Dems Can Work With Trump—But Not on the Plans He’s Outlined
Mr. President, you can implement high tariffs and conduct mass deportations, or you can make life better for Americans. You can’t do both.
WELCOME BACK TO WASHINGTON, President Trump. You’ve got an important choice to make.
The American people elected you in November largely because they’re tired of the high inflation and high prices that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. They think groceries, medications, and rent are too expensive. It’s why poll after poll shows that the economy and inflation were top issues on voters’ minds last year.
Today, average prices are 22.5 percent higher than they were before the pandemic. Stabilizing the costs Americans pay ought to be Washington’s number-one priority this year. If you have good ideas about how we can do this, I want to work with you on them. After all, the idea that food, clothing, and housing should be affordable isn’t a Democratic idea or a Republican one. Fight for smart ways to tackle inflation, and we’ll all work to make that happen.
If you want to lower costs for Americans, however, you’re not going to do it with some of the ideas you ran on.
The two policies you advocated most consistently on the campaign trail were your proposals for widespread tariffs and mass deportations. But these won’t help Americans deal with everyday costs—at all. They’ll actually raise prices.
Let’s start with tariffs. To be clear, strategic, targeted tariffs can be a crucial tool for accomplishing some policy goals. Both parties in Congress will work with you to implement tariffs on cheap, high-pollution steel and concrete that undercut our own manufacturers and our environmental standards. Lawmakers will also be eager to help if you want to wield tariffs to retaliate against unfair trade practices. Unfortunately, these sorts of goals don’t seem to be what you have in mind.
At different times, you’ve threatened across-the-board 10 to 20 percent tariffs on every one of our trading partners, 25 percent tariffs on goods coming from Mexico and Canada, and 60 percent or higher tariffs on goods from China. China, Mexico, and Canada: These are our top three trading partners. These proposals also don’t appear to be negotiating tactics; after all, you said just two weeks ago that reports your tariffs were being scaled back were “Fake News.”
These tariffs are a tax—one that our citizens will be paying. From clothes to furniture, groceries to electronics, across-the-board tariffs will make prices higher for working Americans. They raise the cost of imports, so companies will initially pay more to bring their goods into the United States. But these importers aren’t obligated to eat these costs. Experience shows they’ll pass them on in the form of higher prices.
Institute tariffs today, and American consumers—most of whom are still recovering from high post-pandemic prices—will face sticker shock tomorrow. It will be hard to lower the cost of groceries if you put tariffs on half the fruit we eat. Our country needs to build more affordable homes to lower the cost of housing, but nearly half of the lumber and wood products we import that we need for new home construction comes from Canada. The Peterson Institute estimates that your tariffs will cost the typical American household more than $2,600 a year.
These tariffs will also cripple your efforts to bring jobs and investment back to the United States. American-made cars are built using parts and raw materials imported from around the world, and so are American-made semiconductors, electronics, and machine tools. Putting tariffs on the raw materials those industries need will raise the cost of American production and make it more likely those businesses move these jobs overseas. This is also before the retaliatory tariffs come—and they will. When our trading partners fight back, we will struggle to sell our goods overseas, hurting our farmers and killing good-paying export-oriented manufacturing jobs. We know this will happen because it happened during your last administration.
LET’S SWITCH GEARS TO YOUR PLAN for mass deportations. There’s no question that illegal migration at our southern border is a problem. More resources for border patrol agents and immigration courts to speed up the processing and deportation of dangerous criminals is an important goal, and Democrats like me will support that.
However, you seem serious about trying to deport every undocumented immigrant, even if it takes mobilizing the National Guard and the military. The United States already faces a labor shortage, and roughly one in twenty workers here in our country is undocumented. Many of them work in areas like agriculture, construction, and hospitality that are most sensitive to inflation. How are you going to keep the cost of food down when you’ve deported half of our farmworkers?
The upshot of these policies you ran on isn’t lower inflation, but exploding costs. Even close allies of yours like Elon Musk are admitting that these policies will lead to markets crashing in an economic “storm.”
All this brings us back to the choice you have to make. Do you want to deliver on the economic promises you made to the American people—that you will give them low inflation, a strong economy, a secure border? Or do you want to stick with the universal tariffs and deportation of tens of millions of people instead? Ease off those policies, and you might still make those positive conditions a reality. Democrats will even help you do it.
If you pursue your campaign proposals for tariffs and deportations to their fullest extent, however, there’s a real risk you’ll wreak economic havoc on average Americans, weakening us at home and abroad. No one wants that. We should work together to prevent it.
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