Sane-Washing Trump’s Tariffs: The “Master” Plan Doesn’t Make Sense & Isn’t Being Followed

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

In 2025, amid a sea of tariffs, tweets, economic brinksmanship and cries of “Drill, baby, drill,” one man’s name keeps surfacing as the supposed brains behind the Trump administration’s latest moves: Stephen Miran. He’s a Harvard-trained economist, former Treasury official, and newly appointed Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. In a political landscape where incoherence is often a feature rather than a bug, Miran has become something of a mythic figure—a wizard behind the curtain, credited with bringing intellectual order that’s disguised under Trumpian chaos.

Enter the concept of “sane-washing,” a term that was coined in 2020 and been applied to justifications for Trump’s tariffs recently. I’ve been seeing lots of it recently in articles, posts and comments, so thought I’d try to dig through the mess. Sane-washing is the idea that Miran lends a glossy, academic sheen to what is fundamentally an erratic and improvisational economic agenda. Think of him as the tuxedoed valet pulling up in a clown car and insisting the dents are a design feature. That’s not to say he doesn’t have a plan. He does. The problem is that the plan is built on contradictions so sharp they should come with a tetanus warning.

Miran’s central thesis revolves around tariffs. Not as simple protectionist tools, mind you, but as levers to fix a broken global trade and currency regime. In his mind, the United States has been a chump for decades—bearing the burden of a reserve currency, overvalued exports, and trade deficits that hollowed out American industry. His solution is to impose sweeping tariffs that would, through the magic of international finance, cause foreign currencies to depreciate, thereby offsetting the price increases from the tariffs themselves. The brilliance, according to Miran, is that the pain lands not on American consumers but on Chinese manufacturers or Vietnamese exporters.

It’s all very clever, until you realize that in the very next breath, he proposes a Mar-a-Lago Accord—an international deal where America would pressure its trading partners into strengthening their currencies. That’s right. First you want their currencies to fall, then you want them to rise, all while the dollar becomes weaker and stronger at the same time. You can’t walk north and south simultaneously unless you’re in a physics paradox, a Christopher Nolan movie, or apparently, a Stephen Miran economic memo.

But let’s not stop there. The Mar-a-Lago Accord itself is a masterpiece of economic wishcasting. Miran envisions a scenario where the United States, after shocking the world with aggressive tariffs, summons global leaders to Trump’s Florida resort and gets them to voluntarily agree to strengthen their currencies against the dollar and also lend the U.S. money for free. Not figuratively free. Literally zero-interest century bonds. Yes, the plan is for foreign central banks to swap their interest-bearing U.S. Treasuries for bonds that pay nothing for 100 years. It’s a little like convincing your landlord to reduce your rent to zero for the next century in exchange for you threatening to set fire to your own apartment.

Critics from across the economic spectrum, including former Fed officials and international economists, have pointed out that this doesn’t even add up on paper, let alone in practice. It’s an economic fever dream wrapped in diplomatic extortion. The only reason it hasn’t triggered a global panic is that nobody believes it’s real. And that’s precisely the problem. Miran’s ideas give the illusion of a plan—a logical scaffolding for an administration that otherwise communicates in barked threats and broken sentences. But even if the White House were actually pursuing this strategy, the contradictions embedded in it would cause the structure to collapse under its own weight.

Now, let’s talk about fiscal policy, where Miran adds another layer of absurdity to an already convoluted framework. On the one hand, he’s alarmed by the size of the U.S. national debt. On the other hand, he supports sweeping tax cuts, maintains silence on any major spending restraint, and proposes to fund the whole show with tariff revenue and magical foreign lending. It’s a fiscal strategy that combines the optimism of a lottery ticket with the credibility of a chain email. He suggests that economic growth—presumably turbocharged by deregulation and fossil fuels—will eventually pay for it all.

That would be more reassuring if it hadn’t already failed under previous Republican administrations. And while Miran claims his approach is grounded in hardheaded economic realism, the assumptions required to make the math work would make a Vegas bookie blush. Worse, his theory of how tariffs interact with inflation relies on the idea that foreign suppliers will simply absorb the costs and that currency depreciation will neatly cancel out any price increases. In other words, it’s a free lunch. Tariffs, he claims, aren’t inflationary.

That’s not how any of this works. Economic studies from the first Trump term showed that U.S. consumers and businesses bore most of the costs of the tariffs. Prices went up, supply chains were disrupted, and whatever benefits may have accrued were lost in a sea of uncertainty and retaliation. The idea that you can slap taxes on imports and nobody in America pays more at the store is not just naive, it’s economically illiterate.

