Ever since Donald Trump’s first term as president, his detractors in the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the mainstream liberal media have had a recurring refrain: his single achievement in office was a tax cut for him and his rich buddies. It was always nonsense, erasing the significant tax cuts middle- and working-class Americans got, as well as his achievements controlling the southern border, imposing tariffs on China to force supply chains elsewhere, and, more generally, shrinking the income gap for the first time in 60 years. But let Liberation Day—Trump’s moniker for April 2, the day he imposed across-the-board reciprocal and global tariffs—put to bed the myth that Trump is beholden to the rich.
President Trump has outraged the elites of the international global economic order by ending the globalization-promoted fleecing of the American working class with mass tariffs. Lost amid that outrage is one of the more startling aspects of the change: doing so meant dismissing the importance of quarterly earnings reports and dividends of his “rich buddies” to reorder the global trade system toward ordinary Americans instead.
The old elite status quo was maintained by both parties for decades before Trump’s election. In the 1970s, the largest share of U.S. GDP was held by the middle class—not coincidentally because 25% of our economy was in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs give people access to a middle-class standard of living and the American Dream. Yet in the intervening years, we went from an economy built on good jobs for ordinary Americans supporting a thriving middle class to an economy largely driven by finance and real estate, which accounts for a whopping 20% of GDP. Unsurprisingly, over 60% of our national wealth is now in the hands of the top 10%. For decades, our economy has fostered an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the asset rich. What Trump is trying to do with his tariffs is simple: reverse that trend.
What is so frustrating about the conversation around tariffs is that most people agree on the problem: the deindustrialization of America led to the downward mobility of the American working class, deaths of despair, and an economy where people working multiple jobs still couldn’t afford the American Dream. Yet when a president has the guts to use a tool at his disposal—once a common feature of American policy—to reverse this trend, it’s wall-to-wall criticism from the free trade extremist Right and, well, the now free trade extremist Left.
For the latter, in its need to oppose Trump at every turn, tariffs are only the latest policy about-face, a list that presently includes nearly every idea it once supported in the name of championing labor. And where some claim that reshoring manufacturing is impossible, that sentiment is hard to square with the transition already underway, from the ongoing return of advanced semiconductor manufacturing with the CHIPS and Science Act to the more than $1 trillion in manufacturing investments announced since the day Trump took office—all that before a suite of new tariffs that make producing in America even more important for selling in the American market.
The goal of the tariffs is not only about manufacturing and ending unfair trade practices. Trump has long said that “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the English language, and he has used it as a tool to accomplish a wide variety of goals. One major existing concern is national security, where the production of critical components of our armed forces, the technology of the modern world, and beyond has moved abroad, often to China. A sovereign nation simply cannot rely on its greatest enemy for pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, lumber, semiconductors, and the very ships that it will need to fight should the situation call for it—and yet, China controls vital chokepoints in those industries.
Moreover, Trump has already used tariffs to achieve significant foreign policy concessions. His threats to Mexico resulted in the country finally policing its side of our southern border for the first time since Trump left office in 2021. The number of illegal migrants crossing our border has dropped to almost zero. These are significant wins for working-class Americans, whose wages were impacted by the massive free flow of illegal labor crossing the border throughout the Biden presidency. Trump is also hoping that the tariffs will be a source of revenue to combat our ballooning debt.
But most importantly, the tariffs are class warfare on behalf of the beleaguered and forgotten American working class, who have been asked to bear the burden of the global elites who got rich off of all of this free trade.
That helps explain why the world of finance is up in arms about tariffs. Wall Street is shorting President Trump’s agenda in part because the rich know that he has taken the spigot which was pointing up at them and pointed it down to working-class Americans, the backbone of this country. Trump’s agenda is for Main Street—not Wall Street.
There are reasonable concerns about prices rising as a result of tariffs, particularly in the short term, as well as market volatility as a result of the change. These are the realities required to redirect the global trading system to something that better serves American interests. Yes, Trump’s critics will point to the Wall Street sell-off as evidence of their criticism, but what that really captures are the price of ending the distortive practices that advantage foreign powers at the expense of the United States.
And where conservatives are concerned, these factors may not be the barrier to support that free-trade fundamentalists suggest. A 2023 American Compass poll of GOP voters found that 77% would accept higher prices in exchange for a robust manufacturing base that provided better wages to workers. Meanwhile, the Boston Federal Reserve found that the inflationary impact of new tariffs isn’t as considerable as many Trump critics claim. More importantly, tariffs are just one piece of Trump’s economic agenda, which includes pro-business goodies like massive deregulation, an energy boom, tax cuts, and a lower corporate tax rate for those who reshore manufacturing. These should all help ease any higher prices caused by the tariffs.
The message of the tariffs is simple: we are refusing the race to the bottom on wages. Continuing to do so would harm the American worker. Tariffs, instead, represent a redistribution of wealth from the elites who are invested in finance and real estate to ordinary Americans. We have to start betting on the American worker rather than against him or her, and rebuild the pathway to the American Dream for every American. Tariffs can help make that possible.
