What the Democrats Must Learn From the People of Los Angeles

Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office may have been the longest, figuratively speaking, of any U.S. president in history. But we can also say definitively that they were the most disastrous, ever. His draconian deportations, destruction of the federal government, and insane tariff Tilt-a-Whirls have driven his approval numbers so low as to be a modern marvel; the last time a president was this disliked after 100 days, we were fighting a world war and the Slinky was the country’s most popular toy. Trump has ended up here for no other reason than that he pursued the very policies he promised to pursue on the campaign trail. That’s the story of his first 100 days: Americans elected a dumb asshole, and natural consequences followed.

Now let’s consider the next 100 days, which look to be even worse for all of us—including the president. As The New Republic’s Alex Shephard wrote this week, there are a lot of good reasons to believe Trump’s standing with the American people hasn’t hit bottom yet, the main one being that the worst is yet to come. The president, Shephard writes, “is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high.”

Last weekend, Apollo Global economist Torsten Slok published a preview of coming attractions in the form of a report documenting what he’s calling the imminent “Voluntary Trade Reset Recession.” As Slok documents, Trump’s economy—though quite sluggish—has been boosted by the fact that inventories rose rapidly as firms acted in anticipation of tariffs being imposed. Now that tariffs have arrived, the sugar high is over and collapse is on the way. The most straightforward way of looking at the future is on page 4 of Slok’s report.

What we have here is the prelude to the summer of scarcity, coming soon to a retailer near you. We are already well and fully in the stage where activity at our ports falls off a cliff. As TNR’s Tim Noah wrote this week:

This is how it begins. The recession has arrived in Seattle, with cargo shipments down 60 percent. Los Angeles will be next. As recently as November, the Los Angeles Times reported that cargo traffic at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach reached record highs. But last week it quoted the port’s executive director, Gene Seroka, predicting that “in two weeks’ time, arrivals will drop by 35 percent.” The reason, Seroka said, was that “essentially all shipments out of China for major retailers and manufacturers have ceased, and cargo coming out of Southeast Asia locations is much softer than normal.”

From here, Tim says, there will be less cargo to ship across the country, and inevitably, fewer people employed to do that work. Already, UPS has laid off 20,000 workers because of “current macro-economic uncertainty” that I really think wasn’t all that uncertain when Trump was reelected. This only highlights another grim reality: Even if Trump called off his tariffs tomorrow, much of the coming mayhem is baked into our future, as it would take a substantial amount of time to restart the global shipping machine. “Expect ships to sit offshore, orders to be canceled, and well-run generational retailers to file for bankruptcy,” says Slok.