Beware the Silver-Tongued Soothsayers Bearing Bad News About Tariffs

When common sense outpaces credentials, and the working class sees what elite economists can’t—Trump’s America First strategy isn’t just smarter, it’s grounded in reality.

Tariffs aren’t the problem—experts are. For decades, elite economists have failed to predict recessions, misunderstood markets, and pushed partisan models divorced from reality. Trump’s America First strategy isn’t just smarter—it’s grounded in what they’ll never grasp: consequential knowledge, common sense, and the strategic use of economic power.

Part I: The Experts Are the Problem

I spent the last four days listening to some of the best and brightest the Democrats have to offer on the subject of tariffs—dozens of interviews, each running 30 to 60 minutes. The Ph.D.s were by far the worst. I genuinely felt dumber afterward.

My plumber and yard guys have more common sense and real-world understanding of how the economy and markets function. They get the job done efficiently and at a market-clearing price—consequential knowledge, as Thomas Sowell puts it in The Vision of the Anointed.

These academics, economists, and so-called experts fail the most basic test: common sense. They obsess over abstract models and theory while remaining utterly disconnected from the realities of production, pricing, and working-class life.

They fixate on tariffs as if they exist in a policy vacuum, completely ignoring the broader, comprehensive strategy behind Trump’s America First agenda. Hence, their conclusions aren’t just flawed—they’re dead wrong.

Compared to what Trump and his team are executing, these people are five steps behind—out of their league, out of their depth, and completely unaware of it. No wonder the Democrats have lost all levers of power in Washington. They are intellectually incapable of getting the job done.

Part II: The Experts Can’t Shoot Straight

The so-called economic experts warning us about Trump’s tariffs and “America First” strategy aren’t just wrong—they’re consistently wrong. Their models fail, their forecasts miss by miles, and their ideological spin renders them worse than useless: they’re actively misleading.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Thomas Sowell—once a self-described Marxist—taught economics at Harvard while still immersed in Marxist dogma. And that’s not just an anecdote—it’s a damning indictment. Sowell later explained that Harvard never required real critical thinking or evidence-based reasoning. It wasn’t until he arrived at the University of Chicago, under the intellectual rigor of Milton Friedman and others, that he learned how to truly think. There, for the first time, he was forced to confront both sides of an argument—Marxist and capitalist—and let the facts decide. Capitalism won. And Sowell became one of the most respected economists of the 21st century.

That arc—from ideological theorist to market realist—matters. It reveals the intellectual bankruptcy of institutions like Harvard, which churn out economists long on credentials but short on clarity.

Mohamed El-Erian tells a similar story. After stints at Harvard, the IMF, and the Federal Reserve, he candidly admitted—in a long-form Masters in Business interview on Bloomberg—that for most of his career, he didn’t actually understand economics, because he didn’t understand markets. It wasn’t until he crossed into the private sector and sat across from investors like Peter Lynch—who famously threw him out of his office for being an economist—that he realized the gap between academic theory and real-world function.

These aren’t isolated cases. This is a pattern.

The track record of consensus economists is catastrophic. I’ve personally run the numbers over 30 years, analyzing Wall Street Journal and Blue Chip surveys. Their 1-year, 2-year, and 3-year GDP growth projections missed by an average of 78%, 97%, and 113% respectively. A monkey throwing darts at a GDP board would’ve done better. That’s not hyperbole—it’s statistically demonstrable.

Even at major turning points—2008 and 2020—they were utterly blindsided. In 2008, they forecasted +2.0% growth. Actual: –0.3%. A 767% miss. In 2020, they again called for +2.1%. Actual: –2.8%. Off by 175%. In 2024, they undershot again—forecasting 1.3% when growth clocked in at 2.8%. These aren’t forecasting errors—they’re proof of a profession that doesn’t understand the system it claims to model.

