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To tariff or not to tariff? Today’s tweet-length political discourse pretends this is a binary choice. Donald Trump has pitched across-the-board import levies as a panacea to rebuild American manufacturing, while Democrats insist the president’s proposals are an attempt to crash the economy, and that their party should tout its opposition to all tariffs.
But neither the policy nor politics of this moment are that neat and simple. While too few or too many tariffs can destroy economies, there is a Goldilocks zone that’s just right. It’s just being omitted from the conversation.
Policy-wise, Trump’s tariff-all-imports initiative lands on the “too many” side, ignoring some basic economic realities. In offering almost no implementation period, it provides industry no grace period to actually re-shore factories and other capital-intensive operations to produce goods in the US. In applying tariffs across the board rather than in a targeted fashion, Trump’s proposal makes few accommodations for commodities – from coffee and vanilla to various rare earth minerals that America cannot produce at scale within its own borders.
Trump’s approach is more a power grab than a trade policy – one forcing his erratic decisions on America without the consent of Congress. The strategy allows him to reprise his practice of preserving levies that hit political opponents while granting lucrative exemptions to reward big donors and powerful industries. The likely result: unnecessarily higher prices, industry-crippling retaliation, an uncertain policy environment that paralyzes investment, ever-more rampant corruption and few enduring benefits for the domestic macroeconomy.
That said, liberals’ suggestion that Trump’s behavior proves all tariffs are bad and the existing tariff-free trade policy is ideal – well, lived reality belies those arguments, too.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and the reduction of tariffs on China during the 1990s and 2000s removed a financial disincentive for companies to cut costs and boost their profits by shifting production to countries that allow workers to be exploited and the environment to be despoiled. Unsurprisingly, since the trade deals passed, the United States has lost more than 70,000 manufacturing facilities and millions of factory jobs – an economic apocalypse that coincided with an unprecedented increase in suicides, drug overdoses and other “deaths of despair.”
For much of the working class, wage and job losses were not offset by the financial benefits of cheaper imported goods. While wealthy “Davos Men” of the 1990s and 2000s touted the “creative destruction” of tariff-free international commerce, legions of displaced American workers weren’t afforded the robust support system (healthcare, retraining, pensions, etc) other trade-exposed countries provide. Here in the US, resources were instead spent on wars, bank bailouts and tax cuts for the rich.
Meanwhile, as pandemic shortages most recently illustrated, America’s anti-tariff frenzy diminished our capacity to make necessities we shouldn’t depend on other countries for.
Scoffing at such concerns, Hawaii’s Democratic senator Brian Schatz recently insisted: “It should not be a goal of our national economic policymakers that we make our own socks.” His since-deleted tweet was a glib, anti-Trump broadside against tariffs only a few years after Schatz touted his own party’s use of tariffs to re-shore American jobs. Similarly, some liberal pundits have mocked the idea that America should even try to rebuild some of its manufacturing capacity.
These glib brush-offs distract from security, sovereignty and self-sufficiency problems that come with the United States now relying on other nations for everything from medical supplies and medicine to military and energy equipment to the computer chips that power the economy.
Bubbling beneath liberals’ free-trade dogma is the snobby insinuation that nobody in America actually wants to work in factories – a notion egged on by Chinese AI videos. But polling cited by media, libertarians and Democratic TV influencers as alleged proof of this hypothesis actually illustrates the opposite: not only do the vast majority of Americans believe it is important for the country to rebuild its manufacturing capacity, a whopping one-fourth of the country’s workers believe they would be better off if they were able to change jobs to go work in manufacturing.
There is a middle ground
Republicans looking to own the libs and Democrats aiming to demonize Trump may be at one another’s throats on cable TV and social media, but they are also united in one cause: in this era that rewards partisan polarization, they are both incentivized to pretend there’s no middle ground between Maga’s blanket tariffs that threaten an immediate national recession and liberals’ free trade fundamentalism that caused permanent Depression-like conditions in the heartland.
Left unsaid in all of the political noise is the Goldilocks zone when it comes to trade: targeted tariffs in conjunction with other investment policies can create a more comprehensive industrial policy – which absolutely can create conditions to begin rebuilding American industry and boost manufacturing employment.
That’s not a theory. It’s exactly what started happening just before Trump’s second term.
Once a doctrinaire free trader, Joe Biden as president championed a mix of carefully calibrated tax incentives, spending programs, and – yes – tariffs. He and his administration did a terrible job of publicizing the policy’s triumph – but it was working. During Biden’s term, the United States added more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs, far outpacing Trump’s first term. Many of the jobs and factory investments occurred in Republican-dominated states that had been hammered by past free trade policies.
