Former U.S. President Donald Trump is a self-described “Tariff Man.” Time and time again while he was in office from 2017 to 2021, regardless of the foreign policy question, Trump turned to tariffs and trade restrictions as the answer. Whether it was competition with China or getting Mexico to pay for a border wall, the solution was to impose or threaten to impose taxes on imports from U.S. trade partners.
In his campaign for this year’s U.S. presidential election, Trump seems to be doubling—and perhaps even tripling or quadrupling—down on the tariff tool. If elected, Trump has proposed imposing at least a 10 percent tariff on all U.S. trade partners. He has said that tariffs “are the greatest thing ever invented” and described “tariff” as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.”
By continuing to laud them, Trump is setting himself in opposition not only to a long post-World War II trend in the U.S. of declining tariff rates, but also to the standard view that tariffs are fundamentally a bad idea. As he told the moderator at a recent campaign event with the Economic Club of Chicago, “It must be hard for you to spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you’re wrong.”