Donald Trump took yet another step toward winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination after defeating former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in Michigan's primary on Tuesday, February 27 — a win that follows his victories in the Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. The election is shaping up to be a Trump/President Joe Biden rematch, and one of the issues they will be debating is economic policy.
Trump has been campaigning on a very protectionist economic platform, which investor and economic analyst Steve Rattner is vehemently critical of in an op-ed published by the New York Times the morning after the Michigan primary.
Rattner, who served as a counsel to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner under President Barack Obama, argues, "While Trumponomics 1.0 had major flaws — like the deficit-expanding tax cut giveaways to business and the rich — Trumponomics 2.0 is downright scary. Although Mr. Trump has yet to issue a formal plan, the unalterable conclusion based on what has dribbled out from his campaign speeches, video monologues and his current set of advisers is that he will follow a course that veers even farther from the traditional Republican lane of a global approach to economic policy and into the populist, isolationist lane."
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Rattner, often featured as an economic analyst for MSNBC, emphasizes that "trade wars" during a second Trump term would be disastrous for the United States economically.
"On tariffs, immigration and regulation," Rattner explains, "Mr. Trump would continue the troubling trendlines of his first term in office. The United States would sink farther into misguided protectionism with new trade wars. Business and the wealthy would be enriched by lower taxes and increasingly freed from oversight. Legal immigration would be reduced. And we would continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere while intentionally sandbagging our booming clean energy sector…. At the top of my worry list for a second Trump term: an even more aggressively protectionist approach to trade than he pursued during his four years in office."
Rattner continues, "Mr. Trump has never understood that, on balance, trade can elevate the standard of living and add jobs. In his first term, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs on items ranging from steel to washing machines that, according to economic studies, raised consumer prices and ultimately cost American jobs, in part because other countries retaliated with their own tariffs…. And the inflation that's worrying voters now could get a lot worse, given that Mr. Trump wants to double down with 10 percent across-the-board levies on imports — and still bigger tariffs on countries that retaliate — up from an average 2 percent at present."
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Steve Rattner's full New York Times op-ed is available at this link (subscription required).