It was called Liberation Day. The same name the US president gives the day of victory in Independence Day, the 1996 alien-invasion blockbuster. Then, the enemy was extraterrestrial; now, it’s Malaysian semiconductors and German car parts. Back then, the president gave a rousing speech about freedom, survival, and the destiny of mankind. Now, Trump barks about trade deficits while the crowd waves miniature flags and eats popcorn. The aliens may have gone, but the script remains: America as underdog, triumphant through force; the world saved by tariffs and tough talk. A Hollywood ending, minus the resolution, minus the catharsis.
In the White House Rose Garden, in front of eight towering American flags stretched taut like stage curtains, Donald Trump signed two executive orders and announced a new round of tariffs. At one point, he hoisted a giant black placard almost half his size, listing countries and the tariffs they impose on the United States, with his regime’s new retaliatory figures neatly printed in yellow down the side, a crude visual aid for a crude politics. In his small hands, the board looked absurd, as if props alone could prove the necessity of economic war. He stood in front of three towering American flags, their stars and stripes stretched taut like stage curtains. Among the suits and aides arrayed before him were a handful of firefighters and men in hard hats, props in a theatre of labour drawn straight from Nixon’s playbook of construction worker populism. This, he said, was about “economic independence”. The language was familiar: “They’ve taken our jobs, they’ve taken our money, they’ve taken our dignity.” As if a new automobile tariff might restore something intangible in the American soul.
At one point, he hoisted a giant black placard almost half his size, listing countries and the tariffs they impose on the United States, with his regime’s new retaliatory figures neatly printed in yellow down the side, a crude visual aid for a crude politics. In his small hands, the board looked absurd…
Like so much of Trump’s second presidency, the event was pure spectacle: a pageant of nationalist fantasy projected against the ruins of a global order the US itself built and then disowned. The crowd cheered on cue, Fox News ran its chyron in all caps—TRUMP: WE’RE BRINGING IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICA—and somewhere, no doubt, Peter Navarro cracked open a bottle of something American. But it was a fantasy nonetheless: not protectionism in any real, industrial sense, but a nationalist affect weaponised for the stage.
And then there is the cost. Not the abstract cost to supply chains or diplomatic goodwill, though those will be high, but the tangible, measurable, everyday price of theatre. The result? A $2,000 drop in disposable income for the average American household, a patriotic surcharge paid in instalments. Cars alone will rise by as much as $15,000, pushing monthly payments out of reach for millions. Even JPMorgan, no enemy of Trumpism, now pegs the risk of recession at 35%, an unspoken admission that economic nationalism is simply economic instability in costume. This isn’t the rebirth of American industry; it’s inflation with a flag on it.
The pain won’t stop at the border. These tariffs will ripple outward, punishing workers across the globe, from the night shifts in Reynosa auto plants and the sewing lines of Gazipur to the foundries of the Ruhr and the chipboard floors of Incheon assembly lines. They will face layoffs, pay cuts, and plant closures, all in the name of “American independence”. But independence for whom? Not for the workers at home or abroad, but for the speculators and syndicators clustered around Trump like moths to a grift. They will arbitrage the chaos, bet against the supply chain, and buy back their own stock with the proceeds.
The only real beneficiaries of Liberation Day are those already liberated from the consequences of political decision-making. The rest, American consumers, European exporters, precarious workers everywhere, are collateral in the long war of capital against labour, now dressed up as patriotic defiance. It is protectionism as theatre, and austerity by other means.
In Independence Day, the crowd cheers as the alien mothership explodes. In Liberation Day, they cheer for tariffs that will raise their rent and shrink their wages.
Tariffs are not new to Trump. In his first term, he imposed duties on steel, aluminium, washing machines and solar panels. Then, as now, the impacts were mixed at best: marginal gains for a handful of domestic producers, price hikes for consumers, retaliation from trading partners, and confusion in the global supply chain. The WTO murmured its usual objections, procedural, toothless. Wall Street, as ever, shrugged and went back to counting. The promise was that tariffs would bring jobs back home. The reality was they often did the opposite.
But in the new Trump era, less encumbered by the advisory class, more emboldened by the faithful, the point isn’t the policy, it’s the gesture. Tariffs are not economic instruments but cultural ones. What matters is not whether they reduce the trade deficit (they won’t), or revive manufacturing (they can’t), but whether they perform a certain kind of ideological desire. They are an assertion of sovereignty at a time when sovereignty means little; a pantomime of control over a world that no longer obeys.
The idea of Liberation Day is instructive. It’s the same name the US president gives the day of victory in Independence Day, the 1996 alien-invasion blockbuster. Then, the enemy was extraterrestrial; now, it’s Chinese semiconductors and German car parts. Back then, the president gave a rousing speech about freedom, survival, and the destiny of mankind. Now, Trump barks about trade deficits while the crowd waves miniature flags and eats popcorn. The aliens may have gone, but the script remains: America as underdog, triumphant through force; the world saved by tariffs and tough talk. A Hollywood ending, minus the resolution, minus the catharsis.
Liberation from what? Not China or Brussels, not imports or foreign cars, but from the very contradictions of late capitalism. Trump offers release from the bind of a globalised order without ever challenging the material forces that shaped it. The tariffs are a screen: behind them, the real economy continues its long retreat, automation, precarity, capital flight, and the working class is left with yet another badge, another slogan, another speech in the rose garden.
What Trump understands, and what his liberal critics persist in missing, is that the American electorate is not voting for spreadsheets. They are voting for myth. “Make America Wealthy Again” is not a plan; it’s a vibe, a mood, a nostalgic hallucination. And tariffs, as useless as they are in practice, allow him to inhabit that hallucination. To declare war on enemies real and imagined. To promise resurrection by executive order.
They are voting for myth. “Make America Wealthy Again” is not a plan; it’s a vibe, a mood, a nostalgic hallucination.
For the Democrats, the trap is familiar. Already they are scrambling to respond on policy grounds: arguing that tariffs will raise prices, damage alliances, destabilise markets. All of which is true, and all of which is beside the point. Trump is not governing a country, he is narrating one. The liberals present facts; he presents drama. They model GDP; he re-enacts the American frontier, now featuring cheap shirts and Chevrolets.
There is something tragic, and not a little comic, about the whole affair. We are watching the decline of the American empire reimagined as a parade of red hats and tax hikes, the Hollywood fantasy now running on loop with diminishing returns. In Independence Day, the crowd cheers as the alien mothership explodes. In Liberation Day, they cheer for tariffs that will raise their rent and shrink their wages. The flag still waves, the music still swells, but the resolution never comes.
The tariffs will fail, as they did before. But the failure will be absorbed, redirected, rebranded. Trump’s America is no longer about winning, it’s about refusing to admit defeat, and making sure someone else foots the bill.
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