“Trump, degrowther,” the leftist journalist Doug Henwood commented online last week. He was being facetious, of course (…) Making personal sacrifices, short-term or otherwise, is foreign to Trump’s nature. And yet, for political reasons, he has been driven to ask Americans to accept some limits on their shopaholic tendencies.

“What he is doing is fairly unprecedented: explicitly saying that he is willing to pay an economic price in terms of growth in order to protect something else that he thinks is valuable and important,” Daniel Susskind, an economics professor at King’s College London who is the author of the 2024 book “Growth: A History and a Reckoning,” told me in an e-mail. “Until now, Trump has tended to deny that tariffs come with any sort of price attached.”

What Trump thinks is important is very different from what everybody on slrpnk thinks is important, I’m sure. But just the idea of a mainstream American politician saying “we don’t need to buy all that stuff” makes me feel strangely positive?