Tariff trade wars are sinking retirements. Will AGs Kobach and Bailey protect you? | Opinion

How is your 401(k) looking these days?

Probably not that great. “Volatile” trading has left the stock market on the “doorstep of a correction,” Bloomberg reported this week: That means a panicked selloff has caused the market to fall by nearly 10% over the last three weeks.

Or to put it in big, round, ugly numbers: The market has lost $4 trillion of value since mid-February.

Which is a lot of money.

And a lot of that money is probably coming out of your retirement savings, of course, if you have a 401(k) account tied heavily to the stock market. If you’re thinking about leaving the workforce sometime soon, the latest financial news probably doesn’t feel that great.

I’m sorry about that. Truly.

But the reason for all this chaos isn’t all that difficult to figure out. President Donald Trump is hard at work — when he’s not running the Kennedy Center for the Arts or using the White House as a showroom for Teslas — running the American economy like he ran all the companies he pushed into bankruptcy.

Trump’s tariff-driven trade wars have upended the business world. There is growing talk of a recession. CEOs don’t know how to plan for the future. Investors are stressed. Shareholders — including folks with retirement accounts — are paying the price.

A question: What are Kris Kobach and Andrew Bailey going to do about it?

Looking out for shareholders

After all, the attorneys general of Kansas and Missouri have often shown themselves to be extremely concerned about the well-being of the folks who own stocks in publicly traded companies.

Remember when Bailey signed onto a 2023 letter threatening Target with possible penalties for selling LGBT-themed merchandise?

He was just looking out for shareholders.

“Target has a fiduciary duty to put its shareholders first rather than push a sexual agenda on children, and we’re putting them on notice,” Bailey said at the time.

Same goes for Kobach, who has long waged war on so-called environmental, social and governance or ESG investing, which steers shareholders to companies that prioritize diversity and climate protections in their business practices.

“ESG investing puts the lifetime savings of teachers, police officers and other public employees at risk,” Kobach said in 2023 testimony for a bill to ban such investments by the state employee retirement system. Kansas investors need to be protected, he said, when an investment firm uses a “strategy other than earning the highest rate of return to invest an individual’s nest egg.”

Now: Those issues definitely reflected the conservative culture war priorities of Kobach and Bailey. But protecting shareholders was their ostensible rationale.

Well, American shareholders — including folks in Kansas and Missouri who want to retire comfortably — really need protection from the president right now. So where are the attorneys general?

CEOs are scared. So is Congress

If the two men — MAGA loyalists — don’t want to directly take on Trump, they can always go after cowardly CEOs who won’t criticize the president for hurting their bottom lines.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that there is “universal revulsion” at Trump’s policies among corporate executives who gathered this week for an event near the White House — but that nobody really wants to speak up. Forty-four percent said the market would have to fall by 20% before they criticized the president’s policies. Another 22% said the market would have to lose nearly a third of its value.

So much for fiduciary duty, right?

If Kobach and Bailey don’t want to go after business leaders, maybe they could at least direct a critical word at their Missouri and Kansas GOP colleagues in Congress? After all, the reason Trump has the power to levy tariffs willy-nilly is because the legislative branch gave it to him.

This week, though, House Republicans voted against reclaiming that authority. Oh well.

It’s not clear who wins in Trump’s chaotic economy. It doesn’t seem to be most businesses. Or workers. Or the folks who have money socked away in the stock market and retirement on their minds.

Who will protect them? Who will protect you? It’s not going to be the president or Congress or CEOs. And it’s not going to be Kris Kobach and Andrew Bailey.