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TRUMP’S TRADE WAR IS A POLITICAL TRAP FOR DEMOCRATS  
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David Sirota
April 15, 2025
The Lever
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_ The president’s reckless tariffs are designed to goad his
opponents into touting free trade and scoffing at the working class. _


, AP Photo/Aaron Favila, Pool via AP

 

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
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and vanilla
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to various rare earth minerals
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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
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decisions on America without the affirmative consent of Congress. The
strategy allows him to reprise his practice
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levies that hit political opponents while granting lucrative
exemptions to reward big donors
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and powerful industries
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The likely result: unnecessarily higher prices, industry-crippling
retaliation
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an uncertain policy environment that paralyzes investment, ever-more
rampant corruption, and few enduring benefits for the domestic
macroeconomy. 

That said, liberals’
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suggestion [[link removed]] 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
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and millions of factory jobs
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— an economic apocalypse that coincided with an unprecedented spike
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in suicides, drug overdoses, and other “deaths of despair.”

For much of the working class, wage and job losses were not offset
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financial benefits of cheaper imported goods. While wealthy Davos Men
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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
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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
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his own party’s use of tariffs to reshore American jobs. Similarly,
some liberal
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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
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and medicine
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to military
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and energy
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equipment to the computer chips
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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
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But polling [[link removed]]
cited by media
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libertarians
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Democratic TV influencers
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of this hypothesis actually illustrates the opposite
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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
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just before Trump’s second term. 

Once a doctrinaire free trader
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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
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During Biden’s term, the United States added more than 700,000
manufacturing jobs, far outpacing
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Trump’s first term. Many of the jobs and factory investments
occurred in Republican-dominated
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states
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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
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in an op-ed.

Deluzio, who represents the kind of swing district Democrats often
lose, added [[link removed]] 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
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of the most recent Democratic White House, Deluzio was promptly
dogpiled
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liberals and so-called Never Trump Republicans — some
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him to be primaried and thrown out of Congress. 

Those criticizing Deluzio, Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen
Whitmer
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and other Democrats
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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
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with unions and pushed NAFTA, which delivered Democrats a jackpot
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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
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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
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and Democrats are smart to hone in on that line of criticism. 

But data also show that for the first time in generations
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Republicans have equaled
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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
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United Automobile Workers president Shawn Fain summed up the
discordant political moment. His union endorsed
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former Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, and Fain has
critiqued
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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.

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“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
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“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
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betrayed [[link removed]] his promises
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to create fairer trade policies, instead championing more NAFTA-style
trade deals — thus giving Trump a political weapon
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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.

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* Tariffs; US Trade Policy; NAFTA; Trump's Tariffs;
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