Why Does Everyone Hate Trump’s Tariffs?

On April 2, 2025 — “Liberation Day” — Donald Trump imposed high tariffs – ranging from 10 to 48 percent — on imports from virtually every one of our trading partners. With that announcement the United States abruptly turned its back on generations’ worth of solemn international agreements, effectively voiding a rules-based international trading system the U.S. itself had largely constructed.

Although the Supreme Court eventually ruled that most of the tariffs were illegal, the Trump administration reinstated many of them using other dubious legal strategies. Businesses are, to say the least, unhappy about the uncertainty created by these unilateral, unstable actions. However, the consequences of Trump’s liberation tariffs have been very different from what both supporters and opponents originally expected.

Contrary to Trump administration expectations and predictions, there has been no revival of U.S. manufacturing employment, and investment in manufacturing — at least as measured by construction spending — has fallen off a cliff. And import prices, even excluding petroleum, have gone up, not down, belying claims that foreigners would pay the tariffs.

However, the Trump tariffs haven’t caused a recession, either in the U.S. or globally. Nor have they led to a 1930s-style global spiral into protectionism: Retaliation by other nations against U.S. tariffs has been limited, and there has been hardly any sign of emulation — of other nations deciding to follow Trump’s lead by imposing their own high tariffs on trading partners. Instead, a number of countries have made substantial moves to strengthen their trading relations — e.g., after decades of stalled negotiations, India and the European Union agreed to a free trade deal. And Canada, of course, is trying to compensate for its now-troubled relations with the U.S. by becoming an “associate member” of the EU (although nobody quite knows what that might mean).

Yet for me the biggest surprise arising from the Trump tariffs has been the complete absence of a significant domestic political constituency. This failure has been driven home by polling on Trump’s confrontation with Canada, which appears to be nearly as unpopular as his war with Iran.

This is not, I believe, what most economists or political analysts would have predicted. Conventional economic analysis, while arguing that free trade raises real income for a nation as a whole, also suggests that tariffs can nonetheless benefit significant groups within a nation. Moreover, because the beneficiaries from tariffs are often localized and organized while the costs are dispersed, tariff advocates often wield disproportionate political influence. Indeed, one of the main purposes of world trade rules has historically been to strengthen governments’ hands against their own domestic anti-free-trade constituencies.

However, the actual political response to Trump’s tariffs hasn’t followed this traditional model. Rather, support for the tariffs appears to be limited to that segment of the population — around — that supports almost anything Trump does.

Beyond the paywall, I will address the following:

1. Why conventional economics says about tariffs

2. Polling on the Trump tariffs

3. Explaining low support I: Value chains

4. Explaining low support II: The service economy and affordability

5. Explaining low support III: The Trump factor

6. A policy without a constituency