UPDATE (Feb. 3, 2024, 10:50 a.m. ET): The Trump administration on Monday agreed to delay a proposed 25% tariff on all goods coming into the country from Mexico for one month after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 troops to her country’s northern border to fight drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
In a country as large as the United States, it’s rare when a national election is decided by a single issue. There are simply too many constituencies with too many varying interests and priorities.
But in the 2024 presidential race, there’s ample evidence suggesting the price of living was foremost on the minds of many voters. This was not lost on Donald Trump, who spent months assuring Americans that he’d lower prices and help consumers. The Republican never got around to saying how, exactly, he intended to do this, but he repeated the promise anyway, and the vow helped propel him back into the White House.
It was at that point when the president began his second term by abandoning the issue altogether, effectively admitting that the Trump administration has no plan to address consumer costs.
If we were to stop the conversation here, it would represent a rather dramatic public betrayal. After all, the one thing voters appeared to care about most quickly became an issue that Trump stopped pretending to care about immediately after returning to power.
But we can’t stop the conversation here — because the president on Saturday imposed new trade tariffs on the United States’ three largest trading partners, which is all but certain to raise prices on a wide range of products that Americans buy.
Skeptics don’t have to take the word of economists on this: Trump himself has spent recent days publicly acknowledging that his constituents might soon feel some “pain.”
On Friday afternoon, for example, the president told reporters during a brief Q&A that there could be “some temporary short-term disruption,” but he was confident that “people will understand.”
On Sunday morning, as part of a weird online tantrum, the Republican added that Americans might soon feel “some pain,” adding that he’s confident that “it will all be worth the price that must be paid.” Hours later, Trump said it again, this time on camera.
“We may have short term, some, a little pain,” he told reporters, “and people understand that.”
How “little” would the “pain” be? Trump didn’t say. How long is the “short term”? Trump didn’t say. How does he know that American consumers are comfortable with additional “pain”? Trump didn’t say.
Complicating matters, there’s great uncertainty as to why the president is doing this. As Canada launched retaliatory measures, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau conceded that our neighbors to the north are “perplexed“ as to why the United States is starting an unnecessary trade war. A Wall Street Journal report added that policymakers in Canada and Mexico “have struggled to figure out what would satisfy” the administration.
The international confusion is understandable. To explain himself, Trump has offered a series of moving targets — at different times, the president has said his policy is about trade, drugs, immigration, and his desire to acquire Canada and make it a state — which has only fueled bewilderment.
What’s more, there’s the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement to consider. The Trump administration negotiated the trade deal to replace NAFTA and celebrated it as a triumph. It was designed, in part, to prevent the kind of punitive measures the White House is now imposing, but that’s apparently not stopping the president from proceeding anyway.
So why in the world is all of this happening? As best as I can tell, Trump, who’s long struggled to understand the basics of trade policy, has convinced himself that tariffs will generate enormous wealth for the United States. It won’t, but the president seems blissfully unaware of this nagging detail.
Or as the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal put it, the White House appears to have launched “the dumbest trade war in history.”
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
