This week, I graded the Trump administration’s trade war against five of its own promises — increased leverage, balancing the trade deficit, bringing factories home, increasing national security, and bringing in revenue. They received straight Fs.
You can catch up here:
Now it’s time for The Professor Is In, where I sit down with my producer Augusta to answer audience questions.
Why are Trump’s tariffs so unpopular?
One thing Augusta asked me about: why so many people hate these tariffs. Our comments were filled with people expressing outrage about the policy, and these aren’t just people who have spent years reading economics papers about deadweight loss. One Pew poll from this February found that 60% of Americans disapproved of the tariff increases — including 28% of Republicans. That’s a notably high rate of disapproval, and it’s one that deserves a closer look.
Tariffs have historically been pitched as a populist, pro-worker policy. And they used to be a Democrat position, not a Republican one. Politicians would go to a union hall and say: we’re going to put tariffs on China, we’re going to save American jobs, and China is going to pay for it.
I know because I’ve been the nerd who had to sit in the back of meetings with a whiteboard, sketching supply and demand and coloring in deadweight loss triangles, saying “Well actually, this isn’t going to do what you want it to…”
That is a very hard argument to make. I think the economics of tariffs is wrong, but if you’re a remotely skilled politician, you can sell them. Historically that’s exactly what’s happened.
This time, nobody even tried
What’s different is that the president has had no interest in making his case in the court of public opinion. He’s been completely absent from it. The entire case, as far as I can tell, is: I love tariffs work, and I'm doing them.
So the easiest sale in the world went unmade. Generally speaking, I hear the American people running about two to one against tariffs. That is basically unheard of.
And the parties have swapped sides
The partisan split Augusta alluded to is the strangest part of this.
Go back and watch old Reagan speeches. He hammered on free trade — in the video linked here, he’s is explaining why he’d put a single tariff on Japan (the reason: because they weren’t honoring a free trade agreement over semiconductors). He says: “imposing such tariffs, or trade barriers and restrictions of any kind, are steps I am loath to take … Over the long run, such trade barriers hurt every American worker and consumer.” A single tariff imposed needed a speech from the President assuring the American people that this was a last resort.
The Republicans were the free trade party, and Reagan believed deeply in it — one bigger integrated world, more markets for America, America playing a leadership role through trade. It was the union halls, typically Democratic-leaning, where free trade was the hard sell. That’s why NAFTA was such a difficult lift for Clinton.
I’ve watched the same switch happen in my own classroom. Early in my career, pre-Trump, I’d teach international trade and my students were vehemently unconvinced by the material I was teaching. They tended to be sympathetic to tariffs. I had to work to try to get the principles across.
Now when I teach trade, they look at me like I’m belaboring the obvious. Trade good, tariffs bad, why are you harping on this?
I’m not entirely pleased about that, for reasons I’ll come back to.
A promise should be permanent
Here’s the other half of it. The whole point of doing a deal with another country is that it’s a promise. It’s meant to be a till-death-do-us-part sort of thing.
But a promise that comes out of the White House, when there might be a new bloke in the White House in four years, isn’t much of a promise. It’s more like: let’s hang out for a while.
If Trump were serious, he would push his tariff agenda through Congress, the way Bush and Clinton did with NAFTA. That works for an odd reason. We all know Congress can’t ever get anything done — which means Congress also can’t undo things. So once a program is through, it’s typically pretty close to permanent.
But Trump’s tariffs come only with his signature. And so the next president can — and hopefully will — get rid of a large chunk of this agenda with the stroke of a pen.
More from office hours
Other questions Augusta put to me:
What would the administration actually have to do to raise its grade?
What are the unintended consequences everybody’s missing? (Answer: a middle school cafeteria. The bully takes your lunch money for a few weeks, and then everyone quietly gets up and moves to a different table.)
Is rebuilding the American industrial base a goal worth having at all?
How does this all connect to AI?
Finally, what we did not learn
We’re going to have a presidential election in a few years. Tariffs will be back on the agenda. And a lot of people are going to stand up and say: we learned from the trade war of 2024, 2025 and 2026 that tariffs don’t work.
I’m going to have to be the guy who says: actually, we didn’t learn that.
There is a real argument to be had about tariffs, and I’ll be having it with my freshmen this year. Some economists think there’s almost never a good moment for a tariff. Some think good moments occur somewhat more often. But everyone in that range is talking about smart tariffs — meaning you sit down, you have a think, you analyze conditions, you get your wonks and your nerds to write the reports, and you’re clear with yourself, your allies, and your trading partners about the strategy.
That is not what we got. What we got was incoherent in a way that guarantees all of the costs and none of the benefits.
I used to chart tariff rates using annual data. Now I use daily data, and sometimes they’ve changed within a day. The theory of the case is that a bigger domestic market makes people build factories here — but a factory is a fifty-year bet. When the policy is there Monday, gone Tuesday, partly reinstated Wednesday, thrown out by a court Thursday and back on Friday, you’d be crazy to pour the concrete.
You could ask me right now what the tariff is on a specific good from a specific country. I have followed this as closely as anyone alive. There’s a 50-50 chance I’d get it wrong.
So: employ some good economists. Do the homework. The Liberation Day formula was a laughingstock in my profession, and it was settled on one or two nights before the announcement — which is how you end up tariffing penguins.
This wasn’t a hard question of theory. It was a competence problem.
We didn’t learn that tariffs don’t work. We learned that incompetent tariffs don’t work. We learned that poorly implemented tariffs don’t work. We learned that tariffs nobody bothered to explain to the public or pass through Congress don’t work.
That’s a much narrower lesson, and I’d like us to get it right before the next exam.
Watch the full episode for the rest.
I dont think your history of trade, tariffs, and American policy and attitudes for the past 100 years is accurate. Yes Clinton and the other corporate Dems in the 1990's and 2000's did stuff like NAFTA clumsily, and got into trouble with labor. (But look at their health insurance mess-up). Reciprocal trade deals have been a watchword from the 1930's. Trump's ignorance and incompetence (and corruption and treasonous activity) are real and admired by his hard-core.
All the rest is due to the death of newspapers and centrist tv. You cannot make consensus or two-party policy debate in an all-in on-line world.
I'm no economist, but tarriffs act as an import tax. Higher costs predict alternative choices. If you're talking finished goods, buy American as opposed to foreign might make sense. If you're talking inputs, the consumer pays either way. If there is an unfair trade practice concerning a particular input, you could argue, you're protecting. You could instead subsidize. When there are no unfair practices, it's a regressive tax.