Why Trump Can’t Quit Tariffs

With the possible exception of his pas de deux with Vladimir Putin, nothing about the Trump presidency inspires so much public resistance from his fellow Republicans as the president’s zest for tariffs and trade wars.

That resistance only goes so far, taking the form of nonbinding resolutions and verbal scoldings and sighs of relief when, as he did this week with the European Union, Trump temporarily chooses jaw-jaw over war-war. But in a party so otherwise beholden to its leader, anything that gets conservative senators accusing their president of running “a Soviet type of economy” (as Ron Johnson of Wisconsin put it this week, attacking the president’s jury-rigged bailout for farmers hurt by his tariffs) counts as a dramatic fissure in the facade of MAGA unity.

The critics’ argument is principled — their vision of conservatism has free trade as one of its pillars — but also practical. Trump’s handling of the economy polls at 50 percent in the latest Wall Street Journal poll; his handling of trade in the same survey is underwater. His otherwise-unpopular presidency is floated on jobs and economic growth, and trade wars can be bad for both. So why not just drop the mercantilism and let the good times roll?

The answer gets at the dilemma of the Republican establishment in the age of Trump. The party’s senators generally have a better grasp of facts than the occupant of the White House, but the president often has a better grasp of politics. And the political truth is that Trump probably needs his tariffs, needs his trade war, to have any chance of re-election — precisely because it’s the only remaining economic issue where he’s stuck to his campaign promises and hasn’t just deferred to traditional Republican priorities.

Those campaign promises, as everyone is well aware, were generally more populist than the official GOP agenda: Trump promised middle-class tax cuts and a generous Obamacare alternative, he stiff-armed the entitlement reformers and talked up infrastructure spending, and he railed against free trade deals with every other breath. And that populist branding was crucial to the electoral trade he made, which ceded a share of business-friendly suburbanites to the Democrats but reaped a crucial group of erstwhile Obama voters, mostly white and working class and concentrated in the Rust Belt and upper Midwest states, who ultimately handed Trump the presidency.

That was the story of 2016; the story since, though, is one of reversion to the older political order. Because Trump has mostly governed as a conventional Republican, a certain kind of conventional Republican has come home to him, keeping his support stable in the states that the Romney-Ryan ticket won easily in 2012. But for the same reason — because the infrastructure plan never materialized and the tax cut was a great whopping favor to corporate interests and the health care repeal-and-replace effort was a misbegotten flop — the swing voters he needs to hold the Midwest are nowdrifting away.

And because Trump naturally alienates women and can’t make a gesture of outreach to blacks or Hispanics without stepping on it with bigotry the next day, he doesn’t really have another path back to the White House if those Obama-Trump voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio go Democratic or stay home. Certainly the Republicans criticizing him on trade aren’t offering him such a path: Their overall vision is the same tired GOP orthodoxy that went down to defeat in 2008 and 2012, and that Trump himself crushed in the last primary campaign.

So the fact that Trump’s tariffs are generally unpopular, even in Midwestern states, doesn’t matter politically nearly as much as their potential appeal to the narrow slice of blue-collar swing voters that he needs if he’s going to be re-elected. And their potential cost, for now, can be swallowed up by general economic growth or dealt with via cynical payoffs; if the general economic growth itself goes away, well, then Trump isn’t getting re-elected anyway.

If you expect this to lead to good policymaking, you haven’t been paying attention to how this White House operates. But the fact that Trump has this particular incentive to focus on free trade’s Midwestern losers is not itself a bad thing. One of the strongest arguments for the countermajoritarian element in the Electoral College is that it provides a point of leverage for regional populations that have suffered particularly at the hands of an overreaching bipartisan consensus. And the bipartisan consensus on trade with China really is ripe for an updating, since the domestic costs have been higher and geopolitical benefits more meager than the expert class predicted 20 years ago.

Free-trade Republicans have every right to reject the Trumpian alternative to that consensus. But their whingeing would be easier to take if they hadn’t discouraged Trump from every other attempt to make good on his populist pledges. He knows better than they do how he got elected; if protectionism is the only promise he can keep, it’s no surprise he’s keeping it.