Who did Bill Ackman think he was electing?

To take on America’s entire governing class and win, Donald Trump proved that he had an inhuman level of willfulness and sangfroid. Those are qualities that cut both ways, however, as the investor Bill Ackman is now discovering. 

Wall Street has lost more than $5 trillion in value since the announcement of the new tariff regime last week, but Mr. Trump, speaking on Sunday on Air Force One, appeared deaf to all appeals. How big of a sell-off would the President be willing to endure, a member of the press pool asked. “I think your question is so stupid,” he replied.

Many of Trump’s newfound admirers are panicking. Among them is Bill Ackman, manager of the hedge fund Pershing Square and a prominent Democrat defector in last year’s election. According to Ackman, the “massive and disproportionate” tariffs that are due to come into force on April 9 will lead to “a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.” Other Trump-supporting finance, media and technology overlords have also expressed their horror at the sheer belligerence of Trump’s trade policy. Even Elon Musk is publicly rebuking Peter Navarro, the trade advisor, called for “zero tariffs” between America and Europe and is posting videos of Milton Friedman arguing against tariffs. 

Ackman and others have been careful to endorse the principle of tariffs and reshoring. Their only real criticisms were about their execution. But the question for such voices is clear: what did you expect? And who did you think you were voting for?

The tariffs were calculated using eccentric methods, and as a result many of them appear wrongheaded: the 47 percent tariff on Madagascar, for example, would chiefly affect the production of vanilla – something that Americans would probably not want to on-shore anyway. 

But that underlines a recurring theme of the Trump saga: only someone eccentric enough to put tariffs on an uninhabited island of penguins would ever have had the personal fortitude necessary to reform American institutions.

Bill Ackman only joined with MAGA in extremis. But that begs another question: why did people like Bill allow things to get so extreme in the first place? Ackman is representative of the real haute bourgeoisie – sober, steady men and women of affairs: the guarantor of political moderation in most societies. Through their actions and inactions over the last twenty or so years, they allowed a state of affairs to develop that only someone like Donald Trump could rescue them from. 

This haute bourgeoisie are the ones who came up with “skills shortages” to lobby for mass migration, which helped sustain corporate profits. They also went along with ESG, DEI and general race demagoguery – despite knowing what all that, taken to logical conclusions, would mean for private enterprise. They turned against these progressive fetishes only when they started to affect their pet issues, such as Israel’s right to exist or transgenderism. They were complacent about Middle America always being there to bail them out electorally – and noticeably blasé about Middle America disappearing. By their own shiftlessness, they created an America that only someone willing to face years of sham trials and two assassination attempts would ever volunteer to reform. 

The America that the country’s pro-business moderates allowed to develop was one that could only be rescued by someone of a singular and pharaonic vision; they cannot now complain too much that this vision occasionally slides into loopiness or wrongheadedness. Only Donald Trump was there to save corporate America from an unrealized capital gains tax in 2024 – they must now ask themselves why. His personal fancies are the price they pay for extreme tardiness.