On May 1, 2003, George W. Bush announced, “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” He was standing below a giant banner that read, “Mission Accomplished.” At the risk of inviting charges of understatement, subsequent events didn’t cooperate. But it took a while for that to be widely accepted.

We’re in a similar place when it comes to President Trump’s experiment with a new global trading order.

“Tariffs are making our country Strong and Rich!!!” proclaims Trump, making him not only the first Republican president in living memory to brag about raising taxes on Americans, but also the first to insist that raising taxes on Americans makes us richer.

MAGA’s mission-accomplished groupthink relies primarily on three arguments.

The first is that Trump has successfully concluded a slew of

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