I’ve now seen a couple articles claiming that Democrats are missing an opportunity with Trump’s tariff catastrophe or generally trying to thread some moron needle over whether they’re good or bad. Jon Chait did it here. Now Lauren Egan has written a similar piece in The Bulwark. Both these pieces seem vastly overstated to me. I’m pretty immersed in Democratic voices and almost everything I hear is that Trump tariffs are a catastrophe. But to the extent there is some hedging from a few Democrats, I don’t think there’s even any real issue here to hedge, not over anything actually recognizable as trade policy. Joe Biden embraced what used to be the anathema of industrial policy. He also employed targeted tariffs. In fact he had a pretty all-policy, holistic focus on re-shoring specific industries that are either particularly high-value in economic terms or are tied to critical technologies with national security dependencies. Those policies were very broadly embraced by Democrats.
You could imagine another political world in which Democrats were divided over trade — Clintonite free trade vs Bidenite industrial policy. But that’s just not any universe we’re in. Donald Trump is lighting the global economy on fire through an indiscriminate and draconian application of tariffs which no economist anywhere on the ideological spectrum thinks makes sense. I don’t think this is an overstatement. He’s literally managed to take what was pretty much a goldilocks economy — at least by every conventional measure that matters until 2022 — and send it barreling toward recession, while pouring gasoline onto the remaining embers of inflation, and all in under three months.
It’s just the simplest thing in the world to say this idiot doesn’t know anything about how to manage the economy; he’s on an ego trip that even his billionaire friends think is crazy; and he’s a threat to the economic security of every American family. The issue here isn’t really about tariffs any more than DOGE is about making government work more efficiently.
This isn’t complicated. “This is insane; he’ll kill us all, including your 401k; and he’ll make inflation worse than it’s ever been.” End of message. It’s really not complicated. You can say that very easily without anyone thinking you’re Joe NAFTA. End of story.
