Trump is abusing economic powers of the president intended for national defense to do something he wants to do regardless of any defense concerns.
It would be nice if economically illiterate White House “fact sheets,” a regular occurrence under the Biden administration, were a thing of the past. But Trump’s fact sheet justifying auto tariffs is positively Bidenesque.
Like Biden, Trump is abusing economic powers of the president intended for national defense to do something he wants to do regardless of any defense concerns. Biden used the Defense Production Act to support green energy, and now Trump is using Section 232 national-security tariffs to protect the car industry.
That’s Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act, which is mostly used these days to restrict, not expand, trade. The president is doing so based on a Department of Commerce report from 2019, which said that “automobiles and certain automobile parts are being imported into the United States in such quantities and under such circumstances as to threaten to impair the national security of the United States.” The data from that report is mostly from 2017.
Idealistic protectionists imagine trade experts in Washington analyzing the latest economic data, consulting with defense officials, and working with industry to fine-tune the economy to balance national security with prosperity. In reality, the president is taking a report based on information that’s eight years old and saying “good enough.”
Trump thinks it’s worth it to abuse the process in this way because, as the fact sheet says, “Studies have repeatedly shown that tariffs can be an effective tool for reducing or eliminating threats to impair U.S. national security and achieving economic and strategic objectives.”
What studies? Let’s go through them one by one:
This is the Biden economics playbook: Abuse national-security laws to do something you want to do anyway, purposefully ignore actual economic research on the topic, find other “research” from “experts” you like, and — bizarrely, coming from Trump — cite the Economic Policy Institute and Janet Yellen to support you.