Former President Donald Trump recently told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo that if he’s reelected, he will impose tariffs of a staggering 60 percent — or more — on Chinese imports, signaling a plan to escalate the trade war with China that defined his time in office.
The case Trump is making to voters in 2024 is that the US economy was very strong during his term, but was thrown into disarray by the Covid-19 pandemic. If he were to win a second term, he promises much of the same, with tariffs on imports as the centerpiece of his economic policy. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen last month warned that such a plan would increase the cost of goods for Americans whose budgets have been pummeled by inflation.
Henry Tricks, who writes the Economist’s Schumpeter column on global business, told Vox’s Noel King on a recent episode of Today, Explained that Trump’s plans for a second term are making the business community nervous. The transcript below is adapted from their conversation and has been edited for length and clarity.
Noel King
If there’s one thing Donald Trump does well, that would be disruption. But you say this time around, Trump isn’t explicitly planning to disrupt things.
Henry Tricks
[Trump is] hoping to launch economic policies that make the economy grow in a similar way that it grew during his administration from 2016 to 2020. And to be fair to him, the economy did pretty well under his administration.
The danger is that his approach to economic policy actually risks exacerbating the economic problems that Americans are suffering from today. And particularly, we’re talking about high inflation there.
We know of Donald Trump as a kind of “cut taxes and raise tariffs” kind of a guy. This time his main campaign promise is on the tariff front. He calls himself Tariff Man, and he has this plan to increase tariffs across the board in the US.
What Trump wants to do is effectively triple the average rate of tariffs. He also wants…
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