“Trump should continue to make American producers more competitive in global markets through tax, regulatory, energy, and other pro-America policy changes that bring jobs and capital back to the United States. … Steel and aluminum import tariffs will work decisively against this goal.” —from a column by Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore

To tariff or not to tariff, that is the question. Or is it? Maybe the real question is, what about Lisdoonvarna? Despite nine out of 10 people in this Irish town of 300 residents voting against it, the Irish government signed a contract with a local hotel to provide residences to “asylum seekers” and “refugees” that will increase the town’s population by more than a third.

Likely, this is just the beginning of Ireland’s commitment to a plan approved in 2015 by EU interior ministers, aimed at distributing at least 120,000 “migrants” among EU member states — utterly irrespective of whether those countries want them or not. Ireland’s geographic isolation relative to the rest of the EU had spared it — until now.

It gets worse. Two weeks ago, it was revealed the Irish government has been paying “journalists” to promote Project Ireland 2040, a plan to boost Ireland’s 4.7 million population by another million — courtesy of mass migration. In other words, a staggering 21% of Ireland’s population will be comprised of migrants within 22 years.

Last week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel finally admitted that “no-go zones” exist in Germany. She should know. Merkel won Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2015, largely for her open-borders stance that allowed more than one million “asylum seekers” and “refugees” into Germany. Now she’s decided it’s time to get tough on crime.

Sweden is another nation looking to crack down on crime, but it too has already surrendered certain areas to immigrant gangs, and police officers themselves have been subjected to attacks — including one where a hand grenade was tossed at a police station. In fact, hand grenades have become a “trend” in gang attacks in Sweden.

In the last 18 years France’s Jewish population has declined from 555,000 to 500,000. Why? “There’s no Jewish future there,” asserts Steve Eisenberg, co-founder of the Jewish International Connection of New York. “You can’t walk in Paris wearing a yarmulke. You’re taking your life in your hands.”

In Italy’s March 4 election, a majority of voters opted for anti-immigrant, populist and stridently anti-European Union parties over the status quo. As columnist Angelo Codevilla put it, this is what happens “when voters are ruled by officials and associated corporate types who despise them.”

What does any of the above have to do with collective handwringing over tariffs and the departure of Donald Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn? Because it’s collective handwringing by America’s very own “officials and associated corporate types” who despise us. “The prevailing wisdom on Wall Street and in Washington was that the departure of someone like Gary Cohn would be immediately catastrophic for the markets and the US economy,” asserts Charles Gasparino.

Make that the prevailing globalist wisdom on Wall Street and in Washington.

And who’s kidding whom with regard to wisdom? Wall Street elitists ran the entire global economy into a ditch in 2008, and Washington elitists bailed them out to the tune of $700 billion, courtesy of the taxpayer-funded Troubled Asset Relief Program. Moreover, the Federal Reserve gave elitists additional cushioning, courtesy of Quantitative Easing (QE), and a Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) that ultimately precipitated a financial bonanza for the top 1%.

ZIRP also precipitated a calamity for Main Street America, forced to endure a decade where anything remotely resembling safe-haven savings vehicles, protecting a lifetime’s worth of earnings, were eviscerated.

And now, many of these same elitists are distraught because the current president doesn’t buy into their particular brand of “wisdom?”

Note that Mssrs. Kudlow, Laffer and Moore spoke of bringing jobs and capital back to the United States. What they didn’t speak to is why they left in the first place. For the globalist elites, there are no countries, only markets. There are no citizens, only workers and consumers. The preservation of a nation’s customs, culture, traditions, borders and language? Anachronistic concepts that must give way to one-world governance run by “enlightened” technocrats.

Technocrats who also embrace open borders and mass immigration precisely because it undercuts the preservation of national identity.

Furthermore, the globalist enterprise is strictly bottom line — if specific areas in “flyover America” must take the hit for the generalized benefit of global profits, so be it. In short, global well-being trumps heartland catastrophe. Yet as columnist Michael Goodwin reminds us, those most critical of Trump’s approach “offer no solutions for the working class Americans left behind by the bipartisan push for globalization.”

Globalization with disastrous possibilities beyond economics and immigration. “We today confront a Chinese Communist dictatorship and superpower that seeks to displace America as first power on earth and to drive the U.S. military back across the Pacific,” writes columnist Pat Buchanan. By the way, he notes, China’s “$375 billion trade surplus with us in 2017 far exceeded the entire Chinese defense budget.”

Are Americans content with trade policies that subsidize the Chinese quest for world domination? The same Chinese “superb at free-trade rhetoric and even more superb at highly protectionist behavior,” as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross put it at the Davos World Economic Forum in January?

As for tariffs, misinformation abounds. America already imposes 12,000 of them on a variety of products. Is that a lot? At the same forum, Ross challenged the assembled group of globalist elites to name a nation less protectionist than America.

He got no responses.

“For the past 30+ years, DC politicians have been selling out the U.S. economy to corporate interests, Wall Street and multinationals,” writes ConservativeTreeHouse columnist Sundance. “President Trump is simply saying ‘no more,’ and finally putting a stop to it. They hate him. He doesn’t care.”

He shouldn’t, because that sellout has been beyond egregious. “Global debt levels soared to a record high of $233 trillion in the third quarter of 2017,” CNBC reported in January. Global debt levels engineered by the same elitists responsible for the 2008 crash, many of whom now rail against Trump’s “ignorant” economic policies.

Trump’s tariffs — targeted and negotiable — represent a classic shot across the globalist bow. No matter how much the elites despise Trump and his agenda, he is determined to take a jackhammer to their “prevailing wisdom” that ultimately came down to two corollaries, one spoken and one unspoken. The spoken one? Wall Street and Washington are “too big to fail.”

The unspoken one? The rest of America is “too deplorable to matter.”

No longer. “MAGAnomics” will play itself out, no matter how often $1,000 bonuses are dismissed as crumbs, tax cuts are labeled “catastrophic,” or “putting Americans first” is derided as delusional or racist.

The real delusion has been assuming millions of Americans were content to be cogs in a globalist machine, mollified by a “new normal” that hollowed out their cities and towns — along with their lives. The hardhats who spoke at Trump’s tariff signing ceremony humanized working Americans. The same working Americans globalists would rather objectify.

If there is a better reason why Donald Trump is president, one is hard pressed to imagine what it is.