DONALD WISHES HE WERE HOOVER...:

In the grip of the Great Depression, the 31st president was under intense political pressure to sign the Tariff Act of 1930, better known as Smoot-Hawley after its Republican authors in Congress. Hoover himself was a somewhat reluctant protectionist. And while 1,028 economists signed a petition imploring the president not to sign, he could not then know that "Smoot-Hawley" would become a byword for economic folly. Between 1930 and 1933, the value of global trade declined from $4.9 billion to $1.8 billion.

Trump has no such excuses. The economy is humming. The overwhelming majority of Americans want more trade deals, not fewer, and are leery of a trade war. Congressional Republicans are broadly pro-trade and aren't trying to push the administration into a political corner. And the opposition to tariffs among professional economists is about as universal now as it was then.

The same might be said for many U.S. executives who know something about how the tariffs will work. On Friday I spoke with Gary Stein, C.E.O. of Houston-based Triple-S Steel, which sells about one million tons of steel products a year, mostly for construction and heavy manufacturing. He calls the tariffs "just juvenile."

"These guys in Washington don't understand how real supply lines work," he says. "You can't crack the economy on the end of a whip like that when you are dealing with real jobs and real people and real products coming across borders. There's a lot of special stuff that comes from only one mill, and now suddenly you can't get it or it's going to cost you 25 percent more."

So what motivates the president to pick these fights? Rust-belt politics surely plays a role. But it's also the same ideological obsession he has held since at least the 1980s -- as dated and ugly as his mullet -- not to mention his sneering indifference to what was once called "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

When the Wall Street Journal editorial board (of which I was then a member) asked Trump in 2015 whether he worried that his immigration and trade policies could have disastrous political effects in Mexico, he answered: "I don't care about Mexico honestly, I really don't care about Mexico." Next month, Mexicans, who do care, will likely elect their most anti-American president in nearly 50 years.

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