At first nobody stood up when Donald Trump stepped out from the wings to speak. There was an ovation, but a sitting one, from the well-heeled attendees of the Economic Club of New York luncheon on Sept. 5. Then, the billionaire John Paulson, a billionaire and Trump adviser who was seated on the dais, leaped to his feet. Gradually others fell into line. Eventually nearly every guest in the large room was at attention, applauding the former president.
Right now people are focused on Trump’s glowering, ineffective performance in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris this week in Philadelphia. But last week in New York, boosted by that not-quite-spontaneous ovation, Trump came across as a man to be reckoned with. And, I would say, feared.
Trump added fresh details to an economic agenda that would concentrate more power in the hands of the president. In doing so, he put more distance between himself and traditional small-government Republicanism. Trump’s authoritarian tendencies on matters such as threatening to jail political opponents and to expel millions of undocumented immigrants in a “bloody story” have been clear for a long time. What’s emerging is an economic agenda that’s increasingly similar in tone and ambition. It begins to approach what some scholars call authoritarian capitalism.
The key is the exercise of power. Trump talks about applying tariffs as an America First strategy, but it’s also a Trump First strategy: Tariffs are one of the few economic weapons that a president can use without going to Congress. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 gives the president broad authority to impose trade sanctions on countries that burden U.S. commerce in ways that are judged to be “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable.” Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 allows the president to impose import restrictions on national security grounds.
Trump wielded both trade laws repeatedly while in office, but he wants even more freedom of action. If elected, he’ll try to get Congress to pass what he calls the Trump Reciprocal Trade Act, which would empower him to impose tariffs on other countries as high as theirs on the United States. “In other words, if you screw us, we will then screw you,” as he put it on the campaign trail.
There’s nothing authoritarian or imperial about raising tariffs, of course. The Biden administration kept most of Trump’s tariffs in place and imposed new ones on China. Vice President Kamala Harris has also talked tough on trade.