by Batya Ungar-Sargon at Commonplace
Ever since Donald Trump’s first term as president, his detractors in the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the mainstream liberal media have had a recurring refrain: his single achievement in office was a tax cut for him and his rich buddies. It was always nonsense, erasing the significant tax cuts middle- and working-class Americans got, as well as his achievements controlling the southern border, imposing tariffs on China to force supply chains elsewhere, and, more generally, shrinking the income gap for the first time in 60 years. But let Liberation Day—Trump’s moniker for April 2, the day he imposed across-the-board reciprocal and global tariffs—put to bed the myth that Trump is beholden to the rich.
President Trump has outraged the elites of the international global economic order by ending the globalization-promoted fleecing of the American working class with mass tariffs. Lost amid that outrage is one of the more startling aspects of the change: doing so meant dismissing the importance of quarterly earnings reports and dividends of his “rich buddies” to reorder the global trade system toward ordinary Americans instead.
The old elite status quo was maintained by both parties for decades before Trump’s election. In the 1970s, the largest share of U.S. GDP was held by the middle class—not coincidentally because 25% of our economy was in manufacturing. Manufacturing jobs give people access to a middle-class standard of living and the American Dream. Yet in the intervening years, we went from an economy built on good jobs for ordinary Americans supporting a thriving middle class to an economy largely driven by finance and real estate, which accounts for a whopping 20% of GDP. Unsurprisingly, over 60% of our national wealth is now in the hands of the top 10%. For decades, our economy has fostered an upward transfer of wealth from the working class to the asset rich. What Trump is trying to do with his tariffs is simple: reverse that trend.
What is so frustrating about the conversation around tariffs is that most people agree on the problem: the deindustrialization of America led to the downward mobility of the American working class, deaths of despair, and an economy where people working multiple jobs still couldn’t afford the American Dream. Yet when a president has the guts to use a tool at his disposal—once a common feature of American policy—to reverse this trend, it’s wall-to-wall criticism from the free trade extremist Right and, well, the now free trade extremist Left.
For the latter,…
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