Why Trump Can’t Quit Tariffs
Because his other populist promises are broken, he has to keep this one.
.. His otherwise-unpopular presidency is floated on jobs and economic growth, and trade wars can be bad for both. So why not just drop the mercantilism and let the good times roll?.. The party’s senators generally have a better grasp of facts than the occupant of the White House, but the president often has a better grasp of politics. And the political truth is that Trump probably needs his tariffs, needs his trade war, to have any chance of re-election — precisely because it’s the only remaining economic issue where he’s stuck to his campaign promises and hasn’t just deferred to traditional Republican priorities... Those campaign promises, as everyone is well aware, were generally more populist than the official G.O.P. agenda: Trump promised
- middle-class tax cuts and a
- generous Obamacare alternative,
- he stiff-armed the entitlement reformers and
- talked up infrastructure spending, and he railed
- against free trade deals with every other breath.
And that populist branding was crucial to the electoral trade he made, which ceded a share of business-friendly suburbanites to the Democrats but reaped a crucial group of erstwhile Obama voters, mostly white and working class and concentrated in the Rust Belt and upper Midwest states, who ultimately handed Trump the presidency.
.. That was the story of 2016; the story since, though, is one of reversion to the older political order. Because Trump has mostly governed as a conventional Republican, a certain kind of conventional Republican has come home to him, keeping his support stable in the states that the Romney-Ryan ticket won easily in 2012. But for the same reason — because the infrastructure plan never materialized and the tax cut was a great whopping favor to corporate interests and the health care repeal-and-replace effort was a misbegotten flop — the swing voters he needs to hold the Midwest are now drifting away... Certainly the Republicans criticizing him on trade aren’t offering him such a path: Their overall vision is the same tired G.O.P. orthodoxy that went down to defeat in 2008 and 2012, and that Trump himself crushed in the last primary campaign... the fact that Trump’s tariffs are generally unpopular, even in Midwestern states, doesn’t matter politically nearly as much as their potential appeal to the narrow slice of blue-collar swing voters that he needs if he’s going to be re-elected. And their potential cost, for now, can be swallowed up by general economic growth or dealt with via cynical payoffs.. One of the strongest arguments for the countermajoritarian element in the Electoral College is that it provides a point of leverage for regional populations that have suffered particularly at the hands of an overreaching bipartisan consensus.