The 2024 US presidential election has another nine months to play out, and predictions are a mug’s game at this point. But here’s some evidence of why Donald Trump might perform better than you might expect, if not win.
A recent working paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research explored the intriguing issue of whether then-president Trump’s tariff wars, especially against China, delivered any benefits to the sectors they were intended to assist. The paper focused on economic impacts in the sectors Trump claimed he wanted to protect, and on agriculture, which was hit hard by retaliatory tariffs from other countries.
Trump’s tariffs didn’t work:
… import tariffs do not appear to increase employment in manufacturing (the intended beneficiary sector); rather, their positive effects are confined to the service sector, particularly business services — though this effect is imprecisely estimated. Second, retaliatory tariffs appear to reduce employment in crop production (their primary target sector), as well as transportation and warehousing, business services, and other services.
Meaning, the net result was fewer American jobs. Why? Partly because US importers might have switched from Chinese-sourced imports to other imports. And any job gains from the tariffs might have been offset by job losses from areas where higher prices resulting from the tariffs cut employment.
To help the agricultural sector affected by retaliatory tariffs, Trump resorted to another protectionist device: agricultural subsidies. They only offset a tiny fraction of the jobs lost as a result of other countries’ tariffs.
None of this is surprising. Tariffs, like all forms of protectionism, are the equivalent of punching yourself in the face because another country is doing the same thing. They don’t even force importers or foreign producers to pay more; it’s your consumers and businesses that end up doing that. Trump caused a trade war and wasted taxpayer money in order to cause, in broad terms, no change in American employment — just as everyone knew would happen. It’s a blatant example of the kind of incompetence that characterised his administration.
This latest study is of a piece with an extensive literature detailing how economically damaging Trump’s trade war was to the broader US economy, employment and even to the trade balance it was designed to improve. The studies range from the self-interested (the China trade lobby), to centrist think tanks, business-friendly think tanks, free trade think tanks, the business media, and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few.
But here’s the additional part of the study that should make for a dispiriting read: the tariffs (and subsidies), despite their negligible and harmful effects, increased support for Trump and the Republicans:
The tariff war was evidently successful in shifting voter identification away from the Democratic Party. Did it affect voting? … import tariff exposure significantly increased support for the Republican candidate … import tariffs raised president Trump’s two-party vote share by +0.67%. Retaliatory tariffs had a modest and statistically insignificant negative effect on the Republican vote, while farm subsidies had a weakly positive effect.
Why? One reason might be that Trump constantly lied about the non-existent benefits of the tariffs, including claiming that any manufacturing expansion at the time was because of him. Or it could be that voters didn’t really care if there were no benefits from the tariffs — they liked Trump trying anyway.
In other words, being incompetent doesn’t matter that much for many voters. What’s more important is tribalism: being prepared to signal that you will back your own even if it’s harmful and costs jobs. It’s also possible that the very fact that large numbers of experts, academics and corporations warned that Trump’s tariffs were a bad idea legitimised them in the minds of voters, given the antipathy toward free markets and globalisation.
It’s not a message lost on the Biden administration, which retained the bulk of Trump’s tariffs and implemented its own colossal industry subsidy program to onshore complex manufacturing to undermine China, boost renewables investment and rebuild US manufacturing. Biden is effectively trying to do something similar to Trump, but is putting more emphasis on a less directly damaging mechanism (subsidies) and linking it to high-tech manufacturing and renewables rather than standard manufacturing.
Biden’s challenge is to tap into the same tribalism — something Trump is an all-time master at — for programs that are aimed at achieving the same thing, just in a slightly less self-destructive way. It boils down not to competence or governing well, but shaping whether voters feel you’re on their side, even if you’re costing them their jobs.
No, competence doesn’t matter anymore in America. Once the smartest country on Earth, much of its population have now degenerated into a rabble who demand to be told what they want to hear. And there are no shortage of media outlets and manipulators who will comply. Look at the Taylor Swift ‘psyop’ scandal that Fox is currently promoting. Pizzagate. The Sandy Hook ‘conspiracy’. The ‘stolen election.’ Collectively, America has a mental health issue, and is avoiding treatment.
Not sure if the ‘smartest’ country on earth meets the test of history. Even their technology was either stolen or took a wrong turn in development. The suppression of the electric car for the interests of the oil industry, for example. Hollywood holding back developments in chemical film and sound to ‘save’ on the cost of adapting vertical integration with the movie theater cartel.
