Trump's 2.0 Trade Policy: All Tariffs, No Brakes

Plus: How Biden should keep it simple from here on out.

Happy Juneteenth! A bit of very cool housekeeping at the jump: Sam Stein, formerly of Politico and the Daily Beast, is climbing aboard The Bulwark as our new managing editor.

Sam is a pro’s pro and we’re so stoked to get to work with him.

“I’m beyond excited to help them grow even more,” Sam tweeted this morning. “You all HAVE to sign up, it is IMPERATIVE.”

And we’ll be honest, we couldn’t agree more:

Let’s get to it.

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Former U.S. President Donald Trump. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.)

Trade Wars Are Good And Easy To Win

In yesterday’s not-to-be-missed Press Pass newsletter, Joe Perticone drilled down on Sen. Marco Rubio’s incredible 180-degree turn from 2016 free-trade stalwart to 2024 protectionist cheerleader. 

“The loudest Republican opponents of Trump’s tariffs, such as Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), are no longer in Congress,” Joe wrote. “The ones who are still around have completely gone back on their beliefs and have thrown in with what they once thought was incoherent and dangerous.”

On trade, as on so many other things: Americans who lived through the first Trump term, during which he occasionally butted heads with his own party on policy, are walking around with a seriously miscalibrated sense of what a second Trump term would look like on policy now that he has utterly reshaped the party into a vessel for his own mercurial will.

Economic policy, as a rule, is about managing tradeoffs. But Trump has never believed tariffs involve tradeoffs. In his mind, tariffs are simple: the more the United States slaps on other countries, the better we perform economically. It’s literally just free money, and the only reason not to push the pedal to the metal is out of some goody-two-shoes sense of global noblesse oblige. But nice try, global leaders: Trump is too smart to get suckered by that sort of argument! America First!

It’s not like this belief of Trump’s hasn’t been clear all along. I was writing about it in these very pages back in 2019, when Trump was ramping up his trade war with China. “Tariffs will bring in FAR MORE wealth to our Country than even a phenomenal deal of the traditional kind,” Trump tweeted that May. “Also, much easier & quicker to do.” 

But that was an environment where Trump was still, by and large, in tension with most of his party’s electeds in Congress. It was also an environment where deep tensions between free traders like Larry Kudlow and protectionists like Peter Navarro ran straight through Trump’s own administration. 

If Trump gets back in office, those mediating forces will be gone, gone, gone—and who knows how far down the free-money tariffs rabbit hole he’ll go? He’s already proposed enormous tariff increases far beyond anything he did in his first term in the form of a 10 percent across-the-board import duty. And in a meeting with GOP lawmakers last week, he went much farther still, suggesting the U.S. could raise tariffs high enough to fund the entire federal government. After all, why not? It’s literally free money!

Might such a policy have economic tradeoffs, one might wonder? Might it provoke retaliatory tariffs from other nations, raising costs on everybody and grinding global commerce to a crawl, resulting in economic pain for consumers far beyond the benefits brought in by the tariffs themselves? 

If you, like basically every economist working, are wondering any of that, the Republican Party of today has a simple answer: Shut up, commie. “The notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party,” RNC spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Bloomberg this week.

One awkward thing about Trump discourse today is that all the vile things about him—his naked authoritarian aspirations, his open thirst for vengeance against his enemies, his total disdain for strictures on his behavior like “our laws” or “the Constitution”—suck up so much oxygen that it can be hard to make space to talk about the ways in which he’s merely very stupid. 

But that only goes while he’s out of power. If he gets back into office, the stupid will start making itself felt plenty quick.

—Andrew Egger

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K.I.S.S.

Everyone remembers James Carville’s famous line from 1992: “It’s the economy, stupid.” But in fact, the stay-on-message sign Carville hung in Bill Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Little Rock had three themes: 

1. Change vs. more of the same

2. The economy, stupid

3. Don’t forget health care

Good campaigns aren’t quite as single-minded as people sometimes think.

But they can’t be too complicated, either. A good campaign can and should target lots of groups and sub-groups with specific arguments. But it also needs a basic simplicity and clarity of message and theme.

I’m sure the Biden campaign understands this perfectly well, and in fact they’ve been moving in this direction. Biden is a better candidate today than he was three months ago, and the campaign is a better campaign.

But it’s time to take it up a notch. It’s time to further simplify and clarify.

Here’s my modest attempt to help. Here are three themes that might focus the Biden campaign.

1. It’s Trump, stupid.

Biden’s the incumbent. If you’re working for Biden, you want to praise Biden. If you’re Biden, you want to defend and explain your record. You want credit for your achievements. Which are real!

