For more from Michael Wolff, subscribe to HOWL on Substack and gain access to exclusive daily commentary, analysis, and insider knowledge.
I once pressed Steve Bannon about Trump’s intelligence. He said, “He’s as smart as any guy who’s spent twenty years listening to Lou Dobbs.” As one of cable’s first business anchors, correspondents, and commentators, he developed a variety of stances: birtherism, anti-immigration, and the simple fix of putting tariffs on everything. The underpinnings of these views were not facts, study, but ratings.
All of this formed the certainties with which Donald Trump entered politics, and became popular positions for him too. In turn, Dobbs promoted Trump and would later become a dedicated advocate of Trump’s election conspiracy theories, making him a named defendant in the Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network defamation lawsuit, which cost the network almost a billion dollars and finally got him fired. He died in Palm Beach in 2024.
He continues, however, to live on in Donald Trump, in the president’s unwavering, obsessive focus on tariffs as the necessary and magical correction to all ills. This is obsessive, persists even when it might otherwise seem to be unreasonable and counterproductive—and, in this case, against the law.
Trump is not a man of principle; he is a man of fixation. Tariffs—even though, by all evidence and logic, they will undermine the promise of economic growth central to Trump’s political identity and fortunes—have assumed for him a sacred meaning.
The tariffs themselves may be less the point than his obsession with them. He will pursue a discredited policy because… well, he just can’t get it out of his head, can’t adapt to another way of looking at a problem, can’t challenge his own thinking, doesn’t have enough intellectual capacity to have a replacement for the one idea he already has.
Lou Dobbs explained it all and that’s good enough.
Don’t watch the collapse from the outside. For more on Trump’s tariff plans, and much more, subscribe to Michael Wolff’s HOWL on Substack.
