I’ve now seen a couple articles claiming that Democrats are missing an opportunity with Trump’s tariff catastrophe or generally trying to thread some moron needle over whether they’re good or bad. Jon Chait did it here. Now Lauren Egan has written a similar piece in The Bulwark. Both these pieces seem vastly overstated to me. I’m pretty immersed in Democratic voices and almost everything I hear is that Trump tariffs are a catastrophe. But to the extent there is some hedging from a few Democrats, I don’t think there’s even any real issue here to hedge, not over anything actually recognizable as trade policy. Joe Biden embraced what used to be the anathema of industrial policy. He also employed targeted tariffs. In fact he had a pretty all-policy, holistic focus on re-shoring specific industries that are either particularly high-value in economic terms or are tied to critical technologies with national security dependencies. Those policies were very broadly embraced by Democrats.
