Podcast: The costs of culture wars: Curiosity at risk

The latest fiscal disclosures from the US Treasury offer a stark reality check for a country that continues to see itself as the global lodestar of economic stability. Tariffs, once an auxiliary tool of industrial policy or bargaining chip in trade negotiations, have quietly morphed into the financial backbone of the Trump administration’s economic experiment. October’s revenue haul - an unprecedented thirty-four point two billion dollars, up more than threefold from a year earlier - has been heralded by the White House as vindication. It is, according to President Trump, not merely proof that tariffs are “working,” but a testament to a new era of American prosperity robust enough to fund direct cash transfers to households. A two-thousand-dollar bonus, he insists, is just the beginning.

The president has taken to social media to cast opponents of this approach as out-of-touch elites, blind to a transformed landscape in which the United States is, in his words, “the richest and most respected country in the world.” Record stock prices, swollen retirement accounts, and subdued inflation are deployed to sustain an alluring political narrative: that tariffs are no longer punitive, but emancipatory - a fiscal engine capable of generating national renewal.