Trump’s Tariffs Are More Spectacle Than Strategy

Why some of Trump’s tariffs have support from unions, and more in common with Viktor Orbán than Adam Smith

Imagine your town used to make things. Cars, appliances, steel. The factories paid well, sustained families, built civic life. Then they left. In their place came dollar stores, Walmarts, and Amazon warehouses, and gig jobs. Jobs that paid less and with bad benefits. That hollowing out didn’t just kill local economies—it eroded faith in the American promise.

Donald Trump knows this story. He doesn’t want to fix it. He wants to exploit it.

Trump’s proposed tariffs—blanket levies on nearly all imports, from China to Europe to Lesotho—aren’t industrial policy. They’re political strategy. Their purpose isn’t to reindustrialize America, but to reconstruct power: to hurt broadly, then selectively relieve that pain for those who prove their loyalty. This is less an economic plan than a system of incentives and punishments, weaponized to enforce allegiance. It’s not new. It’s textbook Orbánism.

Viktor Orbán built a system in Hungary where taxes, tariffs, and subsidies became political instruments—tools not for growth, but for domination. Infrastructure contracts went to cronies. Foreign firms were taxed arbitrarily unless they struck favorable deals. The media, universities, and civil society were tamed not through open coercion, but through economic dependency. What emerged, as Hungarian author Bálint Magyar writes in The Anatomy of Post-Communist Regimes, is a “patronal autocracy”—a regime “in which a single-pyramid patronal network has monopolized political power and exercises it through formal democratic institutions,” subordinating the state to the informal interests of a ruling elite.

In this model, tariffs aren’t tools of strategic industrial development. They are the language of fealty. Broad pain is inflicted, then selectively withdrawn—if companies praise the leader, stay silent on abuses, or donate to the right super PAC. The result is what Magyar calls a “mafia state”: a fusion of state and party where economic life flows through loyalty, not markets. Trump isn’t copying Orbán’s ideas. He’s absorbing his logic. While railing against globalism, Orbán kept Hungary deeply embedded in European supply chains, especially the German auto industry, luring firms like Audi and Mercedes with cheap labor and targeted subsidies. Behind the nationalist posturing lies a state apparatus that weaponized EU funds and procurement policy to reward political loyalty, not efficiency. Orbán’s government imposed “crisis taxes” on foreign-owned supermarkets and telecom firms while funneling public investment toward a new elite of party-aligned domestic oligarchs.

What emerges is not free-market orthodoxy, nor true industrial policy, but a hybrid system in which the state picks winners not based on national or economic interest, but on political loyalty. As Magyar has argued, the result is a “mafia state” economy—one in which economic sovereignty is invoked less to protect national industry than to consolidate the ruling party’s control over capital itself. Compared to Trump’s erratic tariffs and performative trade wars, Orbán’s model is a bit methodical: a clientelist industrial strategy that builds state-aligned capital power under the guise of protecting the nation.

Tariffs, in both models, are not tools to guide investment or protect strategic sectors. They are leverage—used to force businesses, universities, and even state governments into transactional allegiance. Cause pain with one hand, reward loyalty with the other.

But treating this as economic policy is a category error. The tariffs are spectacle with a purpose. Trump’s trade agenda isn’t about rebuilding American industry. It’s about building a political machine.

Here’s how it works: impose tariffs so broadly they disrupt entire sectors, then offer carveouts and exemptions—on one condition. Companies must show loyalty. Praise Trump publicly. Donate to his campaign. Stay quiet when he violates democratic norms. Perhaps buy his family’s cryptocurrency. Come to his table, make it appear as if he strong-armed someone into doing something, however small or pathetic. In exchange, they get relief.

Trump’s version uses tariffs, fossil fuels, and federal procurement to build an economy that reports not to market signals or democratic institutions—but to him.

