There are 2 things they are trying to do here IMO:

• They are using tariffs to bully weaker countries into worse deals and to interfere in our politics. Here in Colombia the media (all right wing lapdogs) keep talking how president Petro needs to bend the knee and just acept whatever Trump wants to do because it would be so bad for Colombia if we get extra tariffs. And they keep spewing propaganda making it sound like Petro is the one being crazy to kill any remaining support he has (not that he needs any help jajajaja, he has been a really mediocre president on his own and the extreme right is going to get an easy win next election anyway). They are not wrong of course, a trade war between Colombia and USA would hurt Colombia so much more than the USA just because of the relative size of our economies. And Trump and the rest of the republican assholes are using this to bully us and the rest of latin american countries.
• They want to reshape the tax collection in USA to remove taxes from rich people and collect more from poor people. At the end of the day, blanket tariffs on all products is just another regressive sales tax that will fall mostly on poor people. They want to reduce wealth taxes and income taxes which are collected mostly on rich people and instead replace them with regressive taxes like tariffs instead. I mean, his recemt tax changes shifted a huge amount of the tax burden away from the rich and to the poor and middle classes. If you want to put a conspiracy hat, they also think this will create a population boom in the USA. Research shows that people under worse economic conditions have more children, so they want to make life harder to poor people to get more and cheaper workers. At the very least the Musk rat has spoken openly about this, so it’s not crazy to think this is part of their stupid plan.

Long term, the USA is royally fucked because of this. They are killing any good will the USA has with the rest of the world and they are screwing the poor people that actully generate the wealth of their country. But short term rich people will make bank with all this and the rest of us will pay for it.

The issue is how do you “meassure” merit? How do you decide who has earned what they have and who hasn’t?

If you are a conservative it’s very easy, the status quo defines merit. Those who have are those who deserve because the system is working as expected. So rich people ruling is meritocracy for them.

If you are a racist/xenophobe/etc then it’s also very easy, those who are in the “good” (read white in the USA) group are the ones with merit, so they are the ones that should rule.

A few years back, when college degrees where just for rich people with connections, merit was having a college degree because that proved you where educated and hard working jajajaja. Now that a lot more people can get college degrees it no longer means that for some reason jajajaja.

Etc, etc. In general, people use meritocracy to justify their own biases and the decisions they make based on those biases. The USA is of course the current poster child of this, but by no means it’s exclusive to them.

The reality is that when you think about it there is no such thing as merit in the general sense. For example, I get paid well by working as a programmer. And I’m the first one to say that I’m very good at it and deserve my pay. Yet, if my toilet is broken I need to call a plumber and defer to them. So, who says I deserve to earn more than a plumber? I do say so because it greatly benefits me of course jajajaja. But if push come to shove I would absolutely prefer to have a society without programmers than a society without plumbers. So who has more merit?

The simple truth is that we are all valuable in our own context and we should try to build a society where we all can participate and contribute as needed. Ideas like meritocracy are used by right wing people to justify the existence of hierarchies and social classes. If there are better people (with more merit) then of course they should be in charge and everyone else must obey. But the more you dig into the idea, the less it makes sense. Meritocracy is just a very easy trap to fall into because it’s the kind of idea that sounds good to people until you really think about it, but in practice it’s just a useless idea if you want to make rational decisions.