MAGA's mixed messages on tariffs share one disturbing theme

What exactly is the vision for America that Trump and his people are trying to create with these reckless, chaotic policies? It seems as if it's different for everyone.

Trump BFF Elon Musk is thought by some to be a believer in a techbro vision of "The Network State" in which the titans of tech will replace the dollar with Crypto, as God intended, and divide up the world into mini-states that they will control like medieval fiefdoms. Unfortunately, there will have to be a purge of undesirables who do not meet the genetic standards of the new Superman to repopulate the earth with their superior genes. I wish I were kidding. Wired reported just last month that "Several groups representing “startup cities” — tech hubs exempt from the taxes and regulations that apply to the countries where they are located — are drafting congressional legislation to create “freedom cities” in the U.S. that would be similarly free from certain federal laws, " (Recall that Trump himself was promoting "freedom cities" during the campaign.)

But Musk may actually be beyond that vision with his infiltration of the federal government. As Kyle Chayka of the New Yorker explained, Musk no longer has any need for these little techtopian enclaves. Musk appears to be a techno-accelerationist (a subcategory of techno-fascism), which is defined as the total destruction of the existing order "to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top." That sure sounds like a lot of fun.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on the other hand, apparently believes we are in a MAGA cultural revolution, Mao Zedong-style. He told Tucker Carlson in an interview this week, "The president is reordering trade. We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings. And then on the other side that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing."

So now we know that CDC scientists, NIH researchers, IRS tax experts, computer techs, program specialists and other professionals who've been fired by DOGE are going to be sent to work on the assembly lines. Maybe they'll learn to be good, productive citizens instead of "villains," as Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget (and project 2025 author) Russell Vought refers to them.

But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has other ideas. He says those jobs are all going to be taken by robots— but there will be some mechanic types who'll fix the machines. And I'm sure there will always be a need for janitors to keep the place clean, so there's that. More likely, we'll need lots of workers to pick all the food, work in the meat packing plants and fill the jobs of servants for the massively wealthy billionaires, like Bessent and Lutnick, so all those teachers, scientists and educated professionals will no doubt have many job opportunities even if the factories are automated. Trump just announced that he's bringing back coal mining in a big way, so that presents some excellent possibilities as well.

Trump's vision is very different than any of that. He wants to go back to the Gilded Age of William McKinley in the 1890s. On Monday, he repeated the fatuous nonsense he's spewed for ages:

"Our country was the strongest believe it or not from 1870 to 1913. You know why, it was all based, we had no income tax then in 1913 some genius came up with the idea of let's charge the people of our country not foreign countries."

Tariffs, as everyone knows except him, are paid by American businesses and consumers. They were then and they are now just another form of taxation, and a regressive one, which he simply cannot fathom.

We know he didn't read a book about it, so at some point, someone told Trump that the country was very wealthy after the Civil War because it ran surpluses. Yes, back in the days of William McKinley, the federal government was funded almost entirely by tariffs. But the government was much smaller then and did very little for the people so they did have surpluses and there was a lively debate about what should be done with them, as Chris Isidore at CNN explained:

Funding the federal government with tariffs wasn’t nearly as difficult as it would be today. Federal spending was relatively minuscule in those years. Federal spending made up less than 3% of the nation’s gross domestic product, the broad measure of the size of the nation’s economic activity. By contrast, the $6.8 trillion that the federal government spent in its most recent fiscal year comes to 23% of GDP, with most of that money going to servicing the national debt, military spending and entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and food stamps.

During the Gilded Age, the country was in the midst of a rapid economic expansion (which, not incidentally, was heavily stoked by mass immigration), and to the extent it was "wealthy," almost all of the wealth accumulated at the very top among the robber barons.

I find myself in agreement with Brian Beutler, who observed that none of these facts and figures are the probable genesis of Trump's obsession with this era. It almost surely stems from his knowledge that the rich were very rich and built lavish, ornate mansions, which is what defines prosperity to him, as Beutler notes:

He lives in Mar-a-Lago, which was built by Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s. And while she, as heiress to the Post Cereal fortune, was not a “robber baron” in the traditional sense of the word, that’s the vibe he likes. It’s what you’d expect in a “rich country.”

Just look at what he's done to the Oval Office. It's become an ersatz Versailles with phony gilt tchotkes jammed in every corner and gaudy picture frames crowded together on the walls:

The average citizen during the Gilded Age lived a bit differently:

The average family's annual income was around $500 (about $18,000 in today's money), according to an 1892 report from the Senate Finance Committee, yet the top 1% of families owned over half of America's wealth. During this era, known as the Gilded Age, the wealthiest families in America, such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, formed a new social elite akin to European aristocracy.

On the other side of the wealth divide, workers and immigrants faced harsh living conditions...Children, who weren't protected by law from physically challenging labor, had often started contributing to their households by age 10.

In New York City, the population doubled every decade from 1800 to 1880. Tenement housing, where families packed as many people as possible into apartments by using cheap materials to create walls or add floors to existing buildings, quickly dominated parts of the city. These settlements often lacked indoor plumbing or ventilation, leading to a rapid increase in the spread of illnesses. The cramped conditions also led to many fires in major cities.

That was what it was like for most people when Trump believes America was "great" — they were poor, uneducated, sick and overworked — and they paid all the taxes while the rich got richer. And when you get down to it, while the billionaires in his orbit may have different visions, whether it's a futuristic techno "Freedom City" or back to the time of the Vanderbilts and the Morgans, in the end, they all want the same thing: They want it all.