If Adam Smith were alive and well and on Twitter/X, here’s the name he would have called Donald Trump: “underling tradesman.”
Here’s the insult in full, from Book IV, chapter III, part II of The Wealth of Nations: “The sneaking arts of underling tradesmen are thus erected into political maxims for the conduct of a great empire; for it is the most underling tradesmen only who make it a rule to employ chiefly their own customers. A great trader purchases his goods always where they are cheapest and best, without regard to any little interest of this kind.”
Smith continues, in a paragraph that casts serious aspersions on Trumpism and tit-for-tat policy of tariffs:
By such maxims as these, however, nations have been taught that their interest consisted in beggaring all their neighbors. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss. Commerce with ought naturally to be, among nations, as among individuals, a bond of union and friendship, has become the most fertile source of discord and animosity. The capricious ambition of kings and ministers has not, during the present and the preceding century, been more fatal to the repose of Europe than the impertinent jealousy of merchants and manufacturers. The violence and injustice of the rules of mankind is an ancient evil for which, I am afraid, the nature of human affairs can scarce admit of a remedy. But the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of the merchants and manufacturers, who neither are, nor ought to be, the rulers of mankind, although it cannot perhaps be corrected, may very easily be prevented from disturbing the tranquility of anybody but themselves.
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