Suicide Squad
With his deranged reciprocal tariff plan, Trump unleashes the kind of global chaos worthy of a comic book supervillain.
In the long line of United States Secretaries of the Treasury, few characters are more colorful than Steve Mnuchin. Serving as Secretary of the Treasury throughout Donald Trump’s first administration, Mnuchin and his glamorous wife Louise Linton lived the kind of wealth-flaunting, jet-setting lifestyle you might expect from an investment banker turned film producer and a tiny-dog collecting former scream queen actress. Despite this flair for excess in his personal life, Mnuchin somehow became a stabilizing influence in Trump’s first cabinet, drawing on his experiences at Goldman Sachs to steer Trump away from his most destructively infantile impulses toward more orthodox policies maintaining the economic growth and wealth creation that began under Barack Obama.
Before serving as Secretary of the Treasury, one of Mnuchin’s greatest successes as a film producer was Suicide Squad, an action comedy from the DC Comic universe. In the 2016 movie, the Suicide Squad refers to a band of anti-heroes and supervillains enlisted by U.S. Intelligence to carry out a secret mission to defeat even more sinister forces. In our 2025 reality, Suicide Squad could just as easily refer to Donald Trump and his new band of feckless, spineless, mindless economic advisors who make us long for the days when we had Steve Mnuchin as a voice of reason to check Trump’s reckless supervillain tendencies.
Since announcing a schedule of crushing reciprocal tariffs on so-called “Liberation Day,” April 2nd, Donald Trump has inflicted the kind of economic chaos and destruction that only a supervillain could unleash. The tariff rates Trump enacted on nearly every other country were based on wild miscalculations of rates charged against the United States by those foreign nations e.g. Trump’s big board of tariff rates listed China’s at 67% when the World Trade Organization calculates Chinese tariffs against the US at a mere 3%. It was a completely unhinged and delusional spectacle that amounted to the declaration of an unrestrained worldwide trade war. Within two days, nearly $7 trillion would be vaporized from the stock market. Charts of the Dow Jones and Nasdaq look like a red knife stabbing directly into the heart of the world economy, with both indexes approaching bear market levels 20% lower than all-time highs reached just a few short months ago. Crypto is down, and even gold slumped on Friday, as investors search in vain for safe haven assets to protect them from an American President driven by retribution, revenge, and retaliation rather than any guiding principles of economics.
To diehard MAGA disciples who refuse to “trust the experts” on hard sciences like climatology and epidemiology, Trump’s flouting the advice of every top economist across the political spectrum is seen as a sign of strength. But to anyone who remotely values good governance based on sound economic principles, Trump’s crazy carnival of reciprocal tariffs has been a nauseating rollercoaster ride straight downward with no signs of going up any time soon. In the words of Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, Trump’s tariffs are “worse than the worst-case scenario.” If and when this ordeal ends, Trump’s “Liberation Day” is likely to be regarded as one of the most devastating individual acts of purposeful economic destruction we have witnessed in human history.
Of course, there is the enduring hope against hope in the business community that Trump’s reciprocal tariffs are just a clever gambit of the “Art of the Deal” president. They believe Trump will just wave his wand and make the tariffs disappear once he gets what he wants from other countries. Even if the Liberation Day reciprocal tariffs are nothing more than a negotiating tactic, Trump is still sitting down to the negotiation table with the American economy strapped into a suicide vest. If other nations call Trump’s bluff and walk away from the negotiating table the American economy will explode from the price increases and market dislocations bound to result from the tariffs going into effect. Those who think the tariffs are “so crazy they might just work” must question their own credulity in trusting a madman willing to risk a second Great Depression just to extract a few incremental concessions from America’s trading partners.
Tariffs aren’t necessarily a suicidal death wish for an economy. The protection afforded by tariffs can allow a nation to nurture infant industries or build out onshore supply chains for products of national strategic importance, like personal protective equipment or semiconductors. The difference between these narrowly tailored strategic tariffs and Trump’s exorbitant, expansive tariffs is that successful tariffs require government intervention and planning to guide production when the free market could not be expected to do so on its own. Tariffs require greater government involvement and intervention in the economy because tariffs are by their very nature a rejection of free market mechanisms. Yet Trump, with the help of Elon Musk, is simultaneously slashing administrative capacity, firing knowledgeable employees, and cutting the very government funding needed to guide the economy through the shocks and dislocations triggered by the tariffs. Trump, Musk, and all the Republicans too cowardly to denounce them seem to schizophrenically believe that the same free market they are dismantling internationally will magically grow the economy domestically. They believe the same businesses and shareholders sent in a tailspin by Trump’s erratic economic policies will somehow have the confidence to make huge, long-term investments in building factories and supply chains onshore that could take over a decade to yield profits. They believe America has the infrastructure, manufacturing prowess and motivated labor force needed to begin making T-shirts currently sewn in Vietnam or iPhones currently assembled in China. In other words, they are thrusting 340 million Americans into the abyss of trade isolationism without any economic plan beyond hoping some miracle of free enterprise will save us.
“I think Liberty’s your excuse to do whatever you want,” Bloodsport tells Peacemaker in the movie Suicide Squad. Just a few short days after Trump’s tariffs tanked global equity markets we now know that his much-hyped “Liberation Day” was also nothing more than an excuse for Trump to do whatever he wants. It’s a narcissist’s slap in the face to all the advisors, economists, and elected representatives who have implored him to govern with humility, wisdom, and restraint. It’s an attempt to grab even more power, giving Trump a bargaining chip to dangle in front of world leaders and CEOs eager to do his bidding in the hope that their tariff burdens might be lightened in exchange for obedience. The primary goal of the tariffs is not to give America a fair shake on the world stage, rebuild our country’s industrial base, or reinvigorate the middle class with good union jobs. If that were the case Trump would not be allowing his billionaire friend Elon Musk to dismantle the federal government at a time when a robust industrial policy and a secure social safety net is most needed to stabilize the American economy while it transitions toward greater self-sufficiency. No, the primary motivation behind the tariffs is to demonstrate to the world that Trump can do whatever he wants and to give him the leverage he needs to get leaders of corporations and other nations to bend to his will.
Suicide Squad was released on August 5th, 2016, just three weeks before Donald Trump was elected to his first term. I’m not one to draw causal connections between cultural products and political developments, but there seems to be a similar cynical impulse leading Americans to watch movies where violent murderers are tasked with saving the world and deciding to vote for a brash, amoral billionaire on the pretense that he is the only one with the guts to “Drain the Swamp.” President Trump, the sequel, has demonstrated an even darker depth of American trust in the antihero, delivering Trump a more resounding 2024 victory despite 34 felony convictions, election denial, and the failed insurrection of January 6th, 2021. The biggest MAGA fans might still believe that the real-world Suicide Squad of Trump and his economic advisors might be able to use his crazy tariff scheme to restore American greatness. But the rest of the country is growing weary of this spectacle just two and a half months in. Americans might be willing to spend two hours of their time and shell out $12 to watch the chaotic excitement of an antihero action flick. Whether they are willing to endure four years of economic chaos and risk losing their life savings to the whims of an antihero President of the United States is a whole other story.
I had no idea that Mnuchin was a film producer! And yeah, in hindsight, he really was a stabilizing force. If only we knew how good we had it during Trump's first term!