The Pros and Cons of Trump’s Tariff Bomb
The president has some good and not-so-good reasons for tariffs, which will both hurt and help.
Donald Trump is a bomb dropper. He sees a broken system and blows it up with the idea of starting over or at least fixing the mess. There’s a lot of that at play with tariffs. To change metaphors, it’s fair to say Trump is playing a long game with trade, and an important one. The trouble is that he sometimes overplays his hand.
Tariffs and their fallout are front-page news everywhere this morning after Trump’s virtual atom bomb on Wednesday. Trump-hating legacy media personalities and social media influencers who became economic experts on Wednesday scream, The stock market is down big! Other countries are retaliating! This is a Great Depression disaster like Smoot-Hawley! Oh no!
To be fair, many really smart people on the conservative side are saying those things, too. It’s not just Trump derangement that makes a person see his faults.
Still, it sells advertising for media talkingheads to light their hair on fire in front of the camera. Fortunately, since we don’t sell any advertising — we rely on your support — I don’t have to burn my rapidly graying head. I can instead look at the whole tariff thing analytically, so bear with me as I start with the bad news and get to Trump’s understandable rationale later.
We are constitutionalists, first and foremost, so a good bit of our concern is with Trump’s authority. Article I, Section 8 grants Congress the sole authority “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.”
Congress outsourced some tariff power to the president via the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the Trade Act of 1974, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977. “While the Constitution granted Congress, not the executive, the power to set tariffs,” write the editors of the Washington Examiner, “Congress has meekly handed them over, and the Supreme Court has blessed the transfer of power.” Frankly, that still doesn’t settle the constitutional questions.
In this case, Trump has used his claimed authority to enact what the Examiner calls “the second-highest tax hike in the nation’s history, the highest being the Revenue Act of 1942, which Congress passed to pay for World War II.”
National Review’s editors likewise say, “As a share of the economy, the executive order is likely the largest peacetime tax increase in U.S. history.”
It’s a regressive tax, too, hitting low-earners proportionately hardest.
Back for the authority, the editors of The Wall Street Journal argue, “No previous President has used that [1977] law to impose tariffs” as Trump has. “Mr. Trump is stretching his authority much as Joe Biden did with his student-loan forgiveness.” They continue:
Congress has circumscribed the President’s power to impose tariffs, allowing it on imports that threaten national security (Section 232) or in response to “large and serious” balance-of-payments deficits (Section 122), a surge of imports that harms U.S. industry (201), and discriminatory trade practices (301).
None of these trade provisions empowers Mr. Trump to impose tariffs on all imports from all countries based on an arbitrary formula. Section 122 lets a President impose tariffs of up to 15% in response to trade deficits, but Congress must approve them after 150 days. Someone should sue to block his abuse of power.
Oh, look at that. There’s a lawsuit — filed by a conservative legal group, no less.
Multiple pieces of legislation have been introduced to rein in the tariff power with, for example, congressional review. Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul reintroduced the No Taxation Without Representation Act, which he says “reasserts Congress’s constitutional authority over taxation and serves as a check on presidential overreach that threatens the economic wellbeing of every American.” Paul explains those economic consequences in a Fox News op-ed today, adding that past Republicans have suffered electoral rebuke for raising tariffs.
Paul isn’t the only conservative stalwart who sees economic danger ahead. No less than the highly esteemed economist Thomas Sowell, a spry 94 years old, called it a “ruinous decision,” with a caveat. “Now, insofar as he’s using these tariffs to get various strategic things settled and that he is satisfied with that,” it’s one thing, said Sowell. “But if you set off a worldwide trade war, that has a devastating history. Everybody loses.”
Thomas Sowell, in a rare interview, takes a hit at Trump’s tariff plan.
— The Rubin Report (@RubinReportShow) April 3, 2025
Could it be a catastrophe and set off a ‘worldwide trade war’? Or is this just the bump in the road Elon and Trump have mentioned?
Incredible man, still sharp at 94. @RubinReport pic.twitter.com/v20ib4B8gQ
When Thomas Sowell speaks (especially about economic matters), you pay attention.
To Sowell’s point, other nations are speaking, too. Though U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned, “Do not retaliate,” retaliate they did. China hit back with a 34% tariff. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a reciprocal 25% tariff on imported vehicles. The European Union is expected to respond with higher tariffs, too. Other nations will undoubtedly try to negotiate rather than retaliate.
The stock market is also speaking about Trump’s tariffs. The major indexes plummeted by as much as 6% yesterday on news of the levies, losing $3.1 trillion in value. They’re down even further today. Thursday’s drop was the biggest single-day decline since the coronavirus pandemic hit in March 2020. You might say Trump’s no stranger to significant stock market losses.
(Side note: Where was everyone in the Leftmedia crying about one man controlling the economy when Anthony Fauci did it?)
Now, to Trump’s rationale.
He’s certainly not looking at China’s response or the market tumble and saying, I’ve made a huge mistake. He’s playing the long game, and he knows that correcting decades of imbalance will require time and sacrifice.
It’s fashionable to accuse Trump of “starting a trade war,” but let’s be honest: He didn’t start it. Other nations have been undercutting, cheating, swindling, and manipulating trade with the U.S. for decades. Free trade is a great thing, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of fair trade, as it has all too often.
Trump is incorrect in his seemingly dogged belief that a trade deficit with another nation is ipso facto proof of said cheating. Ben Shapiro sees the same flawed reasoning: “Trump is predicating his tariff war upon … the idea that trade deficits are inherently bad.” It’s a lot more complicated than Trump’s formulation, as Shapiro aptly explains.
Yet he’s also seeing something that many Americans know is happening but that coastal elites ignore: Many of our jobs are being outsourced, our rural towns are hallowed-out opioid havens, and everything we buy at the store anymore is “Made in China.” We might get cheap toasters, but millions of people, particularly men, are deprived of meaningful work making stuff.
Trump is famous for the Art of the Deal, and that’s on display here. Trump aide Peter Navarro declared, “This is not a negotiation,” followed by Trump himself saying, “The tariffs give us great power to negotiate.” The media sees a contradiction. Trump sees rope-a-dope dealmaking.
“We knew this was going to be a little bit bumpy in the beginning,” argued New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew, “but let’s understand what it’s about. It’s about fairness. It’s about America first, not America last.” He added, “We have been tariffed. Our goods are tariffed. We are always at an unfair disadvantage with these countries.” The stock market “will come back,” he says, but “this is about making things in America.”
The White House is pushing a message of trust. “To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term. We saw wages increase. We saw inflation come down. We had a Trump energy boom. We had the largest tax cuts in history, and that’s exactly what the president intends to do.”
His number two is backing him up. “President Trump is taking this economy in a different direction,” said Vice President JD Vance, whose book Hillbilly Elegy chronicles the decimation of American manufacturing towns in the Rust Belt. “We’ve gotta take this country in a different direction.”
In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Regardless, Trump intends to blow up the status quo and make something different. He has a way of doing positive things after the dust settles.