And plastic killed hemp. Henry Ford made a hemp car and attacked it with a sledge hammer without damaging it. Then along came rayon and the rest. DDT. Bhophal. Scientific experts are always wrong, God created the world in six days 4,007 years ago, and that’ll do. And Trump being the only sane voice that knows what we want will get my vote! It’s a no-brainer he’ll win and if he doesn’t it must be we’ve been cheated. Anyway, Democrats always cheat, everyone knows that, so that proves it. Honneee! Put ammo on the shopping list for Walmart.
It was Alexander Dupont who killed hemp with Prohibition in the 1920s. Watch the doco Billion Dollar Crop. And it was Du Pont’s mates who killed off Tesla’s electric car dream. Hemp plastic is now at Development stage of R&D. It breaks down, apparently.
Another explanation is that most voters do not look deep enough to see the overall effect of measures like tariffs so they can properly compare them to any alternative. Economists and policy wonks might take the trouble to analsyse the consequences, and some of the better quality media might report it, but none of that reaches ordinary voters. All they see is that Trump is doing something, and he says he’s doing it for them. And that’s what they like, they like it a lot. This works in most areas of policy. For example, tax cuts are almost universally popular, even when they only go to rich people, because the connection to crap government services and infrastructure never gets through; few see any downside to any tax cut. And so on.
Don’t forget that all most people get to see as ‘news’ is what their curated social media algorithms feed them, which means more and more of the same confirming views, gradually getting simpler and simpler – with less and less counter-views getting any screen time presence at all. What could possibly go wrong?!
Anti-social media is making it worse, much worse, but it precedes that development. Early in the first Blair government in the UK, late 1990s, the newspaper headlines were full of moral panic stories about feral teenagers and the problems they cause. Blair turned to his political advisors (SPADs) — not his civil servants, he was at the forefront of the movement away from using their competent disinterested expert advice — and told the SPADs he needed an eye-catching initiative that would make him look good. Blair did not demand or even suggest that the initiative be based on any evidence or knowledge, nor did he show any interest in whether it would work. The only criteria he set were that it would grab attention and puff up his image. That approach is the essence of modern government, whoever is in power. (For anyone interested, the initiative Blair adopted was the Anti-Social Behavior Order or ASBO, which did indeed grab headlines, and wasted quite a bit of time and money, and was eventually seen as doing more harm than good; the ASBO became a badge of honour among certain groups of youths, rather like being awarded a medal. ASBOs were replaced with a different system in 2014.)
There’s another detailed example of this style of government in Rory Stewart’s book Politics on the Edge about his time as a UK Tory MP and minister, about his first encounter with Liz Truss after she was made Environment Minister with him as her junior minister. When she asked for input he first, mistakenly, thought he was supposed to develop a proper policy proposal and enthusiastically began to suggest how he would go about it. She quickly made it clear he was being silly. She wanted no such thing, she only wanted a quick list of good-sounding aspirational bullet points she could wave about in public, nothing of substance, anyone could knock it together in 5 minutes. Stewart’s political career crashed and burned when he tried opposing Johnson on the grounds Johnson was utterly unfit for high office. Meanwhile Truss rose to be PM (only briefly and calamitously, however she remains a darling of the British loony right).
I’m not actually surprised by this – people like Trump because he gives them a license to be openly hostile to women, racial. minorities and trans people, not because of economic policies he understands or ever intended to implement.
Increasingly, many of the above median age voters are no longer in the workforce or active in the economy, but it’s more a xenophobic dog whistle to ageing ‘workers’?
The equivalent of ‘self-harm politics’.
“They” followed lying leaders, hunnish harlot headstrong hopeless “heroes”, all through history, from Rameses, to Caesar, on to Attila, Napoleion, Adolf and Josef, so, why not a complete bowelload in Trump? So honest, keen, moral, generous, capable, and intellectual too…
Tends to not start wars, but, unlike your list.
Tends not to start wars – that was his 1st term. He’s become increasingly unhinged since he was elected in 2016. 2020’s result and the White House insurrection on 6th January 2021 took it all to a different level. If Pence hadn’t refused to obey Trump’s wishes and demands…………. how do we think the next 4 years would be panning out now?