what strikes me is not just the overwhelming view on the part of economists that the Trump tariffs are a bad idea, but the fact that the tariffs are a political dud. That is, there doesn’t seem to be any large constituency demanding a confrontation with our trading partners.
Who wants a trade war? Not corporate interests — stocks fall whenever trade rhetoric heats up and rise when it cools down. Not farmers, hit hard by retaliatory foreign tariffs. Not working-class voters in the Rust Belt states that were crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory: A plurality of likely voters in those states say that tariffs hurt their families. Belligerence on trade, it turns out, is pretty much a one-man affair: It’s what Trump wants, and that’s about it.
True, given how U.S. trade law works, a president can have a trade war (as opposed to, say, a border wall) without congressional approval. But what’s Trump’s motivation? Well, he made trade his signature issue, and he wants to claim that he’s achieved big things. It’s telling that even when he leaves policy mostly the same he insists on a name change. That way he can go around pretending that the “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement” — or as Pelosi calls it, the “trade agreement formerly known as Prince” — is completely different from Nafta, and that he had a big win.
So major affairs of state are being decided not by the national interest, nor even by the interests of major groups within the nation, but by the financial interests and/or ego of the man in the White House. Is America amazing, or what? |
