The Things We Cannot Change (Gwen Moritz Commentary)

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After dinner on April 2 — our glorious “Liberation Day” of massive new tariffs — I made the mistake of watching some news about stock futures. “There’s not a damn thing we can do about this,” my husband said. “Let’s watch something mindless.”

So we binged on a couple of episodes of “Elementary,” the modern-day Sherlock Holmes series that ended in 2019. In “Elementary,” Holmes is a drug addict (as was Arthur Conan Doyle’s original character) who is maintaining sobriety through a 12-step program and, in one episode, he references the Serenity Prayer, which was pretty much what my husband was telling me: Accept the things we cannot change.

We cannot change what President Donald Trump decides to do to investors like us who are in the market for long-term financial security, not day traders, market timers or short sellers.

I am notoriously bad at predictions, but I felt comfortable expecting Republican control of the White House and both houses of Congress to mean policies that would benefit the investor class. Yes, I heard Candidate Trump’s promises to impose tariffs, but he also declared that other countries would pay them, which I knew to be an upside-down explanation of how tariffs work. Even the president of the United States cannot impose a tax on other countries; he can only impose a tax on American importers, who then pass that tax along to consumers. Since post-pandemic inflation was the undoing of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, I didn’t expect President Trump to unilaterally impose massive new taxes on consumers in a way that would look exactly like price inflation.

When he did, I didn’t know that his administration would confuse the world by declaring that the tariffs were permanent and nonnegotiable — and also that this is “the art of the deal in real time.” I didn’t know that the president would demean world leaders looking for better terms by saying they were kissing his backside or that Vice President JD Vance, who famously wrote about his “hillbilly” childhood, would insult the federal government’s biggest lender by calling them “Chinese peasants.” I didn’t consider that the interest on federal debt would immediately increase because the U.S. government suddenly looked like a riskier borrower.

This is why I avoid making predictions. By the time you read these words, there is no telling what our retirement accounts will look like. But there’s much more at stake than a couple of baby boomers having to figure out a retirement timeline and budget.

Business depends on trust. International trade should not be a game of “Red Light, Green Light,” changing at one man’s whim. Republicans in control of Congress have displayed no appetite for changing what they could, but other world leaders have accepted that they can’t change the United States back into a trustworthy partner seeking mutual benefit.

Gwen Moritz is a contributing editor at Arkansas Business Publishing Group. Email her at gmoritz@abpg.com.