Then there’s the Federal Reserve, which Miran wants to “reform.” His plan would allow the President to fire Fed governors at will, shorten their terms, and give state governors a new role in selecting regional Fed directors after nationalizing the regional reserve banks. It’s the kind of structural overhaul that looks like decentralization until you realize it’s actually just a politically engineered Trojan horse. The President gets more power. The states get more say. And the only people who don’t get more influence are the monetary policy experts who, despite their flaws, are at least supposed to be insulated from election-year pressure.

Miran pitches this as a return to democratic accountability, but when you scratch the surface, it looks more like an invitation to politicize an institution designed to stand apart from the electoral circus. Economists across the political spectrum, including many who’ve criticized the Fed’s actions over the years, have slammed the proposal as a recipe for instability. Giving the President power to fire Fed governors turns interest rate policy into a campaign prop. Adding more state-level appointees, who themselves may be political allies, only makes the institution more beholden to partisan interests. It’s not a governance model. And you’ll note the nationalization point in there, which is an interesting choice for a deep fiscal conservative.

Of course, none of this would be complete without addressing Miran’s views on energy and climate. Spoiler: there aren’t many. His industrial policy calls for cheap, abundant energy, which in Miran-speak means more fossil fuels. There’s no discussion of renewables, no embrace of electrification, no proposals to decarbonize anything. Instead, he sees climate change as a global problem that can’t be solved by the United States, so it might as well drill and burn its way back to prosperity.

In social media posts and op-eds, he mocks Western climate goals and shrugs at the idea that the U.S. should take the lead. His position boils down to this: unless China cuts its emissions, why should we bother? It’s climate change denial 101 these days, pretending to accept the science and then shrugging and pointing at China and India, which are both doing far more than the USA is on the subject.

And it matters, because economic policy doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If you’re redesigning the American economy around fossil fuels, tariffs, and regulatory rollbacks, you’re not just indifferent to climate policy—you’re actively undermining it. The clean economy of the future requires electrification, decarbonization, and investment in next-generation technologies. Miran offers none of that. His vision is retrofitted for the 1950s and coated in an oil slick.

No one outside of Trump’s inner circle considers Miran’s ideas and plans to be coherent, credible or realistic. The best that most can manage is that he has identified real problems, like the rather absurd debt the country has, and is suggesting ‘innovative’ and ‘radical’ approaches to dealing with them. Then they eviscerate his arguments. Most just start with the evisceration and don’t bother with the gentle opening. Elizabeth Warren tried to get him to explicitly abjure his positions during his confirmation hearings, for example.

Even more damning to the narrative that Miran is the strategic genius guiding Trump’s actions is the fact that Trump himself isn’t following Miran’s roadmap. Instead of targeting specific trade imbalances or building pressure toward a coordinated currency adjustment, the administration’s tariff strategy in 2025 has been indiscriminate and poorly sequenced. Allies like Canada and Mexico have been hit just as hard as rivals, undermining any hope of building a coalition for the mythical Mar-a-Lago Accord. The rollout has been chaotic, with inconsistent exemptions and retaliations flying in every direction. If Miran truly intended for tariffs to be a form of surgical economic leverage, Trump is wielding them like a sledgehammer in a glassware shop. It’s yet another contradiction in a portfolio full of them: Miran provides the blueprint of a modern Taj Mahal, Trump builds a treehouse with a blowtorch, and Republicans and their cheerleaders pretend it’s an architectural masterpiece.

The bigger danger here isn’t just that Miran’s ideas are riddled with internal contradictions. It’s that they’re being taken seriously by people who should know better. Because he’s articulate, credentialed, and able to speak in full sentences, Miran lends intellectual legitimacy to a deeply unserious agenda. He’s the velvet glove on the iron fist of economic nationalism. But when you peel back the layers, what you find is a worldview that treats trade as zero-sum, debt as someone else’s problem, the climate as a lost cause, and the central bank as a political pawn. This isn’t a blueprint for 21st-century leadership. It’s a ransom note to the future, written in the language of policy white papers.

In the end, what Stephen Miran represents is not a coherent alternative to the global economic consensus, but a cleverly packaged rejection of it. His ideas are less about solving problems than about reasserting American dominance through brute force and clever finance tricks. They offer the illusion of strategy while chasing mutually exclusive goals. They trade long-term sustainability for short-term leverage. And in the realm of clean energy and climate, they offer nothing at all. A clean economy can’t be built on rage, regress, and ransom demands to trading partners. It requires evidence, engineering, and actual solutions. Miran offers none.