UPDATE (April 9, 2025, 2:17 p.m. ET): On Wednesday President Donald Trump shared on social media that he is raising U.S. tariff charges on China to 125%. For other countries, the president said in the post, he is issuing a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs, during which time he will lower tariff charges to 10%.
Before President Donald Trump’s expanded tariffs went into effect on Wednesday, hedge fund billionaire and MAGA fan Bill Ackman warned over the weekend on X that the country was “heading for a self-induced, economic nuclear winter.” As he contemplated the pain ahead, he sounded mournful, perhaps even regretful: “This is not what we voted for.”
Many other conservative commentators and investors have echoed Ackman’s sentiment as Trump’s radical tariff plans have rocked global markets. And it is absurd. Trump has advocated for protectionist trade policy for decades, long before running for president. He also repeatedly proposed economically disastrous plans to institute tariffs on the 2024 campaign trail. Ignoring that required ignoring the historical truth that presidents generally pursue their core policy agenda — even Trump.
The denialism on the right has been remarkable.
The denialism on the right has been remarkable. Some right-wing pundits have argued that the current crisis is a surprise because Trump never presented on the campaign trail this specific — and economically nonsensical — tariff formula for extremely high duties on imports from scores of countries around the world. Business and tech leaders — who showered Trump with money in hopes of favorable treatment — have reportedly been surprised by Trump’s fierce commitment to tariffs. Mega-billionaire Elon Musk, who recently wore a hat emblazoned with the words “Trump was right about everything!” has reportedly been directly appealing to Trump to drop the tariffs.
The claim that Trump is pursuing a trade policy that goes beyond what they voted for is indefensible. On the campaign trail last year Trump promoted massive universal tariffs and went as far as to float the idea of replacing income taxes with tariff revenue. At the time, Adam Hersh, a senior economist with Economic Policy Institute Action, told me Trump’s idea was like “dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane.” Hersh calculated at the time that across-the-board tariffs would have to be somewhere around 120% or 130% on incoming goods to make up for the roughly $4.2 trillion in revenue generated through income taxes. With the U.S. set to impose a 104% tariff rate on Chinese goods beginning Wednesday, it’s a bit silly to say none of this was foreseeable.
The counter to this position is that Trump promised tariffs ahead of his first term in office and that his first tariff regime was relatively moderate and targeted. That’s true. But anybody observing Trump should’ve noted a few things ahead of his second White House bid. After his first term in office, his rhetoric grew more extreme on everything from dismantling democracy to immigration to trade.
Secondly, Trump has fewer checks on his instincts this time around. His first term in office was in some respects a hostile takeover of the GOP, it elicited open criticism from some tech leaders, and it was staffed by many pre-MAGA conservatives and more conventional Washington players. This time the party and the business community treat him with extreme deference, and he is surrounded with loyalists and MAGA ideologues. Many of the very people who are now mad at Trump already gave him more room to play — and he’s naturally exploiting it.
A common strategy Trump supporters use in justifying their support for him despite his extreme policy ideas has been to cherry-pick his more moderate policy ideas and insist that his most extreme ideas are not “serious” ones. That might be a quasi-effective tool for Trump supporters attempting to save face in polite society or mainstream spaces, but it is most certainly a gimmick for Trump supporters to have their cake and eat it, too. Trump has demonstrated time and time again that when it comes to his right-wing nationalism and his authoritarian rhetoric, he means what he says — and after the Jan. 6 riot, it became clear one cannot rule anything out with him.
Despite his incorrigible mendacity, Trump fits a broader historical pattern: The historical record and reams of political science studies show presidents and members of Congress generally do try to pursue their campaign promises. As Vox reported in 2015, “An overview of 21 studies of campaign promises from the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Greece found that on average, political parties fulfilled 67 percent of their promises.”
In his first term Trump did indeed follow through on many of his campaign pledges. He found a way to reduce immigration from Muslim-majority countries, killed and renegotiated free trade deals, reversed climate progress, enacted tax cuts for the rich, tried (and failed) to end the Affordable Care Act, moved the U.S. Embassy in Israel and set in motion an end to the war in Afghanistan. There was no reason to presume that Trump’s second term wouldn’t follow a similar course, but more maximalist due to his intensified campaign rhetoric.
Given the historical record, Trump’s own track record and his constant promises to pursue a radical tariffs regime, the position that Trump supporters didn’t vote for this economic crisis is untenable. A more honest position might be that a segment of his voters decided that a gamble on tariffs was worth it because they liked other things Trump promised, whether that’s politicizing the Justice Department or treating migrants like they aren’t human or promising fewer regulations on businesses. But they played their cards wrong — and we’re all paying for it.