Jeffrey Blehar of National Review Online ponders President Trump’s approach to tariff policy.
How seriously should we take all of this? After all, right as this column was about to head to the printers with twice as much splenetic verbiage as it now contains, Trump agreed to “delay” the tariffs he announced for Mexico for 30 days. All it took was a phone call from President Claudia Sheinbaum and an agreement to do the exact same thing her country did in 2021, when Joe Biden took office: send 10,000 troops to the northern border for show. (That certainly availed Biden little.) Beyond that, as Noah Rothman points out, Trump and Sheinbaum have reached nothing else save “an agreement to make an agreement”: a monthlong pause after which the tariffs are slated to return.
And then what’s more, right after this column landed in my editor’s inbox, Trump announced that — surprise, surprise — he was offering the same 30-day window to Canada after a “good conversation” with Justin Trudeau.
This obviously suggests that — regardless of what Trump avers in public — he views tariffs not as an end unto themselves but rather as a blunt instrument to wield in negotiating favorable trade arrangements. I am well aware that, rhetorically at least, Trump has spent the last 40 years of his public life obsessed with tariffs; they are perhaps his sole ideological idée fixe. But so far he has used them primarily in strategic ways, even if ineptly. I sometimes wonder whether his publicly implacable rhetorical tone is merely his idea of taking a tough bargaining position, while always leaving himself private room to climb down later.
The truth is that I don’t know, and I never have known with Trump. He remains President Wild Card, which is why it’s impossible to repose real confidence in him. But so far it seems like the trade war is shaping up to be merely a phantom menace.
