The president’s nonsensical tariff saga is unleashing economic chaos, hurting working people through canceled manufacturing projects, higher grocery prices and lost retirement savings. It is also pushing too many progressives to hop into bed with Wall Street and retreat to the old and disastrous corporate-centered way of thinking.

There is a third option: Embrace a trade policy that truly levels the playing field for workers.

Tariffs, when used with a clear and consistent strategy, are a necessary part of any economic policy that looks out for workers. But clear and consistent, Donald Trump’s tariffs are not. And his domestic economic agenda does next to nothing to help workers.

Growing up in Mansfield, Ohio, in the 1960s, I went to Johnny Appleseed Junior High with the sons and daughters of unionized workers making steel, cars, tires and appliances at the Westinghouse, General Motors, Mansfield Tire and Tappan Stove factories nearby. By the 1970s, executives had moved many of these plants south in search of lower wages. Unsatisfied, they then lobbied Congress to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and permanently decrease tariff rates with China — again, in search of lower wages. Compliant politicians obliged.

The deals they struck helped hollow out the middle class and devastated entire communities. Workers saw whose opinions mattered to the “serious people” in Washington and on Wall Street. They rarely have a seat at the table and their interests are so often overlooked.

Mr. Trump rose to power by understanding many workers’ legitimate anger. He told workers that yes, the system is rigged against them — and on that, perhaps that alone, he was right. He knew that millions of working Americans wanted destruction.

But the destruction Trump voters asked for? Surely not higher prices on bananas or coffee that we can’t grow in the United States, or interruptions in supply chains with Canada.