US President Donald Trump’s focus on “reciprocal tariffs,” rather than balanced trade, does not suggest that his administration intends to use tariffs strategically to cut the country’s chronic trade deficit. But Democrats must stop dismissing outright a policy tool that they themselves embraced under Biden.
WASHINGTON, DC – As the clock ticks down to President Donald Trump’s planned imposition of “reciprocal tariffs” on US trade partners on April 2, Trump’s opponents have been attacking tariffs as a price-raising menace, rather than indicting Trump’s two-month master class on how to misuse a potentially effective policy tool.
Many Democrats seem to have forgotten that President Joe Biden increased the size and scope of the first Trump administration’s tariffs on imports from China. And while Biden raised tariffs in 2024, inflation still started to decline – just as it remained flat after Trump tariffed Chinese imports worth $350 billion starting in 2018.
Biden’s combination of tariffs and industrial policies to boost demand for domestic goods and incentivize investment delivered the manufacturing boom that Trump keeps promising. By 2023, the United States had the highest rate of investment in factories in 30 years. Perversely, instead of trumpeting this achievement, the Democrats’ 2024 presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, attacked “Trump’s tariffs” in a campaign that lost a majority of working-class voters.
Now, instead of attacking Trump’s misguided notion that tariffs alone can revive American manufacturing, and highlighting his plan to kill the industrial policies that will deliver new manufacturing jobs (for which Trump will claim credit), Democrats have doubled down.
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