Doubling down on his failed trade policies, Trump tells Chicago biz group that “tariff” is a "beautiful" word

I spent an hour or so watching Donald Trump sing praises to tariffs while doing a live Q & A yesterday at the Chicago Economic Club. My reaction? I continue to wonder at his fixation on this repeatedly failed approach to trade policy.

When pressed by the questioner, who noted that there is widespread disdain for tariffs as protectionist policy — the Wall Street Journal being among the doubters — Trump shot back:  “What does the Wall Street Journal know?”

To that I had to shake my head. What does the Wall Street Journal know? Mmm … WSJ gets things wrong on occasion. I know that after more than a decade of trading stock options on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange, but on the matter of tariff warfare, they probably know a little more – make that a heckuva lot more – than Trump ever will.  

WSJ certainly knows that tariffs, as a protectionist measure, have never worked. Since the turn of the Twentieth Century, there has never been an episode of tariffs being used to protect American industries that succeeded in expanding industrial production in this country. 

To be specific about Trump’s trade war, Boston University research scholar Sandra Polaski found that the U.S. lost 170,000 manufacturing jobs during that Trumpian joyride into failure.

Taking a broader look, Fordham University, where Trump was an undergraduate, provides a thumbnail history of tariffs that includes their early use and subsequent demise – including the disastrous episode of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of the 1930s. The lesson about the futility of protective tarrifs apparently escaped Trump while he was taking classes there.

As to the Smoot-Hawley tariffs themselves, conservative columnist Robert J. Samuelson had it just right when he said “the ghost of Smoot-Hawley seems to haunt President Trump.”

Trump (seen above at a 2019 signing of one of his trade deals in a public domain photo posted on wikimedia commons) is clueless about tariffs, and his memory of their failure when he declared his infamous “trade war” is short. Trump never acknowledges the retaliation against the U.S. by China, which sharply cut back its massive imports of American agricultural products. The result was a devastating punch in the gut to American farmers, many of whom had to be rescued by billions of dollars of federal mitigation payments to stay afloat.

I know that a lot has been written about Trump’s rambling, stream-of-consciousness style and possible cognitive issues. I wonder if his stubborn belief that re-imposing tariffs will produce results that differ from their history as failures isn’t just another manifestation of cognitive decline.

John Tsitrian is a businessman and writer from the Black Hills. He was a weekly columnist for the Rapid City Journal for 20 years. His articles and commentary have also appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post and The Omaha World-Herald. Tsitrian served in the Marines for three years (1966-69), including a 13-month tour of duty as a radioman in Vietnam. Republish with permission.