The Democrats Won’t Acknowledge the Scale of Trump’s Tariff Mess

Two days after President Donald Trump’s shambolic “Liberation Day” announcement, which set off a full-scale economic meltdown, House Democrats released a video response. It was oddly sedate, almost academic in its nuance. The video featured Representative Chris Deluzio, from western Pennsylvania, who calmly intoned, “A wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom” and “Tariffs are a powerful tool. They can be used strategically, or they can be misused.”

As the American public was screaming, “Please, God, no!” the Democrats were calmly whispering, “Yes, but.”

The loudest and most unequivocal response is not always the shrewdest political message. What’s strange, however, is that the Democrats have responded so coyly at this moment, when Trump has exposed himself politically and committed what could well become the defining failure of his second term. The plunging stock market threatens to unglue the Republican coalition, as the economy teeters and the once-unified conservative-media infrastructure has erupted into civil war. Why is Trump facing sharper political attacks from his allies than he is from the putative opposition?

[Read: Trump is willing to take the pain]

The answer is that Democrats are following a decade-old strategy designed to co-opt Trump’s appeal to working-class voters by backing away from the party’s general support for free trade under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. What they seem not to have figured out yet is that Trump himself is undermining the basis for their tariff-friendly strategy by illustrating the harm of trade barriers in the most vivid and unforgettable way.

At the tail end of the Obama administration, when Democrats felt the winds of history at their back, numerous progressive interest groups pushed the party to adopt more liberal positions. Unions had long opposed free trade and blamed it for declining wages in the manufacturing sector. Seeking stronger support from organized labor, Hillary Clinton, the party’s 2016 nominee, came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Obama administration’s attempt to assemble a trade bloc that could counter China. (The deal failed under bipartisan opposition.) Joe Biden followed the same course, closely aligning his administration with positions advocated by labor, including on trade. Biden kept in place tariffs imposed by Trump in his first term and declined to revive TPP or pursue any other free-trade deals.

Not all Democrats are invested in maintaining this position. But many are, especially those representing heavily unionized districts or belonging to the party’s progressive wing. They are eager to prevent their party from straightforwardly opposing Trump’s protectionist lurch—a reaction that voters might construe as a defense of free trade.

But the tempered stance that Deluzio and other official Democratic Party messengers are taking is not likely to age well, for two main reasons. The first is that Trump’s tariffs are having highly visible, highly damaging effects on the economy. Forecasters have lowered their expectations for economic growth while raising forecasts of the inflation rate, and now give roughly even odds of a recession this year. Slowdowns and recessions happen periodically, but they almost never follow directly from a contested policy choice made by the president.

[Annie Lowrey: Here are the places where the recession has already begun]

Such an outcome will change minds even in areas where anti-trade sentiment runs deep. The Wall Street Journal recently published a detailed report from Michigan, where voters have long blamed free-trade agreements for the shrinking economic footprint of the state’s automobile sector. Voters there by and large sympathize with Trump’s goals and are even willing to endure some temporary hardship in order to restore an industrial golden age. Yet the same story shows that Trump’s tariffs are having the opposite effect. The American auto industry is deeply integrated in foreign supply chains, including networks of companies in Canada and Mexico that provide component parts that Trump is now making unaffordable. Michiganders are coming into contact with the cold reality that their belief that NAFTA is the root cause of Detroit’s decline is simply incorrect.

If the auto industry continues suffering, as seems likely, will Michiganders still support tariffs in a year or two? Will other blue-collar workers maintain their beliefs about free trade after Trump’s tariffs harm American industry by driving up the cost of its inputs, and retaliatory tariffs shut down export markets? Trump is giving Americans a more effective lesson in the virtues of free trade than if he’d assigned the entire population to read Adam Smith.

The second problem for Democrats is that their base is highly energized to oppose Trump generally, which makes their equivocal trade messaging sound tone-deaf. Senator Bernie Sanders has endeared himself to the so-called resistance by giving Democrats the red-meat denunciations of Trump they crave from their leaders. Yet his critique of Trump’s catastrophic global trade war is like mushy oatmeal. “As someone who helped lead the effort against disastrous, unfettered free trade deals with China, Mexico and other low-wage countries, I understand that we need trade policies that benefit American workers, not just the CEOs of large corporations,” he declared in a statement. “And that includes targeted tariffs which can be a powerful tool in stopping corporations from outsourcing American jobs and factories abroad. Bottom line: We need a rational, well-thought-out and fair trade policy.”

To be sure, Sanders’s principles are his principles, and it’s difficult to blame a politician for holding to a subtle position rather than giving in to the anger of the crowd. But that hesitation is less admirable when the principles themselves are shaky. And Trump’s embrace of ruinous tariffs, which have tanked the stock market and infuriated most of his wealthy supporters, have undermined the whole basis of the Vermont senator’s analysis. “What we have today,” Sanders has been saying, “is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires.” Of and by, certainly. But for? Most of the billionaires are begging Trump to reverse course and have found that they have no more influence than the proletarian masses.

At some point, Trump might backtrack on his trade war or pivot to a completely different set of policy obsessions. Perhaps by 2028, Democratic voters will be focused on bringing back Social Security or ending the war in Greenland. But to the extent that the tariffs define Trump’s economic mismanagement, a modulated stance on tariffs is going to become awkward for Democrats.

[Rogé Karma: Trump’s most inexplicable decision yet]

Before the Iraq War started, Democrats were internally divided over the merits of using the threat of force to compel Saddam Hussein to cooperate completely with arms inspections. Once the war devolved into a quagmire, the hawkish position disintegrated. The tail end of George W. Bush’s administration was not a great time for Democrats trying to argue, “I supported an Iraq War, but not this Iraq War.” Pro-tariff Democrats might find themselves in a similar spot.

Not long ago, the political logic of rejecting free trade made a certain degree of sense for Democrats. But events have a way of changing political logic. A trade-skeptical message that worked perfectly well five or 10 years ago is going to sound awfully out of touch after Trump is done turning tariffs into a synonym for catastrophic ineptitude.