Trump’s Tariffs Are a Self-Inflicted Political Wound

Until recently, conventional wisdom held that Donald Trump’s return to the presidency was a fatal blow for the Left. Trump would upend the Left’s agenda on key issues like immigration and climate and strike at its centers of prestige and power in academia and the bureaucracy. These things have indeed come to pass. But few expected Trump to discredit the Left by acting on one of its most noxious impulses: a disrespect for a functioning, if imperfect, status quo, and a desire radically to remake areas of social life.

This attitude has come through clearly in the tariff crusade’s rhetoric and rationale, in which the president and his allies have embraced a worldview long associated with progressives—one that scorns the legitimacy of existing institutions, dismisses conventional economic metrics, and justifies sweeping disruption in the name of a morally righteous revolution. The result is a policy shift that resembles not a conservative adjustment but a kind of economic radicalism in populist guise.

The justifications offered for Trump’s tariff upheaval have revealed a distinctly revolutionary impulse. Trump himself has declared tariffs an instrument of “ECONOMIC REVOLUTION.” Throughout history, the revolutionary impulse is usually a conjunction of two moods: utopian aspirations for the future and deep pessimism about the status quo. We see both sentiments in Trump’s post-Liberation Day economic arguments.

On the one hand, tariff advocates make sweeping promises: the revival of American manufacturing, a return to the nation’s supposed golden age (which Trump oddly places between the Civil War and World War I), a reorientation of the U.S. economy away from the feckless financial sector and toward the middle class—even a broader moral renewal.

On the other hand, they are unremittingly dour about the economic status quo. The president and his defenders portray the pre-tariff U.S. economy as a nightmare—one in which foreign nations took advantage of America, the average citizen was immiserated, and the middle class was vanishing. Our industrial capacity, on this view, had long since disintegrated. And conventional measures of economic health—like stock market growth, GDP, and the unemployment rate—rather than revealing anything about reality, merely misled us into complacency. Republicans, the traditional party of business, were all of a sudden chiding those worrying about Treasury yields and their 401(k)s as out-of-touch elitists with insufficient patriotism.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to this diagnosis. The costs and benefits of globalization have not in fact been shared fairly, and aggregate increases in well-being from the “neoliberal” era did indeed mask steep decline in particular regions and sectors.

I know this intimately: I grew up only a half-hour from J. D. Vance’s hometown in southwestern Ohio—an area that, like much of the Rust Belt, has not seen its prosperity rise alongside the liberalization of global trade. Instead, it became almost the stereotypical victim of globalization. Around the time of the financial crisis, a German megacorporation, which had acquired the town’s largest employer a few years earlier, shuttered it.  The closure devastated local property values, the school system, and the many businesses that relied on these employees for customers.

Similar occurrences in the Midwest and elsewhere have contributed to numerous social pathologies, including the opioid crisis. The needs of some regions and sectors have indisputably been better attended to than others in recent decades.

But these problems do not justify revolutionary upheaval. They warrant a careful, gradual rebalancing of priorities and a thoughtful targeting of aid and support.

The first Trump administration—and the Biden administration, too—had already begun to rack up considerable successes in reshoring important industries and combating anticompetitive practices in China that hurt American workers, and American manufacturing was on the upswing. Economic inequality was diminishing in these years, and working-class wages were rising, including in Rust Belt states. Notwithstanding some legitimate concerns, the American economy was the envy of the world—and strengthening.

Today, the respect for the general welfare that once guided reform has given way to a desire to upend the established order. Trump’s tariff policies—including the  troubling invocation of emergency powers to implement them—reflect a revolutionary impulse more commonly associated with anti-establishment movements on the left.

Meantime, MAGA has embraced the idea that tariffs—which make the goods American manufacturers rely on more expensive—will somehow help those same manufacturers. Self-acclaimed spokesmen for the neglected working man are pushing a policy of which industrial workers themselves disapprove. Here we see, again, a reprise of a posture typical of the worst elements of the Left in recent years, when supposed champions of racial minorities repeatedly misrepresented the opinions of the groups they claimed to represent on core issues like public safety.

The self-inflicted political wound from Liberation Day is already beginning to sting, though the full economic effects remain to be seen. Perhaps the clearest and most dispiriting outcome of the current tariff saga is how it reinforces the reality that America has no true conservative party—one that prefers to tread lightly rather than stretch beyond public consensus in pursuit of dubious goals.

The unfortunate truth is that both parties are too inclined to act on revolutionary impulses. During the years of peak woke, the Left inundated the public with calls to revolutionize policing, race relations, sex, the border, ideas of due process and the presumption of innocence, and much else. It is discouraging to see the Right adopt such a posture within months of regaining power with regard to an economy that, whatever its flaws, was the healthiest of any large nation. For those who believe America is neither a racist society nor an economic dystopia exploited by other countries, there seems to be nowhere to go.

The first party to find its way back to a less radical approach to governance could secure a durable political advantage. There are great gains to be made by leaders who see their job as appealing to the broad American center. In a healthy democracy, voters deserve an option that advocates prudent conservatism and avoids sudden change on vital matters; but this alternative has been absent in the U.S. for the last several election cycles. Whichever side offers it first has the chance to end this period of turmoil and establish itself as the natural party of government for years to come.

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