Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Trump’s Beautiful Tariffs Would Deliver an Ugly Economy

No amount of PR will make Trumponomics even mildly attractive.

October 20, 2024 at 12:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

The tariff dance.
Photographer: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images North America

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What’s the most beautiful word in the English language? For Philip Marlow in Dennis Potter’s brilliant 1986 miniseries The Singing Detective, it was “elbow.” Erma Bombeck chose “benign.” A curious trio — JRR Tolkien, Drew Barrymore in Donnie Darko, and an Italian savant in the obscure 1903 novel Gee-Boy — all agreed on “cellar door.” Dorothy Parker, ever the wag, had two: “check” and “enclosed.”1