Democrats have wasted no time rejecting President Trump’s tariffs as “damaging” and “unnecessary.” My colleagues have lampooned them as “irresponsible,” “bad economics” and purely a tax on consumers. This anti-tariff absolutism is a mistake.
I’m a Rust Belt Democrat from a swing district in Western Pennsylvania — where lousy trade deals like NAFTA stripped us for parts.
Many of my constituents support smart tariffs, particularly ones that target China, and so do I. Watching my colleagues on the Hill, it’s clear we’re missing the mark. Democrats need to break free from the wrong-for-decades zombie horde of neoliberal economists who think tariffs are always bad.
Mr. Trump’s tariff approach has been chaotic and inconsistent. There’s no doubt about that. But the answer isn’t to condemn tariffs across the board. That risks putting the Democrats even further out of touch with the hard-working people who used to be the lifeblood of the party — people like my constituents.
Instead, Democrats should embrace tariffs as one component of a broader industrial strategy to revitalize American manufacturing and make whole communities that have been hollowed out by decades of bad trade policy. This isn’t just about making the economy work for more Americans; it’s also about earning back the trust and faith of the people we need to win elections and who ought to be at the heart of the Democratic Party.
Since the 1990s, presidents from both parties pushed trade agreements that were great for corporate bosses and their Wall Street overlords, but a disaster for districts like mine. American companies offshored production to take advantage of cheap labor in countries like Mexico, which for decades have crushed independent unions to keep wages rock bottom. Later, firms shifted production to China and Vietnam, which are often called out for employing beggar-thy-neighbor tactics like wage suppression, enormous subsidies and currency manipulation to jack up their exports.
For too long, we absorbed these unfair imports and created a chronic trade deficit that deindustrialized our nation and fueled income inequality. In 2004, the grandfather of modern trade economics, Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson, revealed how offshoring could cost American workers more in relative wages than they gained from cheaper imported goods, making the current trade regime a bad deal for most Americans.
Tariffs are one of a few tools that can break this cycle: They force mercantilist countries to increase their domestic consumption of what they produce because they can no longer dump it in the United States. Increasingly, policymakers — of all political stripes — recognize that tariffs can help protect industries that are key to our economic and national security, boost American production and wages, and safeguard workers’ rights as well as our air and water by incentivizing firms to raise their labor and environmental standards.
If you oppose all tariffs, you are essentially signaling that you are comfortable with exploited foreign workers making your stuff at the expense of American workers. I am not and neither are most voters. Many polls show that Americans — especially the three-fifths without college degrees — support tariffs in part, economists have suggested, because communities harmed by global competition view them “as a sign of political solidarity.” The Biden administration, to its credit, tripled tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum imports. So, why is the Democrats’ only message on tariffs that they raise prices? That was the play during the 2024 election and it flopped. Just last month, a CBS poll found that a majority of Americans one, thought Mr. Trump was not focused enough on lowering prices, two, believed that tariffs could increase prices and three, still wanted tariffs on China.
Rather than reflexively condemning all tariffs, Democrats should be highlighting how Mr. Trump’s scattershot threats, unanchored to any real industrial strategy, will not deliver on the goals of rebuilding American manufacturing, raising wages or rebalancing trade.
For one thing, tariffs are effective only when used in a predictable and stable way — and the Trump administration’s approach has been anything but. On Feb. 1, Mr. Trump announced he was imposing new 10 percent tariffs on China and fixing part of a trade scam that allows four million packages to enter the United States daily without facing tariffs, taxes or meaningful inspection — simply because they’re labeled “low value.” Not only does this “de minimis” loophole undermine U.S. producers and retailers, but traffickers also often exploit it to sneak in deadly fentanyl-laced pills and fentanyl precursor chemicals. Days after his announcement, Mr. Trump flip-flopped and reopened the loophole. He raised China tariffs another 10 percent on March 4 — good! But still, the loophole means billions in Chinese imports can evade tariffs and inspections.
Mr. Trump’s chaotic tariff two-step — imposing, delaying, threatening and then again imposing tariffs, including on allies like Canada with whom we mainly have balanced trade — is bad business for America. Entrepreneurs ready to invest in production here sit on the sidelines, wondering where the tariff roller coaster will stop.
Democrats should emphasize that tariffs alone will not create jobs or build new plants.
They have to be paired with investments, tax incentives and other industrial policies. That is why Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act. As a result, in 2023 we had the largest investment in new American factories in decades — including a factory that Mitsubishi Electric plans to build in my district, with hundreds of jobs coming online when it’s fully operational. If the Trump administration succeeds in killing these pro-manufacturing policies and illegally freezing the funding that Congress approved, it would undermine the effectiveness of Mr. Trump’s tariffs and his expressed goal of American industrial revival.
The corporations that profited from the old trade regime should pay for this revival, not workers and consumers. If we make it easier to join a union and ban stock buybacks, the gains from protection will translate into higher worker pay, not just windfall dividends for investors. Strong antitrust enforcement can stop corporations from using the cover of tariffs to intensify their price gouging. Mr. Trump and my Republican counterparts oppose all of those plans. And that’s why their approach is unlikely to benefit most Americans.
Every past trade deal was sold to American workers with the same lie: that we could export our way to a trade balance. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is pushing that line now, claiming that a “reciprocal tariffs” plan can intimidate other countries into cutting their tariffs and buying more of our stuff. But the main problem is on the import side.
The United States has had mostly duty-free access to Mexico’s markets since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and we still have a huge bilateral trade deficit with Mexico. Mr. Trump tried to update NAFTA in his first administration, but our trade deficit only expanded. Instead of just hitting Mexico with tariffs — if and when Mr. Trump makes up his mind about them — we should fix the agreement he signed with Mexico to force companies seeking its benefits to agree to higher wages and stronger labor rights enforcement, to pay for their pollution costs in Mexico and to stop Chinese firms from using it to obtain duty-free access to the United States.
Western Pennsylvanians know how important it is to get this right. We lost more than our share of manufacturing jobs and factories to bad trade deals and policies. As our tax base collapsed, hospitals, schools and vital public services faltered, too, and communities were stretched to the brink.
For the last decade, Mr. Trump has capitalized on voters’ justifiable anger on bad trade deals, but his administration is too undisciplined to deliver the relief Americans need. That is why Democrats must fight hard for smart tariffs and other trade policies that will deliver good-paying jobs and restore America’s manufacturing leadership.
