Trumpy Harris confident ‘we will win the trade war’ and defeat the ‘globalists.’

It will come as no surprise to anyone in Maryland that Rep. Andy Harris, the 1st District Republican and Total Trumpy, defends Trump’s tariffs and says, “We will win the trade war, there’s no question about that.”

Economists might believe Trump’s tariffs will lead to inflation and crater the U.S. economy. The Economist might characterize Trump’s gambit as more unhinged and more wantonly destructive than could be imagined. The tariffs might already have caused trillions in losses in the stock market — and our retirement accounts — and sparked retaliatory tariffs by other countries. Trump’s action might cause a global recession. 

But never mind all that. 

Andy Harris remains among the dwindling masses who are confident Trump knows what he’s doing.

Harris went on Sinclair-owned Fox 45, Baltimore — where else? — to join a morning host who pushed the White House line that nations already are bowing to Trump’s genius and starting to line up to negotiate a better deal on tariffs.

This is how it works, right?

When you’re part of the Trump cult you have to make the Ignoramus-in-Chief look as savvy as possible, even as he sets a torch to a post-pandemic economy that, until now, had been stable and strong over a long period. 

So the Fox 45 host throws Harris a couple of softballs and the congressman uncorks White House talking points: It’s time to bring manufacturing jobs back to America (even when the unemployment rate here has been under 5% since September 2021.) 

Harris also said, “The only thing we’ve been exporting is jobs.” (In 2024, U.S. exports of goods and services reached a record $3.19 trillion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Maryland farmers, many of whom live and work in Harris’ district, export products to 35 countries, according to the state Department of Agriculture.)

With that kind of talk, Harris sounded very much like Trump, but also like Maryland’s 1980s protectionist Republican, the late Helen Delich Bentley. 

She stepped out of her Capitol Hill office one day in 1987 to join other members of Congress in smashing a Japanese-manufactured radio with a sledge hammer. Bentley was fighting a losing battle. Japanese technology and automotive engineering were advancing rapidly and surpassing the U.S. in the 1980s. Two gasoline crises, in 1973 and 1979, had increased demand for smaller, fuel-efficient cars, and Detroit had done little in response. Japanese companies also produced excellent electronics for the consumer market. No one was going to stop technological advances and the expanding international market with a sledge hammer.

The global economy has been a thing for 50 years. It is not going away because of Trump’s tariffs.

But there’s Andy Harris, expressing confidence with a straight face that Trump will defeat the “globalists,” that “everything will turn around,” and that “we will start seeing the shakeout” real soon.

He did not acknowledge the shocking impact on stocks, except to suggest, in 1980s Helen Bentley-ish gripe mode, that the companies most harmed by tariffs were the “globalists” who had “shipped jobs overaseas.”

Harris uses “globalist” as if it’s a dirty word, and as if it refers to some unique class of companies rather than the thousands of mainstream companies that import and/or export products in the course of doing business. That would include, I assume, many of the 4,600 farms in Harris’s mostly rural Maryland district, at least those that produce soy, corn and poultry for the international market. He might sneer at globalists, but Andy Harris represents a bunch, and he’s bound to find out — if he hasn’t already — that farmers are not as piped about Trump’s trade war as he is.