FILE - The United States Steel Mon Valley Works Clairton Plant in Clairton, Pa., is shown on Feb. 26, 2024. President Biden and Donald Trump agree on essentially nothing, from taxes and climate change to immigration and regulation. Yet on trade policy, the two presumptive presidential nominees have embraced surprisingly similar approaches. FILE - The 2024 Ford F-150 truck is assembled at the Dearborn Truck Plant, April 11, 2024, in Dearborn, Mich.
“If you look at the election, it’s obvious,’’ said William Reinsch, a former trade official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Where are the deciding states? Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin — right there, you can see that trade is going to have an outsize role.’’ Yet like free trade, trade protectionism carries its own economic price. It can raise costs for households and businesses just as the nation is struggling to fully tame inflation. It tends to prop up inefficient companies. It spurs retaliation from other nations against American exporters. And it typically sours relations with allies and adversaries alike.tried to pummel America’s trading partners with import taxes, vowing to shrink America’s trade deficits, especially with China.
For his part, Biden favors subsidizing such key industries as chipmaking and EV manufacturing to give them a competitive edge. It’s a stance that reflects worry that China’s rising military and technological might imperils America’s national security. As last week’s announcement showed, Biden isn’t averse to new tariffs, either.
Either way, a consensus formed in recent years that U.S. trade policy had to change. Moving factories to low-wage countries like Mexico and China in the 1990s and early 2000s, critics say, fattened corporate profits and enriched executives and investors but devastated American factory towns that couldn’t compete with cheap imports.
Finally, he started perhaps the biggest trade war since the 1930s: He hammered $360 billion of Chinese products with tariffs for Beijing’s efforts to surpass U.S. technological supremacy through illicit tactics, including cybertheft. China lashed back with retaliatory taxes of its own: It targeted American farmers, in particular, to try to hurt Trump’s constituency in rural America.
If Trump’s trade war fizzled as policy, though, it succeeded as politics. Autor’s study found that support for Trump and Republicans running for Congress rose in the areas most exposed to the import tariffs — the industrial Midwest and manufacturing-heavy Southern states like North Carolina and Tennessee.