Trump is all about tariffs as he leads a party that used to be all about free trade

This week, President-elect Donald Trump told reporters that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and claimed that tariffs would “make our country rich.”

All of that is standard Trump rhetoric on trade, but it also represents a stunning about-face for the party he leads, especially when you look at how past presidential nominees talked about trade.

In 1999, while running for president, George W. Bush framed free trade as a moral good: “In order to promote the peace, I believe we ought to be a free-trading nation in a free-trading world,” he said at a primary debate, “because free trade brings markets, and markets bring hope and prosperity.”

In 2007, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proclaimed himself “the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see.”

In 2011, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney likewise championed free trade, albeit with a few more reservations.

“I love free trade. I want to open markets to free trade, but I will crack down on cheaters like China,” he said at a debate.

But Trump blew up that Republican orthodoxy, twice winning the presidency while telling voters to be skeptical of international trade. Relatedly, he proposed massive new barriers to trade. During his most recent presidential campaign, he floated 60% tariffs on Chinese goods, plus blanket 20% tariffs on all other goods coming into the United States. Since winning the presidency, he has additionally promised 25% tariffs on products from Mexico and Canada.

“Tariffs, properly used, which we will do, and being reciprocal with other nations, but it’ll make our country rich,” he said at this week’s news conference. “Our country right now loses to everybody.”

That’s a significant change from free trade leading to “hope and prosperity.”

A massive Republican shift

Free trade is about making it easier to sell goods overseas and easier to buy foreign goods at home. That generally means making trade agreements and reducing tariffs, which are taxes that American importers pay on foreign goods. Economists broadly agree that tariffs therefore raise prices for U.S. consumers, as American businesses pass on the higher costs.

Just how different is Trump’s trade rhetoric from that of past Republicans? Doug Irwin, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, says you have to think back almost a century.

“To have a president that across the board thinks trade is bad and thinks that tariffs are really good, you have to go back to Herbert Hoover,” Irwin said.

Free trade has had support from prominent Democrats as well over the years — think President Bill Clinton passing NAFTA or President Barack Obama promoting the Trans-Pacific Partnership (which ultimately failed).

Still, Irwin says, the modern Republican Party was long seen as the party of “big business” and was more firmly pro-free-trade.

“There’s a stereotype that the Republicans were the party of big business,” he said. “And that was certainly the case, that the Reagan administration, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush — all of them championed trying to reduce trade barriers, expand world trade in the 1980s and ’90s and into the 2000s.”

But importantly, he’s talking about elites. Voters have had more mixed views.

Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, for example, the two major parties weren’t far apart on the question of whether trade creates opportunities, according to Gallup. Republicans were only somewhat more pro-trade than Democrats, and neither party was overwhelmingly pro- or anti-trade.

Still, there’s good reason that there was some voter skepticism — in some manufacturing-heavy states, for example, Americans saw job losses as trade increased with China.

And that is where Trump comes in.

The elite-voter divide

There wasn’t just a partisan divide on trade, says Diana Mutz, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. There was a divide between elites and voters — one that Trump used to his advantage.

“What he did was to move the Republican Party’s position to something closer to what the average American position was on trade, which was more negative than they saw the party elites being on trade,” she explained.

There are nuances to this — some pre-Trump politicians, like Romney, had started to worry about China using currency manipulation to unfairly boost its exports. But Trump went much further than Romney, not only being hostile to China on trade but using China as an example to his voters of why, in his view, trade can be bad.

Mutz has studied American attitudes toward trade closely — she wrote a whole book on the subject — and her research found that Trump’s shift did win him votes.

“What happened in 2016? The two big issues that people talked a lot about were trade and immigration,” she said. “And what I was surprised to find in my analysis was that Trump moving the party closer [to voters] on trade did in fact garner additional votes. It did switch people’s attitudes toward the Republican candidate relative to the previous presidential election.”

In addition, Trump made voters think more about trade, period, than they had before. And he did it in a very Trump way: He made trade about fighting.

“Trade was emphasized by Trump as a means of dominating other countries, as a means of becoming the winner and them the losers,” Mutz added.

An economics textbook would tell you that trade isn’t about winners and losers — the idea is that two countries trade so they both can benefit.

Trade is complicated. A trade deal can lead to job losses, but it can also boost the economy and lower prices. And that idea — that trade can bring widespread economic benefits and that those benefits outweigh the costs — is why some old-guard Republicans disagree sharply with Trump.

Will Republicans go along?

Before he left the Senate in 2023, Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey was known as a free trader.

“There’s no question Donald Trump is a protectionist. He has been for decades,” Toomey said. “He’s been consistent. I think he’s been consistently wrong, but he has been consistent.”

When Toomey left the Senate, it was seen as a blow to long-held Republican values of limited spending and free trade. Toomey himself told The Wall Street Journal that he thought Trump had changed the party.

When Toomey eventually opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a trade deal he had once championed — it was seen as a sign that he had caved to the pressures of the MAGA GOP. Toomey told NPR that he thought the Trans-Pacific Partnership needed better protections for American businesses.

Congressional Republicans have fallen in line behind Trump on many issues. Whether current members push back on tariffs depends in part on how far Trump goes once he’s back in the White House.

Toomey, for his part, isn’t convinced Republicans will go along if voters are threatened by higher prices.

“Republicans are going to be hearing from their constituents if there are these broad, significant new tariffs imposed. So I think it’s premature to decide that the Republican Party has gone all protectionist,” Toomey said.

For now, Trump isn’t backing off his tariff threats. In just over a month, he’ll get the chance to follow through.