Tariffs, Trump, and the Theater of Economic Toughness

When people talk about Donald Trump and tariffs, they often talk past each other. Supporters frame tariffs as bold economic nationalism. Critics sometimes dismiss them as pure stupidity. Neither explanation really gets at what was actually happening.

Tariffs under Trump were not primarily an economic strategy. They were political theater. Loud, confrontational, easy to explain in a tweet, and perfectly suited to a worldview that mistakes domination for governance.

That matters, because tariffs themselves are not inherently right-wing. The left has a long and complicated relationship with trade barriers. The problem was not that Trump used tariffs. The problem was how, why, and who ultimately paid for them.

Let’s unpack that without pretending this was some 4D chess masterclass or, on the other hand, a random tantrum with spreadsheets attached.

What tariffs actually are, minus the mythology

A tariff is a tax on imported goods. That’s it. It is not a fine imposed on a foreign government. It is not a punishment magically absorbed by another country’s treasury. It is a tax paid at the border, usually by U.S. importers, and then passed along the supply chain.

Which means prices go up.

That increase shows up in construction materials, appliances, electronics, food production inputs, and consumer goods. And when prices rise, the people who feel it first are not hedge fund managers or multinational executives. It’s workers. Renters. Anyone whose budget already runs hot.

From a left perspective, that’s already a red flag. Broad tariffs without protections act like a regressive tax. They hit the working class harder than the wealthy. That doesn’t make them unusable, but it makes them dangerous if deployed carelessly or cynically.

Trump deployed them both carelessly and cynically.

The story Trump told

Trump’s tariff narrative was simple, and simplicity was the point.

America is being ripped off. Foreign countries are cheating. Manufacturing jobs were stolen. Tariffs are the punishment. Strength will bring factories home.

It’s an emotionally satisfying story, especially in regions that were gutted by deindustrialization. There is real pain behind that anger. Factories closed. Towns collapsed. Unions were crushed. Communities were left to rot while capital fled.

The lie was not that something bad happened. The lie was who did it and how to fix it.

Trump blamed countries. Left analysis blames capital.

That difference is everything.

What Trump did not do

If Trump’s goal had actually been to rebuild U.S. manufacturing in a way that benefited workers, tariffs would have been the smallest part of the plan.

He did not restrict capital flight. He did not penalize corporations for offshoring. He did not strengthen labor law. He did not expand union power. He did not create large-scale public manufacturing. He did not guarantee jobs or wages. He did not democratize ownership. He did not seriously invest in industrial planning.

Instead, he paired tariffs with massive corporate tax cuts and deregulation. That combination told corporations exactly what the real priority was.

You can raise costs at the border, but if you still reward companies for squeezing labor and chasing cheap supply chains, they will simply adapt. And they did.

Supply chains rerouted. China lost some share. Vietnam, Mexico, and other low-wage regions picked it up. The worker still lost. The executive still got paid.

The system bent. It did not break.

China as villain, capital as ghost

Trump fixated on China, and again, there’s a kernel of truth buried in the noise. Global capitalism did use China as a manufacturing hub to drive down labor costs and discipline workers everywhere else. That happened. People are not wrong to be angry about it.

But China did not force U.S. corporations to offshore. They chose to.

Tariffs targeted trade flows while leaving capital mobility untouched. That’s like blaming the road instead of the car.

A left approach would have gone after ownership and power. Trump went after flags.

So corporations responded rationally. They didn’t suddenly become patriotic. They shifted suppliers, raised prices, and waited out the storm.

Workers got rhetoric. Capital got flexibility.

Tariffs as nationalist aesthetics

One reason tariffs appealed to Trump is that they look like action without requiring cooperation or structural change. No Congress. No organizing. No confrontation with domestic capital. Just a signature and a press conference.

That made tariffs perfect for symbolic politics.

They created visible enemies. They fed a narrative of toughness. They gave supporters something concrete to point at. They allowed Trump to posture as anti-globalist while governing as a conventional pro-business Republican.

This is why tariffs under Trump felt aggressive but changed very little.

They were noise, not leverage.

Why the left critique is sharper than “tariffs bad”

Some liberals opposed Trump’s tariffs because they disrupted markets or offended allies. That critique misses the point.

The left critique is that Trump used a tool that could have been part of a worker-centered strategy and instead hollowed it out into a weapon of nationalist spectacle.

Tariffs can be defensible if they are:

Narrow and targeted

Paired with labor protections

Embedded in industrial policy

Combined with public investment

Designed to discipline capital, not protect it

Trump’s tariffs did none of that.

They punished consumers. They protected monopolies. They offered no guarantees to workers. They produced no democratic control. They created subsidies without accountability.

That is not economic nationalism in any meaningful sense. It is branding.

The cost everyone pretended not to see

Farmers got hammered by retaliatory tariffs. The administration responded with bailout payments. That alone should have ended the argument that tariffs were making foreign governments pay. U.S. taxpayers were literally compensating U.S. producers for damage caused by U.S. policy.

Consumers paid more for goods. Workers faced unstable pricing. Small businesses absorbed shocks. Large corporations adapted and survived.

This pattern is not accidental. It is what happens when you confront symptoms instead of structures.

The bottom line

Trump’s tariffs were not a serious attempt to challenge neoliberal globalization. They were an attempt to narrate dominance while leaving power relations intact.

From a left or anarchist perspective, that’s the real failure.

You cannot fix deindustrialization by waving a flag at the border while capital remains mobile, ownership remains concentrated, and labor remains disposable.

Tariffs without solidarity are just another way to shuffle pain downward.

They look like rebellion. They function like maintenance.

And that’s the quiet truth beneath all the shouting.