The Terrible Arguments Coming from Trump’s Tariff Defenders
Markets have swooned and spiked and swooned again as President Donald Trump has alternately imposed and then paused large new tariffs. What has stayed consistent through every announcement is the dismal quality of the public arguments for these spasms of protectionism.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has run through many of the worst ones. “A lot of our trading partners, including some of our allies, have not been good partners,” he told Tucker Carlson. “If tariffs are so bad, why do they have them?” Governments throughout history have pursued policies that impoverish their people. Many countries, including our own, have recently had high inflation. If it’s so bad, why has it been so widespread?
But Bessent’s point is even weaker than that. Even before this year’s tariffs, many countries — including Canada, the United Kingdom and Vietnam — had lower trade barriers than the U.S. Trump has put tariffs on all of them anyway. No developed country has tariffs as high as the ones we now have, even under the latest plan announced on Wednesday. If Trump restarts the paused tariffs, that gap will get bigger.
In the same interview, Bessent also dismissed concerns that Trump’s tariffs have pummeled stocks on the ground that “the top 10 percent of Americans own 88 percent of equities.” It’s certainly true that wealthy people have most of the wealth. Gallup reports, however, that 65 percent of people in its middle-income category — making $40,000 to $100,000 — own stocks, either directly or through their retirement plans. It’s probably not much comfort to them to hear that billionaires are losing more money to the tariffs than they are.
The commentator Batya Ungar-Sargon suggested on Fox Business that Wall Street was, in “utterly despicable” fashion, trying to force Trump to abandon “the American worker” — an analysis that the White House amplified on social media. On this theory, investors around the world acted, in concert, to deplete their own wealth by trillions of dollars in order to achieve a shared political objective. An alternative theory is that the tariffs reduced investors’ expectations of future corporate profits and prices moved accordingly. I’ll trust readers to judge which explanation has more plausibility.
Fox News tried out several other defenses of the tariffs. It published an article theorizing that Trump’s tariffs are a “calculated” ploy to create global economic uncertainty that would cause investors worldwide to buy U.S. assets and consequently lower our interest rates. At least one Republican congressman swallowed this story, but interest rates have refused to cooperate — so much so that Trump cited the “queasy” bond market in suspending some of his tariffs. If interest rates decline as a result of the tariffs, though, it still might not be good news, since it could be a side effect of lower economic growth.
On air, Fox Business anchor David Asman played on nostalgia. The tariffs, he said, are an attempt to bring back a world where a man could provide for his family while his wife stayed home, the way his father could in the 1950s. That’s still possible, though, if the family wants a 1950s standard of living. But dual-income households are generally going to make more than single-income households, and there is no reason to expect tariffs to bring them much closer to parity.
Tariffs cannot even be counted on to increase manufacturing jobs. Trump’s first-term tariffs appear to have reduced them both because they increased the cost of manufacturing inputs and because they led to retaliatory tariffs against us. Trump adviser Peter Navarro even alluded to this problem when he accused Elon Musk, whose company Tesla already produces cars and batteries in the U.S., of opposing tariffs to head off a spike in supply chain costs.
Some Republicans, perhaps aware that defending the substance of Trump’s trade policy exceeds their rhetorical gifts, have opted instead to base their argument on Trump the man. “You have to trust the president’s instincts on the economy,” says House Speaker Mike Johnson (Louisiana), because his leadership yielded “the greatest economy in the history of the world” during the pre-covid years of his first term.
That assessment overstates how much influence presidents usually have over the economy: Those early Trump years largely continued the economic trends of the late Obama years. More important, the average tariff rate in Trump’s first term was much lower than it is now. If his first-term policies were really so helpful, maybe we should get them back. Johnson and his congressional colleagues could even insist on it, through legislation.
Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, opted to pretend that critics of the tariffs aren’t patriots. “America is not an economic zone,” he said on X. “It’s not a strip mall with an airport attached. It’s a nation. It’s a people. It’s our home. For too long, our leaders have been selling our country off for parts.”
America is a home. It would be a happier home if we didn’t slap taxes on Americans for buying coffee, or force American companies that rely on imported steel to shrink.
We now have a 90-day pause on some of the tariffs. If the administration won’t use the time to find better policies, let its apologists at least use it to find better talking points.