Howard Lutnick is the man behind Trump’s trade war. He dreams of a country that is financed without taxes only with tariffs. But his radical plan threatens to overthrow America into chaos – and also puts it in danger.
Bastian Brauns reports from Washington
The name of the man who is currently sparking the World Trade War for Donald Trump is Howard Lutnick. In order to understand how today’s US trade minister and former Wall Street investor ticks and which plan is behind the immeasurable chaos that he is triggering for Trump, it helps to just take a look back for a few months:
In the middle of the hot final phase of the presidential election campaign, Lutnick is on stage on October 27, 2024 in the New York Madison Square Garden and explains his vision for the American economy in the 21st century. The 63-year-old goes far back with the horror, backed hair.
“When was America important and important?” Asks Lutnick in front of thousands of Trump supporters and directly gives the answer. It was the period of the turn of the century of 1900, i.e. 125 years ago. At that time, the American economy “rocked”, says Lutnick and calls the reason: “We had no income tax. Everything we had were tariffs.” That’s why America had so much money that you didn’t know how to spend it.
According to Howard Lutnick, Trump’s mission is to turn the time back by 125 years – and with it the history of globalization. From the perspective of the President, the consequences of the past two world wars are to blame for today’s over -indebtedness and the propagated demise of America. Lutnick expresses it as follows on the stage in New York:
“Because we saw it as our duty to rebuild the rest of the world, we broke our protection,” he says. Customs on imports have been removed. “From then on we taxed Americans to save the world,” he says. In fact, income tax was only introduced in the United States in 1913. Lutnick thinks that this should have ended. It should really end with Trump as President.
What Howard Lutnick told in the Madison Square Garden and sounded strangely backwards for many observers, he is now implementing the Trump government with the current penalty measures. Regardless of his own population, which must pay for the resulting higher prices, Trump with the help of his Minister of Commerce Lutnick takes a plan: to radically replace imports with domestic products.
American cars should no longer be manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but in the USA. And so the high tariffs not only meet the great competitors China, but especially the closest allies, including Canada, Mexico, the states of the European Union and Great Britain. This is what it looks like, Lutnick’s economic dream from the isolated American economic area.
The simplified “America First” calculation by Howard Lutnick and the Trump government is: Only foreign, but not the domestic goods would be more expensive through the punitive tariffs. The fact that American companies also work with mixed calculations that imported sub-components cannot simply be replaced overnight and that domestic demand cannot often be operated by domestic offers-all of this in the White House so far seems to be irrelevant.
The important, large goal is like a nationalist re -education program: American consumers and companies are to be literally forced to largely align their consumption on domestic products by making everything foreign. This so -called import -substitute industrialization (ISI) was actually a trading policy strategy of developing countries to promote its own production – with questionable success.
It is now questionable whether the idea of the world’s largest economic power can work. Trump’s trade wars started under the aegis of Howard Lutnick already heat the inflation concerns. A stock exchange quake allows the courses of numerous American companies to collapse. In an interview with the US television broadcaster Fox News, Lutnick recently defended his politics and his president.
