COMMENTARY: Playing hardball

The Trump tariff global roller coaster continued last week, so it’s safe to say that our wild stock market ride is not over yet. My simple advice — and I’m not a registered stockbroker, by any means — is not to panic. Don’t sell your stocks when they go into a sudden free fall. Hold on, trust the market and try to take advantage of the temporary flash sale on solid stocks such as Microsoft.

The past century has been dotted with crashes. But in the medium-to-long run, stocks have always recovered, just like they did after 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID lockdowns of 2020.

Historically, trusting the American stock market has been a much safer bet than trusting our political leaders. But in the case of President Donald Trump, I think we should trust him to get us out of what he has gotten us into with the global tariff war he has started.

Trusting Trump sounds a little crazy. But in case you haven’t noticed, he doesn’t think and act like a typical politician. Sure, he occupies the White House. Sure, he likes to sign those executive orders. Sure, he knew how to get elected — twice. But he still thinks and acts like what he is and always was — a hard-nosed New York City real estate tycoon who has had a lot of financial ups and downs himself before ending up a billionaire.

For some reason, Trump loves tariffs and William McKinley’s 19th-century protectionist trade policy. Every famous economist you’ve never heard of says tariffs are bad. But Trump has been calling for them to be used to protect American manufacturing since the 1980s when he was buying full page ads in The New York Times to say it. Until he proves otherwise, I’m going to bet on him and his team making the global economy a freer and fairer place for America to do business.

As for Trump singling out China for extra-high tariffs, I think there are parallels between what he is doing with China and what my father did with the old Soviet Union.

In the mid-1980s, my father had to negotiate a nuclear arms agreement with the USSR and its leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. The Democrats in Congress, the liberal mainstream media and virtually every one of my father’s advisers thought he should go to Iceland and do what all the presidents before him had done in the Cold War — be nice, give the Soviets whatever they wanted and shortchange the United States.

But my dad didn’t play nice. When he refused Gorbachev’s request to trade away the development of our “Star Wars” anti-ballistic missile system, everyone, including Gorby, was shocked. All of my dad’s enemies thought he had made a nuclear war impossible to avoid.

But Gorbachev, who knew my father’s long-range goal was to wreck the Soviet Union’s weak economy by forcing it into an arms race it couldn’t win, faced reality and folded his cards.

China is Trump’s Soviet Union. China is our only global threat, economically and militarily. Trump is using my dad’s playbook. He’s getting tough on China in ways no previous president has — including himself in his first term. He’s putting China into a corner, economically, and saying, “If you want to be treated well by us, and if you want to be a player in the global economy, from now on you play by our rules.”

We can be mad at Trump for causing the market to tank our 401(k)s. We may all pay a bit of a price in the short run. But if we don’t pay it now, it’s going be a much higher price in the future for our kids and grandkids.

For decades, we’ve played nice with our adversaries and we got taken advantage of. Finally, we have another president who says, “Screw you. We’re playing hardball.”

Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation. Send comments to reagan@caglecartoons.com and follow @reaganworld on X.