability. You can’t replace boring competence with vibes. You can’t govern by tantrums and call it strength.

So the distractions escalate. When groceries stay expensive, he points at migrants. When supply chains wobble, he points at borders. When tariffs raise prices, he declares victory and starts another fight. Anything to keep people looking outward instead of downward at their receipts.

Trump wasn’t undone by complexity. He was undone by adulthood. He never learned it, never wanted it, and now the country is paying for that refusal in higher prices, weaker systems, and permanent instability.

Eyes open. Voices loud.