The Left Throws Itself Under the Tariff Bus
Trump Derangement Syndrome has progressives snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
When it comes to trade, there are two kinds of progressives: the virtue signalers who profess concern for the environment, human rights, and good jobs for American workers while quietly pushing American reliance on low-wage sweatshops and sludge-dumping factories, and the ones who support tariffs.
This used to be a fair fight within the Democratic Party. The corporate wing would head to Davos to celebrate free trade, open borders, and higher profits, dutifully buying carbon offsets for their private jets, while the labor wing would stay home and warn against undermining liberal values to save a buck on labor.
When Joe Biden became president in 2021, he kept most of Trump’s existing China tariffs in place. This was no simple act of inertia either; before abandoning his 2024 re-election bid, Biden proposed tripling duties on Chinese steel and quadrupling them for electric vehicles as a way to outflank Trump on the campaign trail.
“Because Chinese steel companies produce a lot more steel than China needs, it ends up dumping the extra steel into the global markets at unfairly low prices,” Biden told a group of union workers in swing state Pennsylvania last April.
“Chinese steel companies don’t need to worry about making a profit, because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he added. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating. And we’ve seen the damage here in America.”
No longer. Donald Trump supports tariffs, and the Republican Party is coming around, and that is apparently enough to necessitate that all progressives throw their own priorities under the bus.
There’s an anti-tariff MoveOn petition seeking 50,000 signatures listed alongside others opposing ICE agents at the Super Bowl and the addition of Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore. “In This House, We Believe” signs now include the phrase “tariffs hurt manufacturing” among a host of unrelated claims. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is on record as far back as 1996 railing against our trade deficit with China, yet she now calls tariffs “reckless” because they will “raise prices for consumers.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) backed the collection of environmental and social programs known as the Green New Deal, which would have imposed trillions of dollars in costs across the economy, yet she too describes Trump’s tariffs as reckless because they could allow companies to “raise prices more than necessary.”
The problem here is two-fold. First and foremost, the progressive agenda does not work without protection for the domestic market. The Left wants higher wages, leading the Fight for $15 a decade ago, and now some deep-blue jurisdictions are pushing that figure as high as $20 an hour. But without tariffs, such a policy creates a massive incentive for corporations to push labor overseas where wages are much lower. Even if your favorite big-business CEO remains committed to domestic workers, when her competitor ships jobs to Mexico or China to lower prices and increase profits through labor arbitrage, she will have little choice but to follow suit.
More generally, Democrats have for decades dubbed themselves the party of worker power and organized labor. On this topic too they will need to decide: do we support American workers, or do we allow products to flow unfettered across our borders fueling a race to the bottom on labor?
Likewise, anyone concerned with environmental protection should recognize that high standards have costs, and that corporations will not comply with those standards and bear those costs if they can save money by offshoring. Environmentalism without tariffs thus provides a double whammy; destroying American jobs while shifting production to places where it will be even dirtier. Only at a No Kings rally does that sound sensible.
The environmental quandary highlights the second problem for progressives, which is that their arguments against tariffs are also arguments against their biggest priorities. By penalizing low-standards countries and shifting production back to the United States, do tariffs raise some consumer prices, at least in the short run? Yes. What else raises consumer prices? The entire progressive agenda.
Environmental regulation, workplace safety standards, higher minimum wages, stronger labor unions, tax increases, on and on—these policies all raise costs for employers, and often those costs are passed on to consumers. In the long run, can those policies create better employer incentives and higher investments in productivity that benefits consumers too? Yes. But that is exactly the argument for tariffs. Even if consumers have to pay a little bit more, is that worthwhile because our nation has values and commitments beyond cheap stuff? Yes. But that is exactly the argument for tariffs.
Looking forward, it is entirely possible that Biden’s political descendants will again follow his lead and embrace not only China tariffs but the global rebalance of trade that the Trump administration has initiated. The alternative, “Tariffs are bad, now let me tell you about my carbon tax that raises prices even more and destroys rather than protects American jobs,” is not an attractive political position.
Democrats will never admit that Trump was right about tariffs or anything else, but don’t be surprised if his trade regime survives through the next Democratic administration—whenever that may be.
Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s first term trade representative, said as much himself during a jaunty interview with the Financial Times, predicting that no Democrat will campaign for free trade again. “If there’s evidence of green shoots and the process working, no one’s going to run on the other side of it,” Lighthizer told FT. “And certainly, if you get the Republicans winning the next election, then you’ve got a new trade system.”
Those two statements are related, of course, and there is plenty of evidence of green shoots that would all be squashed by an incoming administration promising unrestricted imports.
Some progressives may realize this already, hence the process-based complaints about how the tariff rollout is “chaotic” or how “Trump Always Chickens Out” when he uses tariffs as leverage against trading partners and steps them down when deals are struck. But they are only harming the nation by refusing to seek consensus and provide stability and certainty on what is very likely to be their own long-term posture too.