Obama’s economists overshot GDP by 44.5% on average during his presidency. Biden’s team is worse—missing by 46.8%, even while spending $7.3 trillion in just four years. And Mark Zandi, Moody’s chief economist, stands as the ultimate cautionary tale. He inflated fiscal multipliers to back Democrat stimulus packages, only to be refuted by the CBO, the IMF, and a brutal Wall Street Journal editorial that cataloged his long record of partisan flops.

In contrast, Trump’s pre-COVID team delivered a 13.5% average forecasting miss from 2017 to 2019—nearly 70% more accurate than Obama’s and Biden’s advisors. Even then, the monkey still beat the consensus.

This is the point: the people warning you about Trump’s tariffs—the so-called experts—don’t understand markets. They understand models. They understand theory. They understand the narrative their patrons expect them to defend—but not the one thing that actually matters: the daily reality faced by hard-working Americans just trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Part III: Tariffs Are Strategy, Not Sideshow

They fail to grasp that tariffs, under the America First agenda, aren’t a standalone policy—they’re a cornerstone of a comprehensive strategy to rebuild the U.S. economy from the ground up.

This isn’t just about reshoring critical industries, reasserting supply chain sovereignty, pressuring adversaries, or defending American labor. It’s also about bending the curve of the national debt, which has ballooned to over $1 trillion in annual interest payments. The solution isn’t austerity—it’s smarter fiscal design: cutting waste, eliminating fraud, and issuing longer-term debt at lower rates to reduce servicing costs and avoid a full-blown fiscal crisis—one that would ultimately force cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

At the same time, the agenda aims to unleash domestic productivity by lowering taxes, rolling back burdensome regulations, and transforming the U.S. into a magnet for capital. Trump has reported $5 trillion in promised foreign direct investment already because of his tarriff plans, to boost American manufacturing, energy, and tech—real industries with real multipliers. These are hard assets with high multipliers, not government-subsidized climate schemes and EV ventures—malinvestments with negative fiscal multipliers that misallocate capital and drive up debt.

Tariffs play a dual role: they generate substantial revenue—hundreds of billions annually—which can be used to pay down the $36 trillion national debt while simultaneously offsetting pro-growth tax cuts for businesses and workers.

Equally critical is the elimination of malinvested tax credits—especially those tied to EVs and climate schemes. These subsidies, which total $780 billion under the Inflation Reduction Act, are based on the flawed premise that CO₂ drives temperature rise—a notion debunked by paleoclimate records showing CO₂ lags temperature. Meanwhile, global emissions rose 1.1% in 2023, hitting 37.4 billion tonnes, driven not by the U.S., but by coal-reliant economies like China and India, per the IEA.

Scrapping these distortions is the functional equivalent of a broad-based tax cut—freeing up capital, improving resource allocation, and redirecting federal spending toward productive, high-return investments that align with America First priorities.

The objective is clear: to serve the American worker and middle-class families who’ve been systematically neglected by the progressive elites pulling the strings—and their so-called experts who consistently miss the mark. These are the same voices within the Democratic Party who’ve championed policies that enrich bureaucracies, inflate debt, suffocate real economic growth, and steal future prosperity from our children and grandchildren through unpayable debt.

They don’t grasp that tariffs, under the America First agenda, are not a standalone policy—they’re a cornerstone in a broader strategy: reshoring industries, reclaiming supply chain sovereignty, pressuring adversaries, and defending U.S. labor. That strategic context is invisible to the expert class because they’ve been conditioned to ignore it. Raised in echo chambers like Harvard, they’ve learned to prioritize ideology over evidence, and theory over consequence.

So when academics and left-leaning economists fixate on tariffs in isolation, they reveal not only their ignorance of markets—but of strategy. They’re not missing the target. They’re aiming at the wrong board entirely.

If you’re still listening to these silver-tongued soothsayers, you shouldn’t be. Their forecasting record is abysmal, their intellectual framework is broken, and their influence—if left unchecked—will sabotage the very policies capable of restoring American prosperity.

Maybe it’s time we stopped listening to the elites in suits—and started asking who’s really been throwing the darts for the Democratic Party.