Corporate America’s Trash-Talking Tariff Temper Tantrum

 Once upon a time, your correspondent was summoned to a New York war room to help develop the announcement of AOL’s acquisition of Time Warner. His immediate response: “Why!? These guys (TW execs) are the sharpest knives in the business!”

Two years later, the combined company announced a record $54-billion write-down of “goodwill” — which the Oxford Dictionary defines as “the established reputation of a business regarded as a quantifiable asset.”

Credible operational explanations exist for this catastrophic drop of value. But to this commentator, the prime reason was an anonymous media campaign by those C-suite assassins – resentful over a tech-upstart takeover – to carve up the “established reputation” of AOL’s service and leadership.

In their pique, they bizarrely and somewhat brainlessly trashed the value of their own shares.

What occasions this sad recollection? Corporate America’s similarly insipid and ultimately suicidal antipathy toward President Donald Trump’s economic program.

Trashing of his tariffs – and wild gyrations of stock, bond, and currency markets – represent a public temper tantrum by a furious billionaire class that allowed its businesses to get hooked on cheap foreign labor. How dare a president keep his promises to elevate the interests of “forgotten American” working families over theirs?

As for owners of smaller companies crying that tariffs will put them out of business? One feels for them – to a point. And that point is the recognition that they are little different than contractors, landscapers, and the like who live large off under-the-table payments to illegal workers.

But hold on! In a 2024 video recently dug up as a riposte to the president’s trade policy, Apple’s Tim Cook insists that “China stopped being a low labor cost company many years ago” (a thoroughly debatable proposition). Rather, products “require truly advanced tooling … In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I’m not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields … vocational expertise in China is very deep.”

Yet why is that? America’s poohbahs, private and public, handed China industrial innovation leadership – with both hands. 

Nathan Hitchen and Bob Patterson, writing in The American Conservative, explain: “In the late 1970s … (w)ith little debate, the best and brightest declared America was moving into a post-industrial age … with knowledge constituting the acme of achievement. We could therefore ship to the far side of the world messy, blue collar manufacturing jobs.

“While the U.S. financial sector prospered, China became an industrial superpower … now the Asian giant boasts stunning leads in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging science and technology fields (including) synthetic biology, photonic sensors, advanced batteries, telecommunications, and nanoscale materials and manufacturing.”

Or as then Sen. J.D. Vance put it, a little more emotionally, last year: “The Western conceit that you could separate the manufacturer of things from the technological innovation in those things is completely absurd and preposterous.”

That lost industrial expertise has monstrous ramifications beyond fumbled manufacturing innovation leadership and well-paying skilled jobs. As Vance also pointed out: “If we’re going to lose a war, it will be because we have allowed our primary rival to become arguably our most powerful industrial competitor.”

It’s not just that America allowed the Chinese to become champion innovators and put them on the path to military supremacy. The nation has funded it, and continues to do so, with the massive trade deficits Trump seeks to trim. Allowed them to steal it by rope-a-doping massive intellectual property theft. And ole-ed the Middle Kingdom’s:

• relentless cyberattacks and ubiquitous identity theft (“Big Data hoovering”)
• flooding of markets with poisonous and hazardous products from deadly counterfeit vapes and adulterated toys to fentanyl components
• dominating renewables production via slave labor and massive combustion of coal
• and global adventurism and bankrolling of North Korea’s increasingly dangerous and destabilizing nuclear capability.

The U.S. of A simply cannot continue its vulnerable dependence on supply chains of lowest-to-highest-tech goods from an adversary whose “all-of-nation long-term strategy” includes a “military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future.”

And here’s the critical thing: those trashing tariffs and talking down the economy refuse to recognize that what’s bad for America is also bad for General Motors. 

Together with their Chinese enablers, financial vultures and corporate fat cats have feasted for years on a hollowed-out flyover country’s carcass. But to channel Margaret Thatcher’s trenchant observation on socialism, sooner or later you run out of other people’s carrion. When Xi Jinping’s gang feels Uncle Sam’s self-funded self-destruction has advanced far enough, the money men (and women) will be their next meal.

Decoupling with China must and will come, and sooner is better than later. Despite Wall Street’s and the corpocracy’s desperate hopes that the hour of painful adjustment will pass them by via trade deals, the president’s statement that it will be a “total victory” if tariffs remain high into next year is not just about “making a fortune.” It’s about forcing American business to come to grips with the need to kiss CCP despots goodbye.

Meanwhile, the markets’ and commentators’ negative hyperfocus on tariffs as inflationary is spooking voters, who allegedly now view Trump’s presidency as “chaotic” and “scary.”

Here, too, the powers that be are firing squarely at their feet. Not only are their scare tactics frightening consumers into slowing spending, the president’s entire program outside of tariffs is about reducing costs:

• reducing the cost of capital – through massive corporate tax cuts and investment incentives
• reducing the cost of regulation – banking on Supreme Court support post-Chevron reversal
• reducing the cost of energy – “drill, baby, drill!”
• reducing the cost of government – which drives inflation and crowds out private investment
• reducing the cost of debt – by jawboning the Fed.

Just as Time Warner trash talk drove AOL’s lost value and eventual demise, elites’ self-defeating stupidity threatens to tank America’s entire economy and ability to untether the nation from China’s treacherous tyrants. It’s time to halt the hysterics – and get with the Trump program.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/28/corporate-americas-trash-talking-tariff-temper-tantrum/