Will Donald Trump’s escalating imposition of tariffs on America’s trading partners finally break his solid backing by Republican GOP congressmen and senators, not to mention his voter base? Amazingly, where likely collusion with a foreign power, gross human rights violations at the border, and incitement of violence against journalists have failed to stir them, there are signs that Trump’s war on free trade has finally got the frozen hearts of many a Republican a-pumping with the spirit of resistance.
I’m not the only one who’s wondered how the GOP would continue to square its official support for the free market with the president’s willingness to take a wrecking ball to trading regimes built up over decades to benefit and secure American wealth. Donald Trump may have zeroed in on the destruction wrought by de-industrialization and his role as rescuer of the working man as his primary electoral identity, but the trading system has benefitted the richest of the rich, who see little need to tweak a system that has padded their portfolios, opened up foreign markets, and allowed them to use labor more easily exploited and paid far less than American workers.
Two particular areas of dissent have appeared. First, the president’s contemplation of hitting foreign automobiles with a 25% tariff appears to be a bridge too far. My sense is that among Republican elected officials, this is a case of ideological opposition to the president, combined with a growing awareness among Republicans that he may be willing to do real damage to the economy as he pursues an escalating trade war with the world. One angle that may have the Republicans up in arms is that trade policy falls well within the purview of Congress, making them complicit in Trump’s policies — a complicity that opponents will be able to highlight.
The second major area of growing GOP dissent is the tariffs the president has imposed on agricultural imports, which have prompted China and Mexico to retaliate with their own tariffs on American agricultural products. This retaliation is already causing economic pain among America’s farmers, which in turn led to the Trump administration this week proposing a $12 billion bailout package for those affected. Intriguingly, the perceived need for a bailout seems to have been the spark that moved the agricultural industry itself into a fuller opposition to the president’s policies; according to reporting by Politico, many in the industry interpret it to mean that there’s no end in sight to the trade war over agriculture, that the president has no strategy for ending the dispute he started, or quite possibly both.
Particularly with agricultural tariffs, you can see how Trump’s blustering attitudes and baseline Republican realities have collided, and will continue to collide, in unpredictable ways. At the highest level, the reality of Trump’s willingness to risk existing trade agreements, in combination with compensation to some of those hurt by the trade war, has run into at least a superficial buzz-saw of Republican belief in free trade and free markets. My guess, though, is that the GOP and other elements of the farm lobby are not able to separate these abstract ideas from the way they’ve been applied to policy over the years: trade arrangements with other nations that, more often than not, allow American businesses to make money selling goods to those countries. The result is that many Republicans strongly believe in free trade as a principle, particularly because in reality they tacitly understand it’s an arrangement, when implemented in the real world, that makes them money. Trump, in promising better arrangements, is upsetting a system that is already working pretty well for them; accusing Trump of retreating on free trade allows them to make a principled argument when their main concern is that they’re going to lose money.
The fact that their actual business is under threat is of course another major point of conflict between Trump and the agricultural industry, indeed the central one. The fact that the industry as a whole is pretty much turning up its nose at the $12 billion bailout (which apparently would hardly make most businesses whole from the losses they’ve suffered) suggests that the president has misjudged the nature of this economic sector. Unlike the steel industry, which has long been beleaguered, or individual steel workers who are willing to suffer some pain in the present for hope of long-term gain, the agricultural industry is a lot healthier, and so has more to lose. Additionally, though the industry as a whole has done much to obscure this fact, it is hardly the plucky conglomeration of simple family farmers that it would like us to believe. The agricultural industry has undergone heavy consolidation for more than a generation, yet part of me wonders if Trump has made the catastrophic mistake of thinking he’s dealing with a rabble of hog farmers and corn shuckers, rather than a highly sophisticated industry. This sophistication includes a keen collective knowledge of how trade policy works and how it affects their profit margins, a point currently reflected by the quick response of major farm trade organizations in opposition to the ongoing escalation of tariffs.
The conflict between Trumpian attitudes and Republican realities offers the possibility of a world of troubles for GOP politicians caught in the middle. Politico observes that in their planned meeting with President Trump in Iowa, Governor Kim Reynolds and Representative Rod Blum “are walking a tightrope — they must express their concerns about the local economic impact of tariffs while stopping short of criticizing the president.” This seems a particularly difficult tightrope to walk when their constituents are savvy about the tariff issues and well understand the president’s role in creating them.
Politico also notes that Democrats are seeing opportunity in the unease over the president’s trade policies in Iowa and other farming regions. Brendan Kelly, who’s running to unseat Representative Mike Bost in Illinois’ 12th Congressional District, seems to be pursuing a smart line — acknowledging there are problems to be fixed, but that “This all-out barroom brawl with everybody — just throwing fists and not sure where the target is going to be — is just going to end up hurting everybody.” An argument that Donald Trump essentially has no strategy for fixing things has the benefit of being accurate description of reality, one that Republicans are starting to countenance. This might seem like the most basic thing in the world, but pointing out the disparity between people's lived experiences and Trump’s words is a powerful tool for Democrats, particularly since painting a deranged, tendentious view of the world is the cornerstone of Trump’s approach to politics. Harm to the pocketbook is a hard thing for a person to deny for very long; at least in the agricultural industry, Trump may have shot himself in the foot by inflicting economic pain on people who were doing well enough before he got involved. Additionally, any area in which Republicans are provoked to criticize the president weakens him across the board; doubts in one area will feed doubts in others, a dynamic that is likely key to eroding his base both prior to the midterms and the 2020 election.
