To Put It Politely: Stanford's Jennifer Burns Is a Liar
By pretending in the existence of a plan that does not actually exist, Jennifer Burns, with the active assistance of the "New York Times", has handed the Trumpists an attractive fictional gift...
By pretending in the existence of a plan that does not actually exist, Jennifer Burns, with the active assistance of the New York Times, has handed the Trumpists an attractive fictional gift-wrapped economic narrative, affirming the Trumpists’ worldview, granting them credibility—and fatally undermining her own attempt at a critique in the process. And when your anti-Trump argument affirms Trump’s worldview, you need to face facts—you’ve written propaganda…
And the New York Times knows that she is a liar. Shame on them for publishing this.
Jennifer Burns wanted to write an anti-Trump op-ed. She wanted to argue that the United States should keep its foreign-policy economic and security commitments, that Trump wants to break them, and that this breaking will be bad for America. She wanted to argue that it will devalue our nation, and trade away the core economic and political values that have made America truly great.
But the way she set about making her argument involved her telling an awful lot of lies, pretening that Trump has a plan, and so sanewashing him.
The net effect is that she has written two intertwined op-eds, one of which she intends to be pro-Trump and the other anti-Trump. Call the first the “Trump method” op-ed and the second the “devaluing America” op-ed. The arguments of the “Trump-method” op-ed strengthen the confidence the Trump-friendly and the Trump-curious have in Donald Trump. And the arguments of the “devaluing America” op-ed do the same, for from the standpoint of the Trump-friendly and the Trump-curious it tells the story not of Trump devaluing but of Trump standing up for America.
The “Trump method” op-ed sanewashes Trump by saying he has a plan:
Jennifer Burns: There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/tariffs-trump-dollar.html>: ‘Trump’s… tariffs… stumped economists. There is no economic rationale…. But there is order… or at least a strategy…. Trump’s tariffs… are the gambit in a more ambitious plan… intended to better serve American interests…. The Mar-a-Lago Accord… devised by Mr. Trump… Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran… [to] make U.S. exports more competitive, put economic pressure on China and increase manufacturing…. There is genuine economic, social and political discontent driving this plan. Given the demise of U.S. manufacturing and the post-Cold War development of a technologically interconnected world shaped by new geopolitical rivalries, some sort of reset of the economic order probably makes sense for the United States….
The first step is disruption: tariffs that… drive countries to the negotiating table…. Should allies refuse to bend… they may find the United States withdrawing from defense agreements…. Lowering… [the dollar’s] value would amount to financial warfare with China, which the plan endorses…. If everything goes as planned, U.S. exports would be more competitive globally, China would be weakened, and more of our allies would be sharing the burdens of military spending. The upshot would be more manufacturing in the United States and a reinvigorated American heartland…
This “Trump method” op-ed is intertwined, almost paragraph by paragraph, with the “devaluing America”op-ed:
Jennifer Burns: There’s a Method to Trump’s Tariff Madness <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/07/opinion/tariffs-trump-dollar.html>: ‘The slash-and-burn approach of the Mar-a-Lago Accord isn’t the answer…. It is hard to find an economist outside Mr. Trump’s inner circle who thinks it… good…. But even if… the United States eventually prospers… we will have traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great…. Will it work? Few economists think so….. Enormous risks of economic turbulence…. There is an even bigger problem…. The most valuable asset of the United States is not the dollar but our trustworthiness — our integrity and our values. If the world envisioned by the Mar-a-Lago Accords comes to pass, it will be a sign that not only our currency but also our nation has been devalued…
This “devaluing America” piece of the intertwined op-eds makes two arguments: (1) it ain’t gonna work; (2) even if it does work, we will have traded away our integrity and our values for greater prosperity.
But this “devaluing America” op-ed simply asserts that globalist economists claim Trump’s plan won’t work. It does not provide any arguments. Hence it will have no impact on anyone Trump-friendly or even -curious: of course globalist economists are against it!.
This “devaluing America” op-ed does argue that trading away our integrity and our values—breaking our foreign relations economic and security commitments—is a bigger loss than renewed prosperity would be a gain. But, given where the Trump-friendly and Trump-curious are, that is not an anti-Trump argument. All of the Trump-friendly and Trump-curious will, when they read the “traded away the core economic and political values that make America truly great” line, be dumbfounded. They will conclude that Jennifer Burns is an idiot. The Trump line, remember, is that we were tricked by unpatriotic globalists into signing these agreements. Thus renouncing them is not a moral flaw. Renouncing them is a moral virtue. It is correcting mistakes of the past. It isrefusing to be conned again by the “globalists” who hate America. It is, in the words of Britain Brexiteers, regaining control of our destiny.
