by Andrea Widburg
American Thinker
The anti-Trump media are pounding the drums, trying to drive people into a panic by contending that Trump’s tariffs are a Smoot-Hawley moment combined with a 1929-style stock market crash. It is, they suggest, a perfect storm of Trump-created economic devastation. What they’re not telling people—indeed, what they may not know themselves—is that the situation is different, both as regards the stock market and what happened with the Smoot-Hawley tariffs.
I’ll start with the latter first. First, as Van A. Mobley explains with great clarity, it’s dishonest to compare Trump’s tariffs to the Smoot-Hawley Act. The difference is that, in 1930, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Act, America was a creditor nation (that is, it was selling to Europe, which had been seriously damaged by World War I). This time around, in 2025, America is a debtor nation (that is, it’s buying from everyone else):