But this shouldn’t be your focus. The American people have seen Biden as president for three and a half years, and their judgment seems pretty settled. On March 7, when the general election campaign really began, Biden had a 38.1 percent approval and 56.3 percent disapproval rating, according to the averages at 538.com. Today Biden’s at 38.4 percent approval, 56.1 percent disapproval. Those numbers have barely moved. I suspect they’re not going to move much over the next few months.

Nor are people going to be suddenly convinced it’s morning in America.

But they can be made more worried than they are now about what Trump might do over the next four years. And I think those worries fall into two basic categories.

2. Trump and his supporters are extremists.

This is basically the successful 2022 playbook from Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The GOP candidates there were shown to be extreme—and Democrats turned out against them, joined by some mainstream Republicans and ex-Republicans. These Republican candidates were election deniers and abortion banners and chaos producers. Trump is all three, and more.

Take abortion, an issue that has mattered over the last couple of years to voters, and where the GOP is now outside the mainstream. As A.B. Stoddard explained yesterday, Biden can explain not just that it was a Trump Court that gave us Dobbs. He can also explain that if MAGA has its way, Dobbs is just the beginning and that if Trump controls the executive branch and can make more court appointments, far more in the way of abortion bans and restrictions and assaults on contraception and IVF are in store.

By the way, Biden should assume Trump embraces every scary position his supporters have expressed until Trump explicitly says otherwise. And not even then, perhaps: Will Trump check the extremists who will staff his administration and who are committed to work against our freedoms?

3. Trump’s for the rich.

Democrats oddly underestimate the power of bread and butter, New Deal/Great Society, semi-class-warfare type issues. And there are plenty of them to be exploited this year. For all his fake populist talk, Trump is a caricature of a pro-wealthy, pro-corporate Republican. His tax cuts are mostly for the rich. His deregulation is for the powerful corporations. He’s against capping drug prices. His tariffs would be a massive tax increase for the middle class. And so on. Biden needs to embrace his inner FDR.

I’m sure these suggestions can be improved on. But the key, I think, is to understand that successful presidential campaigns have clear themes and simple messages. Clarity and simplicity are all.

—William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• North Korea’s Kim declares ‘full support’ for Russian war in Ukraine: Washington Post

• A massacre threatens Darfur, again: New York Times

• White House baffled by Netanyahu’s claim Biden is withholding weapons: Axios

• Witness tells House Ethics Committee that Matt Gaetz paid her for sex: ABC News

• ‘I love Milwaukee’: Trump tries to make up with the ‘horrible’ city: Politico

• Tight Virginia GOP contest between Bob Good and John McGuire too close to call: Fox News

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Quick Hits

1. The rot runs deep

Yesterday, we gave you a quick preview of last night’s primary in Virginia’s 5th District, which pitted Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Bob Good against a Trump-endorsed challenger in state Sen. John McGuire. That contest is turning out to be a real nailbiter, with just a few hundred votes separating the two candidates, a few provisional ballots left to be tallied, and a likely recount awaiting on the other side. 

McGuire, however, is already declaring victory. “It is an honor to be your Republican nominee,” he told supporters at his watch party last night. Meanwhile, MAGA supporters on social media had begun to chatter that they were trying to steal another election on Good’s behalf. It appears that the knee-jerk MAGA reaction of claiming fraud following any other result than a landslide victory for a favored candidate now extends even to Republican primaries. 

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2. So long to the Say Hey Kid

We lost one of the all-time greats last night: Willie Mays is dead at the age of 93. George Will’s Washington Post remembrance is worth a read: 

In the 1962 Yankees-Giants World Series, the Yankees’ Clete Boyer hit a line drive to right-center. “As the ball left the bat, I said to myself two things. The first thing I said was ‘Hello double!’ The second thing I said was, ‘Oh, sh--, he’s out there.’”

Willie Howard Mays Jr., who died Tuesday at age 93, was the archetypal “five tool player” who could run, catch, throw, hit and hit for power. Said his first major league manager, Leo Durocher, “If he could cook, I’d marry him.” Said actress Tallulah Bankhead, “There have only been two authentic geniuses in the world, William Shakespeare and Willie Mays.”

“I can’t hit the pitching up there,” said Mays, a scared minor leaguer, in 1951, speaking by phone to Durocher, who would soon manage him. “Do you think you can hit .2-f---ing-70 for me?” Durocher asked of the player who was hitting .477 in Minneapolis. He could.

A few weeks later, the Giants sent Mays — who was 0-12 in major league at bats — to the plate to face, 60 feet 6 inches away, Warren Spahn, who was en route to becoming the winningest left-hander in baseball history. Mays hit the first of his 660 home runs. After the game, Spahn said, “For the first 60 feet it was a helluva pitch.” Years later, he said: “We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I’d only struck him out.”

Read the whole thing.

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