Trump, the one-trick tariff pony

New threats against Argentina, Brazil, and France will do nothing to fix what's broken in the global trade system

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Mark Wilson/Getty Images, MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images, Mike Theiler-Pool/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Aerial3/iStock)

One key reason President Trump won in 2016 is he recognized an unmet need in U.S. politics: Tons of working-class voters view trade as a destructive force that guts their communities and takes their jobs. Trump railed against trade like no other presidential candidate in modern history and broke the Obama coalition by flipping the states of the deindustrialized Rust Belt.

Unfortunately, Trump seems to have taken only one simple lesson from this victory: slap tariffs on everything in sight. The president actually has no idea how the global trade system works, and thus no idea why it's causing the pain he exploited. Nor does he know what could actually be done to fix the mechanism.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.