A market-rattling attempt to make the American economy Trump always wanted
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. As investors and consumers fretted in recent weeks about the fallout if President Trump unleashed a massive trade war, Trump himself kept looking to the past. The rest of the world has been ripping off the U.S.
for 40 years, he told advisers who asked him to articulate his economic vision. It was, he and his advisers would note, an argument he has been making on television since the 1980s. Before his second term ends, he said, he feels he has to right those wrongs.
If people complained about the tariffs he was about to impose, Trump told his inner circle to remind the public of his view of how the U.S. once was and could be again: a place with thriving Main Streets and hometowns, where American workers made American products sold to the American public. Trump leaned into that vision with his market-shaking tariff announcement Wednesday.
“Empty, dead sites, factories that are falling down…will be knocked down, and they’re going to have brand new factories built in their place," he said, to an audience that included members of the United Auto Workers union. “We’re going to be an entirely different country." The tariffs Trump announced would lift the average duty above the previous peak of 1930. It is by far the most disruptive component of an agenda that may be one of the most disruptive of any new president since the 1930s, one that includes slashing immigration, government spending, taxes and regulations.
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