Many are wringing their hands now that Trump has started a gobal trade war. But will disaster happen? Will the proverbial sky really fall this time? Will the Republican Party pay the piper for Trump’s seemingly terrible policy choices? My answer … who knows?

I can recall when Bill Clinton raised taxes in the early 1990s. He even had the temerity to hike the top income tax rate to something like 37 percent from around 33 percent. The Republican Party went ballistic, screaming that the sky surely would fall and that the end of Western civilization was nigh.

Reality, of course, proved quite different. Equity markets boomed, employment and wages increased, and we actually ran budget surpluses for several years. Despite all the good results, the hyperbolic political screaming had an impact … Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, thus scuttling (among other things) the welfare reform bill I had spent time in D.C. crafting as well as the long overdue health care financing repair bill. Over the next few years, Newt Gingrich, the fiery revolutionary, led the GOP into an era of ever heightened political confrontation and highly partisan conflict.

Unfortunately, the American electorate is not known for being astute or even awake most of the time. They believed Republican propoganda that Clinton was tanking the economy even as the good times rolled under Bill’s leadership. To put it more bluntly, at least half of the electorate couldn’t locate their self-interest with GPS and a guide dog.

Actually, Gingrich violated his never compromise with the enemy (any Democrat) principle at least once that I recall. He agreed with Bill Clinton on the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), a bill that paved the way for easier trade with our neighboring nations. Newt went to great lengths to explain his violation of the one sacred rule he imposed upon his caucus about collaborating with the other side. He seemed profoundly and deeply embarrassed that he did something for the public good. How odd!

In those days, though, the premise of open and free trade enjoyed support across the partisan divide and among most economists. There were opponents of course … remember Ross Perot? Not surprisingly, support for open trade led to considerable anguish with some observers who once again predicted that the sky would soon fall. That is, all our jobs would end up south of the border.

Reality proved far more sanguin. While there always is some discomfort and adjustment issues with any major policy initiative, the sky is falling crowd were again proved wrong. The American economy continued to grow (until Republicans screwed things up again with the 2008 housing crisis).

In light of Trump’s drastic reciprocal tariff move on Wednesday, the one piece of bipartisanship in the Gingrich years seems oddly misplaced. Suddenly, free trade orthodoxy within both parties has given way to extreme protectionism among the Republican faithful (i.e., the slavish devotees of the GOP cult leader). Moreover, Republican views of our good neighbors to the north have soured in recent weeks. The percentage of Trump devotees claiming that Canada is an enemy has more than doubled. Canada, for Christ’s sake. They would swallow any nonsense spewed by Trump.

You would think they might learn something from earlier disasters for their party. Republican President William McKinley (Trump’s idol) imposed protectionist tariffs at the end of the 19th century. His party subsequently lost dozens of Congressional seats and control of Congress.

As the economy reeled during the early months of the 1930s, the Smoot-Hawly Act was passed that increased protective tariffs by some 40 to 60 percent on some 900 imported items. The intent was to protect American businesses. The result was to deepen the recession into a global depression as other countries retaliated. As one can see from the chart below, the U.S. economy struggled in the late 1890s and the first year’s of the 20th century, the period Trump claims was America’s golden age due to high tariffs and low income taxes.

Of course, Trump’s reciprocal tariffs might be different. He promises that we soon will be so rich that we won’t know what to do with all our money. On the surface, that claim seems preposterous. His plan is based on nothing that makes any rational sense. He has taken the trade imbalance between the U.S. and each other country and simply called that an unfair tariff on American goods. It is nothing of the kind.

A poor country doesn’t have the money to buy expensive American products. But they might well export stuff to us because of lower labor costs. Thus, a trade imbalance. No tariff or national tax was involved, simply the dynamics of supply and demand. Trump lying about normal trade imbalances merely is the excuse he needs to levy punitive tariffs. Did he really believe that others would roll over and play dead?

This is what happens when you let the children play with critical policies. They screw things up. Over the past few days, global markets are on the verge of collapse. Consumer confidence is collapsing. Over five- million Americans took to the streets Saturday to voice their displeasure at the actions of Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk … whose wholesale cuts to federal spending can be expected to exacerbate any tariff induced decline in domestic economic activity.

Will the Trump shock realign our politics for the intermediate future? We have had profound realignments in the past. The Civil War (and the reconstruction era in its aftermath) relegated the Democratic Party to a second class status for decades. The great depression did the same thing for the Republican Party (Eisenhower was hardly a Republican). And President Johnson’s successes in passing the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965 shifted political fortunes back toward the Republicans just as he predicted. If a tectonic economic disaster unfolds during Trump’s tenure, will we see another such transformation? Will the sky fall for the Republican Party?

Only time will tell. Of course, perhaps Trump does have a secret plan. Right now, it looks like he will try to bargain with specific nations and individual industries to strike better deals or enrich himself personally (see meme below). If he can somehow make a buck, he will.

After all, he is the ultimate transactional president. He does little based on principle and everything on personal self-interest and pecuniary gain. Nevertheless, the tariffs and the wild spending cuts are adding up to a seeming death knell to what last Fall had been widely recognized as the strongest economy in the world.

There is at least one reason I have doubts that the Republican Party will pay a substantive price should the sky actually fall this time. Half the country is not responding to reason and reality anymore. They don’t believe in evidence, reject objective reasoning, and have lost all faith in our central institutions. They are molded and driven by pure propganda spewed about by outlets designed to distort, incite, and inflame passions and communal divisions. I no longer know if the conservative base can be reached by rational analysis. The MAGA base now behaves much like the followers of Jim Jones. Rather than question their bizarre belief systems, they will eagerly drink the kool-aid even as the sky falls upon them. There is a popular meme going viral that says the only difference between Donald Trump and Jim Jones is that Trump would charge his victims for the kool-aid.

I desperately hope I’m wrong. But alas, I’m not optimistic respecting future. There simply are too many brain-dead folk out there … way too many. Just how did we get so dumb?