Why start a vastly unpopular trade war?

Because you can. And because you think it looks kingly.

The papers are appropriately obsessed this morning with the question of which new tariffs the Trump administration will announce tomorrow on “Liberation Day,” a day that increasingly looks most likely to liberate some degree of stagflation upon the land. The WSJ reports that the president is leaning either towards reciprocal tariffs that are allegedly more designed to facilitate negotiation versus across the board 20% on all imports.

Readers know my views. To me, this is the choice of banging my head against a brick wall or shooting myself in the feet. Economists left and right agree, fwiw, but at this point, what’s more interesting here are two things: 1) changing public opinion on tariffs and 2) why the president is, at least so far, ignoring those opinions.

In recent years, I came to view tariffs as a politically popular threat, one that signaled to voters, especially those hurt by globalization, that you would lead the charge against countries that have been responsible for the hurt to them and their communities. But many polls show that this is changing. People are a lot less favorable about tariffs, largely because they correctly believe they will raise prices.

Axios has the deets:

Americans don't seem to be into this tariff stuff. The Trump administration's trade policies are pretty unpopular, per a new poll released yesterday by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

By the numbers: While nearly half of respondents to the survey said they approved of the administration's efforts on immigration, only 38% support Trump's trade negotiations with other countries.

Context: A separate survey from CBS News found 72% of Americans believe tariffs will raise prices in the short term, and 47% said prices would be up for the long term.

One thing this shows me is that Trump hasn’t learned the following inequality: 2025 not equal to 2017.

With the pandemic shock and the ensuring inflation, Americans are just far, far more sensitive to prices than the last time Trump started a trade war, when inflation had been low and stable for years. And the media, probably because reporters have been highly elastic to these price-level concerns, has done a good job of informing people of the high likelihood of price passthrough.

So, tariffs are unpopular with consumers, with markets (which just closed out their worst quarter since 2022), and with investors, who are telling reporters that until they get more clarity, they’re going to sit on their hands.

In the political economy world I grew up in, politicians respond quickly and loudly to such broad discontent. But from Trump and his docile collection of subservient Rs, we hear…crickets.

Hear me out. If he was fighting for something that was unpopular but worth fighting for, like land-use reform or a more sustainable fiscal path, this resistance to the broad opposition would be courageous. But in this case, it’s just misguided, and it’s going to hurt vastly more people and businesses than it will help.

So, why is Trump going there? Trust me when I tell you that there is no grand plan, no “Mar-a-Lago Accord”—an update Plaza accord—to restructure global trade and control our exchange rate. Advisers like Navarro believe, against the facts, in reindustrialization, but I’ve never seen evidence that Trump really cares about that.

For the president, the whole tariff package is about being kingly. He can raise them by himself, he doesn’t need Congress, as Congress has completely ceded this function to the executive. (What do they do over there??) And he thinks tariffs are what strongmen, authoritarian, kings are supposed to do. They let you stomp around raving about beating up on countries who rip you off (by selling us things we want to buy from them), and just as kingly, they incent a parade of executives to knock on your door, begging for exemptions.

Trump was once asked: why the hostility towards Canada? Why hit such an old, reliable trading partner with sweeping tariffs? By way of answering, he correctly noted that around 80% percent of their exports are to us, while under 20% of our exports go there (the shares are similar for Mexico).

This gives the king the leverage he seeks. He can hurt them a lot more than they can hurt us. You will note that this decision does not get filtered through the logic of “just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something.”

But such logic is not kingly.