“For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped, and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” President Trump declared last week when he proclaimed a national emergency and imposed the highest tariffs since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930. US stock markets lost more than $6 trillion in value and fierce controversies are raging over whether Trump is rescuing or ruining the economy.

As the 2024 campaign neared its end, candidate Donald Trump began promising that, if elected, he would support the elimination of income taxes. Shortly after he was sworn in, Trump then began saying he planned to abolish the Internal Revenue Service. The Trump team claimed in each case that it could raise enough tax revenue from tariffs to replace tax revenue from income taxes. 

At some point in the early days of the “Virus Era”—my term for the multi-year debacle that we endured from early 2020 through some point in 2023 or 2024—I decided to archive email exchanges with a few friends about this peculiar time in our country’s history.

No White House in my lifetime has been a fount of economic wisdom, and the Donald Trump 2.0 version is taking its place in the Pantheon of economic illiteracy.