“Democrats should embrace tariffs as one component of a broader industrial strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and make whole communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad trade policy,” the Pennsylvania representative Chris Deluzio recently wrote in an op-ed.
Deluzio, who represents the kind of swing district Democrats often lose, added on X: “President Trump’s tariff approach has been chaotic and inconsistent … But the answer isn’t to condemn all tariffs. That risks putting the Democrats even further out of touch with the hard-working people who used to be the lifeblood of the party. If you oppose all tariffs, you’re signaling that you’re comfortable with exploited foreign workers making your stuff at the expense of American workers. I’m not, and neither are most voters.”
Trade politics are more complicated than they seem
Despite echoing what had been the core economic doctrines of the most recent Democratic White House, Deluzio was promptly dogpiled by liberals and so-called Never Trump Republicans – some of whom called for him to be primaried and thrown out of Congress.
Those criticizing Deluzio, Michigan’s Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer, and other Democrats staking out a middle-ground position on tariffs see this as a with-us-or-against-us political litmus test. But populist Democrats, rather than their free trade absolutist critics, are not only right on the policy merits, but also more in touch with the nuanced politics of the issue.
When trade policy became a high-profile national issue in the 1990s, the Democratic president Bill Clinton broke with unions and pushed Nafta, which delivered Democrats a jackpot of campaign cash from business donors. But the move so alienated working-class voters that some of the most consistently Democratic congressional districts quickly became the most reliably Republican in the country, according to a recent study by Princeton, Stanford and Yale researchers.
Three decades later, as trade once again takes center stage, polls suggest a similar dynamic at play. Survey data shows a majority of Americans are dissatisfied with how Trump is using tariffs and how he is managing the economy – and Democrats are smart to home in on that line of criticism.
But data also show that for the first time in generations, Republicans have equaled Democrats when voters are asked which party “cares more about the needs and problems of people like you”.
The takeaway: voters perceive Trump’s tariff gambit as a policy initiative but also as a values statement. They rightly oppose Trump’s specific form of tariffs, but they also seem to see the debate as a deeper “which side are you on” litmus test. However dishonest and fraudulent Trump’s particular tariff sales pitch is, his advocacy for an entirely different trade paradigm is designed to signal to America’s working class that – unlike past presidents – he hears their long-ignored grievances since Nafta began laying waste to their communities.
Put another way: Trump’s trade war is part of his larger culture war.
In a recent Lever Time interview, the United Automobile Workers president, Shawn Fain, summed up the discordant political moment. His union endorsed former vice-president Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and Fain has critiqued both Trump’s across-the-board tariffs and his labor policies. But Fain has also endorsed Trump’s targeted auto industry tariffs and credited the president with centering trade policy as a priority, suggesting that was one reason nearly half of his union’s members voted for Trump in the last election.
“In my first 28 years as a UAW member working at Chrysler, all I saw was plants close year after year, and I feel a rage,” said Fain, who donned a “Ross Perot Was Right” T-shirt during the interview. “And so when you see a person like Donald Trump come along and start talking about tariffs and trade and people still are threatening their plants being closed, that spoke to people.”
A generation ago, Democrats seemed to appreciate the reality described by Fain – and they seemed to understand the error of their free-trade ways.
“We can’t keep playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expect a different result – because it’s a game that ordinary Americans are losing,” said Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign. “It’s a game where trade deals like Nafta ship jobs overseas and force parents to compete with their teenagers to work for minimum wage at Walmart. That’s what happens when the American worker doesn’t have a voice at the negotiating table, when leaders change their positions on trade with the politics of the moment, and that’s why we need a president who will listen to Main Street – not just Wall Street; a president who will stand with workers not just when it’s easy, but when it’s hard.”
Obama’s populism delivered Democrats a huge electoral victory that year, including in major industrial swing states. But as president, he quickly betrayed his promises to create fairer trade policies, instead championing more Nafta-style trade deals – thus giving Trump a political weapon to bludgeon Democrats with and win his first presidential term.
Nearly a decade later, Trump no doubt hopes his tariffs will recreate his 2016 magic, goading his opponents into defending the trade status quo while he bills himself as a populist.
Democrats don’t have to take the bait – they can and should hammer his economic record and his particular use of tariffs, but they also must finally break with the free-trade orthodoxy that has electorally devastated their party and economically destroyed so much of America.
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David Sirota is a Guardian US columnist and an award-winning investigative journalist. He is an editor at large at Jacobin, and the founder of the Lever. He served as Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign speechwriter.
