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I once pressed Steve Bannon about Trump’s intelligence. He said, “He’s as smart as any guy who’s spent 20 years listening to Lou Dobbs.” As one of cable’s first business anchors, correspondents, and commentators, Dobbs 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 $1 billion and finally got him fired. Dobbs 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 obsession persists even when it might otherwise seem unreasonable and counterproductive—and, in this case, against the law.
Trump is not a man of principle; he is a man of fixation. Tariffs—which, by all evidence and logic, will undermine the promise of economic growth that is 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.
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