‘The White Lotus’ characters would never survive Trump’s tariffs
“Do you think you could live with no money?” asks shady patriarch Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) in the Season 3 finale of HBO hit The White Lotus. “I mean, no money, no house, nothing.”
In a remarkable, if not exactly serendipitous coincidence, the show comes out at a time when fiscal austerity is top-of-mind for so many Americans. (And fair warning: Spoilers ahead.)
Perhaps the biggest moral quandary of the series’ third season belongs to Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook). Stuck within the lush, amenity-packed grounds of the titular Thai resort, Piper is convinced she’d rather spread her budding Buddhist wings at a nearby monastery. Her arc throughout the season hinges on whether she will ultimately be willing to cast off her family’s estimable fortune and embrace a monk’s spartan living conditions for at least a year.
Complicating this decision, though unbeknown to her, Piper’s father Timothy has just become embroiled in a federal finance investigation, and it appears the family’s fortunes are about to go up in smoke. Whether Piper chooses to live in the monastery or not, her lifestyle back home is about to inadvertently become far more monk-like. That’s why Timothy spends much of the season feeling out each family member about whether they could (hypothetically!) live without a cushioning biome of wealth.
Interestingly, several MAGA-friendly influencers have spent the past few days in a Timothy Ratliff-like quest to prepare their supporters for lean times ahead.
Their approach might be even less straightforward, though.
“Ask any billionaire what ‘success’ means. They won’t say more money. They won’t say more stuff. They’ll say: ‘My Family,’” popular conservative commentator Benny Johnson posted on X last Friday. It was one of multiple tweets downplaying the importance of materialism, just as markets were crashing around the globe in direct response to policies he supports. Johnson is far from alone, either, in spreading this anti-prosperity gospel.
Right-leaning YouTuber Jeremy Hambly, who goes by the handle The Quarterling, tweeted on Thursday about the unimportance of worldly possessions in the grand scheme of things. (“You do NOT need the new iPad,” he posted on X. “You do NOT need the new Cell Phone. You do NOT need the new video game console. You WANT them.”) Meanwhile, MAGA influencer Milo Yiannopoulos tweeted about how men with “BS email jobs” will find more satisfaction in life from “working in factories again”—an outcome current Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick also suggests is on the way.
It remains unclear whether any of these content creators plan on joining their followers in glorious servitude for the greater good. What seems obvious, though, is that the sudden pivot to Walden-like simplicity, among supporters of a tax cut-craving cabinet of billionaires, sure seems like a coping mechanism for crashing markets.
As for The White Lotus’s Piper, her journey toward monastic enlightenment ended with a reluctant embrace of material wealth. Despite her admiration for head monk Luang Por Teera (Suthichai Yoon) and her discomfort with economic inequality, she chooses a life of comfort.
“I know that I’m not supposed to be attached to this kind of stuff and I don’t want to think that I am,” she said. “But, like… I think I am. I know I am.”
Elsewhere on the show, Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell) accepts a $5 million bribe rather than inform on globetrotting murderer Greg Hunt (Jon Gries.) Apparently, she was unwilling to settle for an ethically pure but far less materially satisfying lifestyle. Belinda’s betrayal of her own morals packs even more of a punch given that her new windfall leads her to abandon business plans with new paramour Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul). It’s a direct echo of how Jennifer Coolidge’s socialite Tanya McQuoid bailed on her plan to finance Belinda’s own spa in the first season finale. Although a character whom the audience is meant to root for does indeed sail off into the sunset $5 million richer, it’s by no means a happy ending.
Piper, meanwhile, is set to be force-fed the spartan lifestyle she just opted out of. Like much of the series altogether, the finale archly illustrates money’s corrosive effects; the way it eats through our morality and higher reasoning. The ending of White Lotus highlights the fact that almost nobody would willingly give up any of their own material comfort—at a time when Trump supporters are being asked to embrace just such a mindset of scarcity.
Trump has telegraphed, again and again, that some “temporary pain” would accompany his not-even-half-baked tariff strategy. Now that the pain is right at Americans’ doorsteps, along with the rest of the world’s, Trump’s messengers have changed their tune. The pain, it seems, might not be temporary, nor should it be perceived as pain. Will the MAGA faithful be willing to recalibrate their values as prices rise and 401k’s fall? That remains to be seen.
Perhaps they’ll never need to do so. Trump could decide tomorrow that his approach to tariffs needs some rejiggering, and the markets might stabilize as a result. Until then, the only new mindset one might do well to embrace is one of uncertainty. As The White Lotus’s head monk says in the finale: “It is easier to be patient once we finally accept there is no resolution.”