WSJ editorial: Trump's tariffs backfired

President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which are the highest “since the Great Depression,” have failed to revive the American economy as he promised, according to a recent editorial by two prominent conservatives.

“"If the economy was 'dead' in 2024, there's no evidence Mr. Trump's tariffs have brought it back to life,” wrote former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) and Donald J. Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday. As they pointed out, “most economists predicted that the economy's performance would be negatively affected. Thus far data overwhelmingly indicate that is what has happened."

As they later added, Trump’s tariffs did not “deglobalize” the international economy to America’s advantage at all, despite Trump promising that.

"The world isn't deglobalizing,” Gramm and Boudreaux wrote. “It's reglobalizing around partners who commit to rules rather than those who wield tariffs like a club." Main data points reinforce this fact, such as how "in 2025 the pace of losing manufacturing jobs accelerated to 1.2%, faster than the decline in 2024 of 0.7%. In 2017 manufacturing jobs actually increased by 0.7%."

As they ultimately concluded, "Tariffs thus divert capital and labor away from uses that would have yielded higher returns to capital and higher wages for workers."

Liberals have joined conservatives in denouncing Trump’s tariffs as unsuccessful. Writing for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, Allison McManus and Dawn Le explained that “far from the manufacturing sector ‘roaring back’ as Trump promised, the United States has lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs over the past year. These actions have pushed the country’s closest trading partners to seek deals elsewhere, including with China: Canada, India, Japan, South Korea, and the European Union have all recently sought new agreements without the United States.”

The bottom line is that Trump’s tariffs cost thousands of Americans their jobs in the immediate term and, they concluded, restructured the global economy to America’s long-term disadvantage.

“Over time, each of these deals will result in markets that were once enjoyed by U.S. suppliers increasingly oriented away from them — and the rules of international engagement increasingly written by foreign governments,” McManus and Le said.

Mona Charen, a pundit for the conservative outlet The Bulwark, warned in February that Trump’s tariffs could contribute to Republican losses in the upcoming midterm elections.

“Voters are rarely able to connect policy to outcomes, but they have done so in the case of tariffs,” Charen argued. “Back in 2024, Americans were about equally divided on the question of trade, with some favoring higher tariffs and roughly similar numbers opting for lower tariffs. Experience has changed their views.”

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