Why ‘Liberation Day’ Frightened Democrats – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Anyone foolish enough to take seriously the rhetoric of the Democrats concerning the reciprocal tariffs announced by President Trump on “Liberation Day” will experience two sensations — dread and confusion. This unpleasant combination was inevitable due to the strident denunciation of tariffs by a political party whose presidents have routinely deployed them in the recent past. President Obama, for example, imposed a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires and President Biden deployed a 25 percent tariff on Chinese steel and aluminum. Yet the voters are now expected to believe the Trump tariffs will somehow plunge us into a recession or something akin to the Great Depression.

It goes without saying, of course, that the corporate media is dutifully parroting the Democratic Party line. A wide variety of “news” outlets have blamed the recent Stock Market slump on Trump’s tariffs. Nonetheless, as the President’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Tucker Carlson on Friday, “For everyone who thinks these market declines are all based on the President’s economic policies, I can tell you this decline started with the Chinese AI announcement of DeepSeek.” Nonetheless, the corporate media continues to diagnose the country’s economic health based on the day-to-day Dow Jones Average, despite  the following admonition from former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich, “Repeat after me: The stock market is not the economy.”

Another subject much belabored by the media and the Democrats is a federal tariff law to which most of us were introduced in high school — the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. This law was implemented in 1931, yet most of us were told by economically illiterate public school teachers that Smoot-Hawley caused the Great Depression which began in 1929. Yet an internet search will pull up dozens of articles comparing Trump’s tariffs to Smoot-Hawley. Oddly enough, it’s difficult to find any article connecting free trade to the nation’s decimated industrial base. One of the few exceptions was published in the Wall Street Journal by by John Michaelson.

Perhaps the worst part of America’s [free] trade policies is their legacy of deindustrialization. Swaths of the country once proud of producing steel and aircraft are now better known for opioid abuse. The death of American industry has exacerbated inequality by eliminating millions of high-wage jobs across America that didn’t require high levels of education. Deindustrialization curtails American innovation, since production breeds know-how and invention. The end of American industry ultimately means the end of American power.

Moreover, the disastrous results of deindustrialization almost certainly contributed to Trump’s decisive victory last November. It is by no means a coincidence that many of the lost jobs to which Michaelson refers disappeared from the fabled “blue wall” states Trump won in 2024. Free trade policies supported by Democrats left our markets wide open to imports from countries that continued to impose exorbitant tariffs on many products manufactured in the United States. The resultant trade deficits inflicted very real pain on many voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, driving them straight into the Trump campaign’s welcoming arms.

Democrats Kept Trump’s Previous Tariff Regime

Trump promised these voters he would use tariffs to revitalize manufacturing in the U.S. And, despite the hysterics of the Democrats and the media, we are already seeing encouraging developments. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told ABC News Sunday Morning, “I got a report from the USTR last night that more than 50 countries have reached out to the President to begin negotiations.” Why? They desperately want to make a deal. Would it be good for us? According to a U.S. International Trade Commission report, Trump’s 2018 steel and aluminum tariffs increased domestic production with negligible price effects.

Section 232 tariffs are estimated to have increased the price of domestically produced steel by about 0.7 percent, on average, and increased the quantity of steel production by about 1.9 percent. During the same time period, section 232 tariffs are estimated to have increased the price of domestically produced aluminum by 0.9 percent, on average, and increased the quantity of domestic production by about 3.6 percent. The increases in production quantity in the steel and aluminum industries translated to an increase of about $2.25 billion in 2021.

This is why the Biden administration kept these Trump tariffs in place and actually expanded them to cover other manufactured goods. Consequently, when Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was asked during a PBS interview about potential price increases associated with those new tariffs, she answered as follows: “I don’t believe that American consumers will see any meaningful increase in the prices that they face.” In other words, even a Democratic official with Yellen’s obvious limitations knew that carefully calibrated tariffs have little or no effect on prices. Now, it would appear that the laws of economics have somehow changed.

It’s hard to escape the impression that the Democratic Party and its corporate media propagandists are terrified that Trump’s tariffs will work as intended. This would convince the voters they made the correct choice last November, and it that it is no longer safe to trust the Democrats on trade or anything else relating to the economy. Those USW and UAU members they lost last year will look at falling fuel prices, a secure southern border and a recovering industrial base and conclude that “Liberation Day” was actually January 20, 2025.

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