As Donald Trump assembles his economic team, a tension seems to have emerged between his desire to reassure Wall Street and his promise to push back against globalization by enacting sweeping tariff policies.
Despite calling himself “a tariff man,” Mr. Trump has influential backers who would apparently like to see him forget his trade priorities. Elon Musk recently cheered tariff-cutting moves by President Javier Milei of Argentina. Some leading candidates for top economic posts in the new administration, such as the hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, as well as Mr. Trump’s pick for secretary of commerce, the Wall Street executive Howard Lutnick, have been criticized as too committed to World Trade Organization protocols or insufficiently supportive of Mr. Trump’s tariff plans. Mr. Trump himself is reportedly concerned that his nominee for Treasury secretary not disrupt the stock market’s strong performance since his election victory.
But to deliver on his longstanding economic vision of prioritizing American workers and industry, Mr. Trump will need people in his administration who share his understanding of trade and can advance it effectively. This means people who regard tariffs not just as a negotiating tactic or foreign-policy tool but also as a broad means of raising revenue and promoting industry. It also means people with a track record of working within institutions while building consensus across partisan and ideological divides.
For these reasons, Mr. Trump should assign an important role on his economic team to Robert Lighthizer, the veteran trade negotiator who has championed Mr. Trump’s plans to revive American industry and transform the global economy. (Mr. Trump has reportedly told allies he wants Mr. Lighthizer to serve as a “trade czar.”)
Mr. Lighthizer served as the U.S. trade representative in the first Trump administration, which defied decades of free-trade orthodoxy by enacting new tariffs on goods from China. That move pales in comparison to the far-reaching agenda Mr. Trump has proposed for his second term, which includes a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods and a blanket tariff of up to 20 percent on goods from other countries.
If enacted, these levies would constitute a drastic change in U.S. trade policy. Rather than being narrowly deployed to protect strategic industries, the tariffs would be applied universally in order to raise revenue and promote domestic manufacturing. They would also be used to force an economic decoupling from China. This change would mean the decisive abandonment of the dream of a globally integrated economy.
It would also mean a break with the neoliberal assumption that economic policy is a matter best left to the experts, and thus insulated from democratic decision-making. Economists have warned that the Trump tariffs would significantly raise prices, depress gross domestic product and harm employment. But in a poll in September, 56 percent of registered voters said they would be more likely to support a candidate who backed a 60 percent tariff on imports from China and a 10 percent tariff on other goods. A defining question of the second Trump term will be whether the experts or the voters have the final say.
Policymakers and businesspeople are already bracing for a shift. Last month, the Wall Street firm Piper Sandler, citing conversations with Mr. Lighthizer, warned that new tariffs could be put in place shortly after Mr. Trump takes office. This past spring, Mr. Lighthizer appeared at a meeting of the Bilderberg group, a free-market organization. His pro-tariff remarks were “terrifying to everybody who was there,” according to an attendee quoted by Politico.
In an interview this year, Mr. Lighthizer dismissed pro-free-trade experts whose models have “never predicted anything accurately.” He has reason to be skeptical. In 1997, he warned that once China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, “virtually no manufacturing job in this country will be safe.” A much sunnier view was offered by nearly 150 economists — including 13 Nobel laureates — who in 2000 signed a letter arguing that China’s accession to the World Trade Organization would promote freedom in China and “raise living standards in both China and its trading partners.”
In retrospect, Mr. Lighthizer seems more prescient. China’s growing industrial might has not meant an increase in liberty for the Chinese. As for China’s trading partners, in a 2016 study, the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found that some 985,000 American manufacturing jobs had been lost as a result of the “China shock” between 1999 and 2011.
For Mr. Lighthizer, trade policy should aim not just at bringing down prices or advancing foreign-policy objectives, but also at promoting good jobs, strong families and healthy communities here in America — part of an approach that he calls “common good economics.” This stance is different from those of both the free-trade right and the progressive left: Along with his support for tariffs and industrial policy, Mr. Lighthizer insists on the need for lower taxes and the elimination of unnecessary regulation.
Though very much a Republican, Mr. Lighthizer has succeeded in building relationships with Democrats. In 2019, he took his staff at the trade office for a two-hour meeting with the Democratic lawmaker John Lewis — not to discuss trade, but to hear about Mr. Lewis’s work for civil rights. Mr. Lewis, who had voted against the North American Free Trade Agreement years before, ended up supporting the Trump administration’s reworked version of the agreement. Mr. Lighthizer has also enjoyed strong relationships with former labor leaders such as Richard Trumka of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and James Hoffa of the Teamsters.
Mr. Trump’s appeal to workers is based not just on his policies, but also on his ability to channel a working-class sensibility that is suspicious of invocations of expert authority, seeing them as a way for a narrow class to advance its interests at the expense of others. Mr. Lighthizer shares this mistrust, and he has a record of channeling it effectively. His career is a reminder that competence is sometimes more valuable than expertise, and that experience can be a better guide than any scientific model.
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