How should the left think about Donald Trump’s tariffs on international trade? It’s an important question, as the true impact of tariffs as a policy tool is often obscured by partisan and corporate media coverage. But the administration’s chaotic approach — announcing, amending, and reversing policies almost daily — makes it difficult to craft a coherent response. Rather than reacting to each policy individually, I’d like to establish a clear position for the left on tariffs, moving beyond a reflexive opposition driven by unequivocal resistance to Trump.
What Are Tariffs?
The Trump administration wants you to believe that tariffs are a penalty paid by other countries on goods imported into the United States, as if China, Mexico, and others are shouldering the cost. This is false. In reality, U.S. companies pay tariffs to the U.S. government when they import goods subject to these duties. The claim that foreign nations are paying is a deliberate misrepresentation. Likewise, efforts to create an “external revenue service” to collect tariffs are, at best, misleading and, at worst, an attempt to deceive voters.
The Trump administration also wants to frame tariffs as a tool for managing drug policy and immigration. More likely, the administration is exploiting these issues to justify declaring a national emergency, which would allow him to invoke tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). Without such an emergency, Trump lacks the unilateral authority to impose tariffs without Congressional approval. While tariffs are a critical tool for specific economic outcomes, they are not the tool needed to address drug and immigration policy.
Despite widespread anti-tariff rhetoric from Democrats and U.S. corporations, tariffs remain popular among American voters. Many see them as a way to protect domestic jobs and communities, even when they believe that tariffs might increase prices.
Jobs, wages, and the economy consistently rank as top concerns for U.S. voters. Trump’s rhetoric about prioritizing American workers and jobs played a major role in his election victory in 2016 and helped him improve his performance with nearly every demographic in the 2024 election. Ironically, the biggest lie Trump tells about his tariffs is that they are truly about protecting U.S. jobs.
Trump’s tariffs are not designed to create jobs. As Shawn Fain, head of United Auto Workers, rightly notes, Trump’s approach to tariffs, combined with anti-worker policies at home, undermine that goal. Effective tariffs aimed at job protection and creation must be paired with domestic industrial policies — like the CHIPS Act or the Inflation Reduction Act, policies whose domestic investments the Trump administration has signaled it wants to claw back. Instead, these tariffs appear to be less about protecting American jobs and more about pressuring other countries into falling in line with the administration’s political agenda.
Notably, in Trump’s first term, tariffs did not bring jobs back to the U.S either. Instead, they pushed production from China to other low-wage countries like Vietnam to evade tariffs — a pattern that continues with this recent round of tariffs. It was only when the Biden administration combined high tariffs with industrial policies that private investment in new manufacturing plants soared to its highest level in over thirty years.
Policies like these demonstrate the potential of tariffs as part of a wider industrial policy that serves American workers. The CHIPS Act allocated over $52 billion dollars to incentivize new manufacturing capacity and fund grants, loans, and research on a much needed technology, and the Inflation Reduction Act allocated more than $50 billion for investments in the clean energy economy that would create nearly 900,000 jobs over the next decade. Although these investments were only a drop in the bucket to solve the issues at hand, they remain some of the most significant industrial investments in US history.
So What Now?
To reclaim the economic narrative and regain ground with working-class voters lost to Trump, the left must articulate a clear, strategic stance on tariffs: one that identifies when and how they can be beneficial and drives home the importance of pairing tariffs with a real domestic industrial strategy.
Tariffs can serve as a powerful tool for upholding internationally agreed-upon labor and human rights standards, ensuring that trade benefits workers both in the U.S. and globally, rather than enabling corporations to exploit labor across borders. They can also help prevent companies from flooding markets with cheap goods to eliminate competition and drive monopolization, and they can support “buy local” and “buy American” initiatives. Additionally, when applied strategically, tariffs can play a crucial role in accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy.
Mislabeling tariffs as a “national sales tax,” as Harris did throughout her campaign, undermines these goals and weakens the case for using them effectively. The left should rightly criticize Trump’s tariffs for what they are: a bullying tactic to promote his nationalist social agenda as an economic policy. But, at the same time, the left must make the case for tariffs as a tool to create a fairer global economy.
Tariffs will remain a recurring issue in the months and years ahead. While we should call out the racist and exploitative ways the Trump administration applies them, we must also recognize that tariffs are a valuable economic tool. Dismissing them outright would only undercut our own ability to build the economy — and the world — we want.
