[CTC] Trump’s Trade War Is A Political Trap For Democrats

[Arthur Stamoulis]

*Trump’s Trade War Is A Political Trap For Democrats*
By David Sirota

To tariff or not to tariff? Today’s tweet-length political discourse
pretends this is a binary choice. President Donald Trump has pitched
across-the-board import levies as a panacea to rebuild American
manufacturing, while Democrats insist that Trump’s proposals are an attempt
to crash the economy, and that their party should tout their 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
reshore factories and other capital-intensive operations to produce goods
in the United States. 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.

Taken together, Trump’s approach is more a power grab than a trade policy —
one forcing his erratic decisions on America without the affirmative
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 spike 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 (health care, retraining, pensions,
etc.) other trade-exposed countries provide. Here in the United States,
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 probably
shouldn’t be solely depending on other countries for.

Scoffing at such concerns, Hawaii’s Democratic Sen. 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 reshore 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,” Pennsylvania
Rep. 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 Gov. 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,
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 show a majority of Americans are
dissatisfied with how Trump is using tariffs and how he is managing the
economy — and Democrats are smart to hone 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, 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 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.

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826
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