Yet to dismiss Trump’s tariffs as simply irrational is to misunderstand them. They are, in fact, highly rational within the political economy of authoritarian nostalgia. What Trump offers is not a solution to globalization’s discontents but a performance of strength amid decline—a kind of Orbanomics: using the state to punish enemies, reward loyalists, and dramatize national victimhood. As British economist James Meadway observed, this is “a hard, aggressive move by what amounts to a relatively declining power attempting one last roll of the dice.”

Trump’s fantasy is not just to reindustrialize the U.S., but to drag the world into a new trade regime negotiated at Mar-a-Lago. His team has floated a “Mar-a-Lago Accord”—a global reset of trade rules with the U.S. at the center, backed by tariffs as leverage and floated with the idea of unilaterally revaluing U.S. debt and demanding allied nations take a “haircut” as repayment for decades of American military protection.

Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis sees Donald Trump’s tariff strategy not as incoherent flailing, but as a deliberate—and dangerous—attempt to rewire the global economic order to maintain American hegemony. In his view, Trump is staging a modern Nixon Shock: dismantling the trade and monetary systems that have underpinned U.S. hegemony since Bretton Woods, and replacing multilateralism with a hub-and-spoke model in which every country negotiates individually with Washington under duress. The tariffs are less about protecting American workers than about leveraging American market power to extract political concessions—what Varoufakis calls a move toward a “bisected planet,” where some nations submit as vassals and others resist through bloc-building.

But Varoufakis is quick to identify the contradiction: success would threaten the American elite. For decades, the U.S. trade deficit has functioned as a giant vacuum, pulling foreign profits into Wall Street and luxury real estate; eliminate the deficit and Trump risks “very angry mates in the New York Stock Exchange and in the real estate market in Manhattan.” In short, Trump’s strategy aims to upend globalization to restore nationalist leverage—but it gambles with the very flows of capital that sustain America’s financialized economy. And Varoufakis’s deeper warning cuts across party lines: the real danger isn’t that Trump is unmoored—it’s that he’s unopposed by any coherent economic counter-vision from his liberal critics.

There’s another reason the politics of tariffs may resonate with important segments of the electorate: they tap into something real. For decades, trade policy has been shaped by elites, often at the expense of workers. And no one knows this better than the unions on the frontlines.

Some liberal pundits dangerously ignore growing labor support for Trump’s tariffs, mistaking it for misplaced nostalgia or economic illiteracy—but they’re missing the point. The Teamsters and the United Auto Workers (UAW) have praised targeted tariffs by Trump—not because they romanticize protectionism, but because they’ve lived through the wreckage of free trade. Their members have seen the factories shut down, the jobs outsourced, the wages stagnate. Trade deals were negotiated in elite boardrooms and delivered as pink slips to working-class towns. Some union members who supported Trump in 2016 and in 2024 did so because he acknowledged their issues with global trade agreements in ways Democrats often didn’t. While Democratic leaders oversee a trade regime that hollowed out industrial jobs, Trump promised to rewrite the rules (even the ones he wrote himself). For many union members, tariffs are simply a final point of leverage. A means to bring corporations and countries to the table to negotiate on wages, jobs, labor protections, and reshoring commitments that decades of free trade agreements failed to deliver.

What they want is a trade regime that works for workers, not just shareholders. And they’re right.

And yet, the deeper risk isn’t that these tariffs fail—it’s that the spectacle works, just enough, for the union families who feel most abandoned by globalization. Many in labor remember who signed the free trade deals and who sat on the sidelines as communities collapsed. For some unions, tariffs aren’t theory—they’re leverage. The last bargaining chip. A way to force corporations and countries to the table on wages, labor standards, and reshoring commitments after decades of elite failure.

That’s what makes Trump’s economic nationalism so dangerous: it wraps real grievances in a performance of strength. It feels like reindustrialization, but delivers patronage. It looks like populism, but serves plutocracy. And it replaces democratic negotiation with authoritarian transaction.

Trump isn’t offering a better future. He’s offering a shortcut around the hard work of rebuilding. And in the absence of a credible economic alternative, the strongman offer may win. Not because it’s right. But because it’s a clear spectacle.

The endgame isn’t new factories or better wages. It’s submission. And that’s exactly the point.