Thus the net effect of both of Jennifer Burns’s intertwined two op-eds is going to be, for everyone Trump-friendly or Trump-curious, this: Read this op-ed! The New York Times tells us that Trump knows what he is doing with these tariffs! And—if you were only to take off your globalist glasses—you would see that it is good!
So why does Jennifer Burns write this? And why does the New York Times publish it?
I cannot imagine. She knows as well as I do that there is no plan for a “Mar-a-Lago Accord… devised by Mr. Trump… Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran…”
She knows as well as I do that this is what Scott Bessent and Stephen Miran want to, after the fact, retcon into a plan. But she knows as well as I do that Trump is not onboard, and certainly did not devise it.
Bessent and Miran certainly want to turn Trump's tariffs (along with other strong-arm tactics) into a plan to force the world into a reset of the global economic order, in order to allow a weakening of the dollar, and thus to increase manufacturing in the United States, harvest more of the gains from product and process technological progress produced by healthy and robust communities of engineering practice, and put pressure on China.
But they are nearly alone. And any “they” that the two of them are part of certainly does not include Trump.
The first prerequisite for manufacturing to be ingathered into the United States, after all, is the construction of a robust economic alliance with Mexico and Canada—we need Mexico for the unskilled-labor low-wage portions of the manufacturing value chains, and we need Canada because Ontario is an essential part of Midwestern manufacturing.
Hence if that were the plan Trump had devised, Trump would have spent the time from his inauguration to now going kissy-kissy with Mexico and Canada. They were in the "green box". They were allies in the reset. They had, after all, embraced Trump's demand to renegotiate the worst trade agreement ever NAFTA, into the best, USMCA. If that were the plan Trump had devised he would have given them some tongue: promised that all would be unicorns, rainbows, and puppies as far as NAFTAzone—excuse me, the USMCAzone—trade and economic relations were concerned.
Focusing from even before the inauguration on keeping Mexico and Canada from looking to derisk from the United States—from looking to shift to Japan, Korea, the Pearl River Delta, and Europe to fill the roles that the United States now fills in the globalized value chains in which they participate—would have been the first prerequisite step, if Bessent-Miran or anything in the same galaxy as it was, in fact, Trump’s plan.
Needless to say, Trump did not do that.
Trump has not spent the time since the inauguration getting Mexico and Canada onboard. Instead, he has given them every reason to prioritize and accelerating their diminishing as many of their economic links with the U.S. as they can as fast as they can.
The second action item in using tariffs as a negotiating tool to accomplish the Bessent-Miran agenda would have been to propose a system of tariffs that would ingather manufacturing in the United States. The tariffs would have been build by, first, looking at who was making the manufactured goods currently imported into the United States; second, looking at those that could be realistically moved here; third, looking at which moves would stoke the growth of the communities of engineering practice we should seek to build. Doing those lookings to devise that system of tariffs would require a lot of staffwork.
Trump did not OK the doing of any of that staffwork.
Instead, we had Kevin Hassett, in an office, with a copy of Excel that had a list of countries ordered alphabetically in column A, a list of trade deficits in column B, a list of trade volumes in column C, and a tariff formula in column D.
And the third action item would have been to, in Stephen Miran's words, "start small and take small steps".
That is not what is going on at all.
What does Jennifer Burns think she is doing by writing this? What does the New York Times think it is doing by publishing it?
I don't know what Burns thinks she is doing. I do know that the "throat-clearing" that opens almost all of these op-eds "critical" of the Trump administration is rhetorically disastrous; it just has the effect of vitiating what follows. (This, by the way, is why I did not obey your injunction to read. the. whole. of what your friend and mentor Larry Summers wrote about Columbia.)
It is not your job to make your opponent's argument! Do not start out by doing so! And don't finish that way either, is my advice; but if you feel absolutely compelled to "forestall" your opponent's argument (which is not a thing that actually works), then bury it at the end. How many arguments supporting Trump start out with "well, the Democrats do have a point, but ..."? None! The reason is that Republican policies may be worse for America than your policies, but they are better at arguing them.
"But," you say, "I want to reach the intelligent and rational reader of good faith who will want to weigh both sides of the debate". Do you not perceive how self-refuting is this argument? There are no such readers! They are a figment of your imagination! It is impossible for a rational and intelligent American of good faith to support the current administration.
A final aside: it is particularly unfortunate that Burns chose as her sole argument against tariffs that few economists think they will work, given that she led with ‘Trump’s… tariffs… stumped economists'. If the economists are stumped, why should we care what they think?
I have to live through the Mad King Donald's reign. I don't have to listen to nonsense suggesting he has a Plan. Thanks for this.