President Donald Trump’s former communications director said that the Republican leader’s “ever-spiraling failures” explain his latest new policy — raising tariffs on Canada, a policy that even the Wall Street Journal recently described as “madness.”
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“Trump’s third tariff tantrum piles more dizzying distractions on top of ever-spiraling failures,” Anthony Scaramucci, who worked for the GOP executive during his first term, posted on X on Wednesday. The Wall Street financier cited a recent article in Fortune Magazine by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Steven Tian, co-authored of “Trump’s Ten Commandments,” in which they described his anti-Canada tariffs as part of his “Wall of Sound” strategy — that is, “his perpetual noise machine of constant, overwhelming distractions to divert attention away from bad news.”
They elaborated on why Trump would want distractions right now.
“Trump was humiliated by raucous boos showering down upon him at the World Cup as he was pushed off stage while jockeying for a central photo position with the Spanish team he publicly disparaged while cheering for their rival Argentina,” the authors wrote. “Earlier this month, he was upstaged over Independence Day weekend by Taylor Swift’s glamorous, mellifluous, joyous, unifying wedding bash, which he mocked, in contrast to his angry divisive ego-maniacal bellicose growls as he tried to co-opt the 250th celebration by rebranding it around himself.”
They added, “Since last November, he has implausibly claimed that affordability is a hoax amidst persistently high prices, even as 3 million files are still unreleased related to convicted [sex-trafficker] Jeffrey Epstein.” Similarly his approval ratings are at 37 percent while he is stuck in an unpopular Middle Eastern war and remains chronically unable to improve Americans’ economic situations.
“As a result, Trump has retreated to a collection of what he sees as his greatest hits, old chestnuts such as attacks on law firms and universities, but especially a combative swagger, swinging the distracting cudgel of tariffs,” they observed. Yet his tariff-happy approach has economic consequences.
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“Trump might love all tariffs all the time, but CEOs distinctly do not,” the authors explained. “At our previous Yale CEO Caucus, over two-thirds of CEOs surveyed told us that Trump’s tariffs had been harmful to their own businesses, and 80 [percent] said that tariff costs had been passed on in part to consumers. 62 [percent] told us that they were not planning to invest more in manufacturing despite Trump’s tariffs.”
For his part, Scaramucci has repeatedly argued that Trump’s greatest political strength was speaking to voters’ valid economic anxieties. Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci argued Trump was able to win over swing voters by speaking to their economic anxieties.
“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci said at the time. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”
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