How Republicans Learned to Love Tariffs

BY MOLLY BALL

On Wednesday, a Republican senator tried to get his colleagues to stand up for free trade—and failed.

Just two fellow Republicans joined Sen. Rand Paul’s resolution to repeal the worldwide tariffs President Trump imposed last month. It was a landmark moment in the GOP’s Trumpist evolution, showing how the party has bent to his will, sacrificing the free-market dogma once considered fundamental to its identity.

“I think you’re seeing the Republican Party flip to where the Democrats used to be 30 or 40 years ago” on trade, said Sen. Bernie Moreno, a freshman Republican from Ohio and selfstyled conservative populist who supports “fair trade.” Following Trump’s lead, he said, “The Republicans are becoming much more interested in helping working-class Americans.”

In Trump’s first term, the overwhelming majority of Republicans still openly espoused the free-market philosophy epitomized by then-Speaker Paul Ryan. Now, the GOP ranks in the House and Senate are populated with younger, Trumpist conservatives such as Sens. Moreno, Josh Hawley, Jim Banks and Eric Schmitt.

While many storied conservative organs such as the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute still argue against tariffs, others have changed their tune. The Heritage Foundation, once the bastion of Reaganism, now features viewpoints like “How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love This Tariff-Like System.”

Trump is drawing support from a rising faction of New Right economic voices that has spent the past decade working to reshape the GOP along Trumpian lines and away from laissez-faire. They say the party’s collective willingness to buckle up and go along with Trump’s trade war, whether out of ideological sympathy or political calculation, is evidence the populists are prevailing.

Some Republicans remain uncomfortable with the departure from Reaganite dogma. The tariff debate has sent markets gyrating and induced anxiety in the business community, long the party’s major constituency.

Too many GOP politicians are still in thrall to the libertarian fantasy of free trade, said Steve Bannon, the “War Room” podcast host, former White House adviser and chief propagandist for the “populist-nationalist” ideology. But they realize that they have no choice but to do what their base wants and follow Trump. “The leadership here is coming from the people, not the political class that is owned by their donors,” he said.

New organizations have sprung up to provide intellectual firepower to the populist right. Chief among them is American Compass, a five-yearold think tank headed by Oren Cass, a onetime domestic-policy director for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. In a flurry of op-eds and media appearances, Cass has passionately argued for the fundamental virtue of tariffs and protectionism overall, though he takes issue with some aspects of their implementation.

Compass’s foundational idea is that the old GOP dogma of tax cuts and small government— what some on the New Right call “zombie Reaganism”— is out of date and that the state should play a role in ensuring families at all income levels can thrive. The organization has come under attack from old-line conservative institutions such as Americans for Tax Reform and Americans for Prosperity, but its influence is clearly ascendant.

“From a worker-focused perspective, free trade can be wonderful, but it has to be balanced. What you’re seeing on the right of center is the result of a decade of evolution,” Cass said.

Most on the left believe Trump’s tariffs are hurting— not helping—workers and see political advantage in relentlessly opposing Trump’s unpopular policies. But there are exceptions: Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, in a recent speech in Washington, said she agreed with Trump that “we do need to make more stuff in America—more cars and chips, more steel and ships. We do need fair trade.”

Both parties’ transformations are whiplash-inducing to longtime players in the trade space. “The shift in elected Republicans’ attitudes on tariffs has been one of the most remarkable I’ve seen on any issue,” said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a nonprofit supported by the steelworkers’ union that lobbies for protectionist policies.

Meanwhile, he said, many Democrats have abandoned their labor movement roots out of blind opposition to Trump. “Most people like to think that Trump shifted Republicans’ views on trade, but I think he was being responsive to the voters who identified as Republicans but were not with Republicans on trade policy,” Paul said.

To be sure, many in the GOP remain skeptical of Trump’s approach to the issue. The Senate majority leader, John Thune, is an open opponent of tariffs even as he has marshaled his ranks to back the president. Thune is a protégé of the former GOP leader Mitch McConnell, who said he would have voted for the resolution but missed the vote for health reasons.

Numerous polls show the tariffs to be the most unpopular aspect of Trump’s second-term agenda. But to many Republicans, Trump is leading the party in a welcome new direction. “We’re going to get through this,” said Rep. Mike Kelly (R., Pa.), whose Pennsylvania district is dotted with postindustrial ghost towns. “We’re going to get back the market share we ceded, we’re going to build things in America, we’re going to get back the jobs we lost. When this is done, we’ll look back and say finally we had a leader who stood up to the rest of the world.”