It has been hard this past week, of tariffs applied worldwide on April 2 to tariffs suspended except for China on April 9, to avoid reflecting on how much trouble could have been avoided if economists, instead of talking about countries’ trade surpluses and trade deficits, had devised different words — say, “buyer-dominant” countries and “seller-dominant” countries.

Perhaps in that case, President Donald Trump would not have been obsessed for the last 40 years by the notion that the United States is impoverished when it buys more from some country than that country buys from us. How many Americans are hurt by the fact that U.S. firms buy lots of vanilla beans in Madagascar while mostly low-income and geographically distant Madagascar citizens buy very little from the United States?

That said, anyone paying attention for the last 40 years has known that Trump regards “trade deficits” as a national liability and believes “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. Pundits and politicians have been on notice that he might impose a slapdash set of tariffs in his second term, even though he didn’t in his first.

What’s not yet clear, and probably will not be in 90 days, is what policies will emerge and what will be their economic effects. There’s an argument that the cost of the April 2 tariff schedules could be lower than the headlines and cries of anguish stock price drops suggested.

“Economic models often predict less dramatic changes than you would infer from popular discussions & even from financial markets,” wrote Obama administration economist Jason Furman. “They’re predicting 0.75-1.5pp less growth this year as a result of the biggest tariff increase in U.S. history. Large but not historically memorable.”

Tariffs are typically imposed on the wholesale value of imported goods, which means that a 10% tariff does not automatically raise retail prices by that amount. It could easily end up being less than the price inflation that followed the 2021-22 Biden spending programs. Sounds irritating but not disastrous.

Nor does last week’s sharp drop in stock prices, with U.S. shares down about 10%, guarantee disaster. These losses were far smaller than the 23% U.S. stock prices fell in a single day (“Black Monday”) in October 1987. But that, as the Federal Reserve history notes, was “not followed by an economic recession or a banking crisis.” But others suggest that Trump’s “Liberation Day” could turn out to be much more costly than the effects of Black Monday.

“The Trump administration has created a new monster-one of unpredictability of erratic behavior,” wrote the ordinarily unflappable economist Tyler Cowen. “Businesses crave certainty,” he reminds his Free Press readers, though one might add they do so even as they strive for profits exceeding others’ expectations.

“As the degree of uncertainty rises, businesses will simply wait,” Cowen continues. “They will invest much less, they will not seek out new markets, and they will be less inclined to hire new workers.”

These political effects are unclear as well. Republicans were the party of tariffs for 100 years, and the law in which Congress ceded the president permanent power to set tariff rates was the top legislative priority of the Kennedy administration in 1961-62. Most Democrats voted for it and Republicans against. Disabling amendments were proposed by Sen. Prescott Bush of Connecticut, the father and grandfather of Republican presidents. Then in the 1970s, labor unions pressed Democrats to back the protectionist Burke-Hartke bill, while in the 1980s, former Democrat Ronald Reagan pushed Republicans toward free trade.

Support for freer trade was bipartisan in the 1990s and predominantly Republican in the 2000s until Trump descended that escalator in 2015. Tariffs and trade weren’t candidate Trump’s strongest issues in 2024, and tariffs have not polled well lately. A post-April 2 Navigator Research poll reports that an identical 30% of college-educated and noncollege voters are favorable to tariffs, with about 60% unfavorable. Evidently you don’t have to have taken Economics 101 to believe that taxing imports is a bad idea.

So far, however, Trump’s job approval hasn’t suffered much. On April 9, it stood at 47% positive and 50% negative in the RealClearPolitics average, the same as in his first-term peak in March 2020 (when COVID-19 restrictions were imposed). In the three public polls conducted entirely since April 2, it’s at 46% positive and 50% negative.

Those changes aren’t statistically significant, but they could be the beginning of an extended decline, as in former President Joe Biden’s approval after the August 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal. But so far Trump’s numbers have been more sticky or, as political scientists say, more inelastic than those of other presidents. He inspires strong feelings, pro and con, which so far don’t seem to be changed much by events. His approval is currently near the high point of the narrow band, where it’s remained since January 2017.

What may be changing, however, is the willingness of politicians and, perhaps, voters to trust one person setting worldwide trade rates by himself. It may have seemed like a good idea when Democratic free traders transferred the power from a Congress, where cooperative “logrolling” operated to raise tariffs on everything, toward presidents who were inclined to reduce rates and restrictions on what consumers could buy. Last week made clear we don’t have that kind of president anymore, even if the non-China April 2 tariffs turn out to be permanently defunct.

Thus we see Republican senators joining six Democratic colleagues in calling for Congress to take back the tariff-setting power granted it by the Constitution. Congress isn’t about to do so, but it’s moving at least a bit in that direction.

Interestingly, it’s doing so even as the Supreme Court is moving away from recognizing the independence of Congress-created agencies and moving toward giving life to the Constitution’s vesting executive power in the president. Are events, 237 years after ratification, moving America back to the constitutional order?

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