With apologies to Martin Niemoller. First Trump’s tariffs raised prices on small appliances, but I didn’t speak out because I’ve got all the appliances I need. Then Trump’s tariffs affected imported cellphones, autos, and airplanes, but I don’t need another cellphone or auto and have never bought an airplane, so I didn’t speak out.

Then Trump’s trade war with ruined farmers that sell soybeans and other crops to China, but I didn’t speak out because I don’t own stock in Deere, once tried to grow a tomato but it was eater by squirrels, and who cares about the price of soybeans in Shanghai?

Now Trump says it’s okay with him if the trade war goes on until after he’s re-elected, and his Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross says its “a really good time” to add more tariffs because they won’t impact Christmas shopping, and I’m not speaking out because my kids are adults so higher tariffs on toys won’t be an issue and the grandkids have so many toys that they may have to call in Marie Kondo to alleviate the clutter.

But now Trump is starting trade wars with Brazil and Argentina over iron and steel and with France over wine, cheese, and makeup. I wouldn’t say anything since I have very little use at my age for iron except in my vitamins, but people in my house really like an occasional glass of Bordeaux, or touch of Chanel, and I’m crazy about Pont L’Eveque, Saint Andre, Livarot, and other French cheeses. Still, I’ve got a feeling very few Trump voters are going to speak up for me as Trump throws the Francophiles in their midst under the tumbrel.

All joking aside, Trump’s lunatic, anti-trade policies are no laughing matter. They are bad for our own economic well-being and for international stability. In a war of all against all, which seems to be Trump’s ideal, everybody loses. In fact, we all like access to products we love no matter where they originate, and conversely our country benefits from selling our farm products, movies, jets, tech to foreign buyers who covet them.

Unfortunately, the President of the United States missed some important classes in his two years at Wharton. He views all of life, including economics, as a zero sum game. You are either the winner or the loser rather than a participant in a complex web of mutually beneficial economic interrelationships. Axios quotes a market strategist who says of the latest tariff binge that its obvious Trump “fails to understand how trade flows, exchange rates, and economies function at the most basic level.” No kidding

The victims of Trump’s trade ignorance are not just American workers who lose their jobs or farms, but also American consumers who pay higher prices for a whole range of goods or are deterred from buying things they want. That’s the point of a tariff, after all — to inflict pain by making imported stuff prohibitively expensive.

Trump seems to think China is paying billions in tariffs, but it’s us: the kid who buys a video game, the parents who buy a car or groceries or bottle of bubbly, their employers forced to pay more for imported raw materials or parts for the products they make whose cost they then have to pass on to consumers.

Republicans used to be the green eyeshade party, the party of business, probity, balanced budgets, low debt, capitalism, free enterprise, trade and commerce. Now they have followed Trump down a fantasy rabbit hole to a xenophobic, isolationist, mercantilist economics that went out of style with the Hanseatic League.

It is an anachronistic error and an expense one that threatens to make us all poorer. Keep your eyes on the markets and your 401k. Wall Street may not want a President Elizabeth Warren, but Trump seems intent on giving us not the economy of Adam Smith and the traders under the Buttonwood Tree but of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the Ancien Regime. We all know how that ended.