Why aren’t the democrats fighting harder against Trumps trade problems?

This has been the mealymouthed critique of President Donald Trump’s trade wars from many Democrats this past week. They awkwardly triangulate between bashing Trump’s catastrophic ideas and touting support for their own similarly spirited, if scaled-down, ideas. No wonder their message is falling flat.

Trump’s current tariff regime — including “only” 10 percent levies on 70 countries, plus 145 percent on China — will devastate the U.S. economy. His tariffs imposed so far are estimated to raise a typical household’s annual costs by $2,700, with lower-income Americans shouldering the biggest burden. That’s only a subset of the damage. Recession risks have surged, companies have begun furloughing workers, and our once-close allies are flipping us the bird.

If this is a curse to the U.S. economy, it should be a windfall for Democratic politicians. Instead, Democrats are blowing their good fortune.

Rather than shouting from the rooftops that trade wars are bad, Democrats babble in “yes, buts.” Yes, these particular tariffs are costly and regressive, they say, but when Democrats impose tariffs, somehow they present no such downsides.

The most obvious cognitive dissonance relates to Trump’s first-term tariffs. Democrats assailed these policies in the 2018 midterms and 2020 presidential election — shortly before adopting them as their own.

For instance, in 2019, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said Trump’s China tariffs led to “American farmers, manufacturers and consumers losing and paying more.” The 2020 Democratic platformsaid Trump had “launched reckless, politically-motivated tariff wars that have punished American workers, antagonized our allies, and benefited our adversaries.” They were right!

But as president, Biden extended (nearly) all of Trump’s existing tariffs. In some cases, he expanded them or replaced them with slightly different trade barriers. He did so with vigorous support from his party.

Given this checkered record, it’s no wonder Democrats struggle to articulate a clear, credible critique of Trump’s (now much worse) tariff policy.

In a social media video this month, House Democrats opened with an awkward defense of protectionism: “I think a wrong-for-decades consensus on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom,” Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pennsylvania) said, adding that we need “a better trade approach” that is “pro-worker.”

Deluzio clarified that he didn’t mean Trump’s trade approach, per se — even though Republicans likewise claim Trump’s approach is “pro-worker.”

On Wednesday, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) gave a speech criticizing Trump for wielding tariffs like a “hammer.” When asked how she would deploy tariffs differently, Whitmer could not answer. “I don’t know how I would have enacted them differently,” she said. “I haven’t really thought about that. What I have thought about, though, is, you know, tariffs are, need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.”

Other Democrats, such as Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, assert that the real problem with Trump’s tariffs is that companies will use them as an excuse for “price gouging” and profiteering. The stock market massacre suggests investors don’t agree tariffs will be profitable. But even if Warren’s critique were true, the same logic should apply to the Biden-née-Trump tariffs Warren backed.

Elsewhere, lefty populist thinkers explain that Trump’s tariffs are bad but tariffs could be good if only the resulting revenue were used for things Democrats like. (Never mind that whole poor-people-bear-the-costs problem.) Both they and their horseshoe-theory-demonstrating conservative counterparts contend that Trump’s execution might be lousy, but the underlying premise — that America must build higher economic walls — remains correct.

Real trade wars, it seems, have never been tried.

To be clear, there are some limited circumstances in which tariffs (or sanctions) could be an appropriate way to build U.S. capacity or punish bad behavior. For example, if an adversarial country has a stranglehold on some technology critical to national defense. Or if an exporter is using slave labor.

But that’s not what either party has endorsed. Both Trump and his Democratic critics have supported broad tariffs on our allies and on random consumer goods (tiki torches, guitars, toothbrushes) with no plausible security or “resiliency” justification.

How did Democrats back themselves into this corner? Partly they’re pandering to pro-tariff constituencies (i.e., unions, once reliable Democratic allies). Populist, anti-“neoliberal” think tanks have also overtaken the party. These often employ political operatives churning out pseudo-scholarly research, which the media then credulously cites. (Republicans invented and perfected this model more than a decade earlier, though it doesn’t seem to have served Democrats as well politically.)

That’s how you end up with Democratic leaders embracing such quackery as “greedflation” and price controls — both of which, by the way, the Trump administration is also now flirting with. This Trump blunder should be yet another layup for Democrats, but they can’t really dunk on it now, can they?

The political calculus on all this is changing. Aggressive trade barriers, no longer abstract hypotheticals, are proving as disastrous as “neoliberal” economists predicted. Americans hate Trump’s tariffs. Even most manufacturing workers think they’re a bad idea, according to a Post poll.

Democrats should stop pulling their punches. What the country needs is an unequivocal, full-throated condemnation of pandering protectionism. Let this be the moment that liberates the Democratic Party from the populists tying them to the same mercantilist, regressive, costly command-and-control economic policies that so often drive Trump’s agenda.