by Jeremiah Johnson, The Dispatch, Nov. 4, 2025- For decades, the working consensus in American politics was that free trade was good. Every Republican presidential nominee from Gerald Ford to Mitt Romney supported agreements to expand and liberalize international trade. Democrats have historically been a bit more reluctant, but their most successful presidents of the last 50 years—Bill Clinton and Barack Obama—both championed free trade and pursued large, multilateral trade agreements. Both the vote to create NAFTA in 1993 and the vote to grant China permanent normal trade relations passed on a bipartisan basis.
That changed in 2016. Hillary Clinton broke with the Obama administration to oppose the Trans Pacific Partnership, and Donald Trump tore up the GOP’s traditional views on trade to promote heavily protectionist, anti-trade policies. Trump withdrew from the TPP on his first day in office, and he was the first president in generations to significantly raise America’s tariff level. ...
Economists say Trump’s tariffs are causing economic chaos—higher prices, slower growth, and increased uncertainty with Trump’s frequent changes. And yet, Democrats haven’t come out forcefully for the idea of free trade. Why?
Democrats have long had a complicated relationship with trade. Despite Clinton and Obama championing international trade, significant parts of the Democratic coalition have opposed new trade agreements. Major unions fiercely opposed TPP, a free trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim nations including Japan, Australia, Vietnam, Peru, and Chile, with AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka calling it “a new low.” And the populist, anti-capitalist left has always been skeptical of globalization and free trade, from the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle to Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders opposing TPP.
.... If Republicans are now the party of high tariffs and trade skepticism, Democrats can’t just be the party of “tariffs, but smarter.” America needs at least one of our major parties to stand up, loudly and clearly, for free trade.
The situation is ripe for Democrats to unapologetically champion trade because the damage being done by Trump’s tariffs is real and hitting so many sectors of the economy simultaneously.
... China bought more than $12 billion of American soybeans in 2024, our single largest export to China—but that number has now dropped to zero. .. The U.S. manufacturing industry has contracted for seven straight months under Trump. This is exactly the opposite of what trade skeptics promised. High tariffs were supposed to usher in a new golden age of manufacturing, but they’re killing American manufacturers instead. ... The U.S. has lost tens of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing sector since April, and that slide is likely to continue as long as tariff chaos does. Tariffs haven’t saved American manufacturing; they’ve weakened it further.
The economic case for free trade is clear. Tariffs increase prices for consumers, they lower GDP growth and kill jobs, they hit low-income families hardest, and they’re causing economic uncertainty and instability. Economists almost universally oppose tariffs, and the long-run gains from trade dwarf any localized pain. But there’s another reason Democrats should come out aggressively against protectionism—it’s a threat to the rule of law.
Trump is attempting to build an “imperial presidency” in his second term, where he can bypass Congress and rule via executive orders and decrees straight from the White House. ... Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution gives Congress the sole power to “collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” on foreign countries. Over the years, Congress has passed laws delegating this power to the president in certain circumstances. But Trump has taken a tool meant for emergency measures and illegally used it to pass sweeping tariffs on every country in the world.
An appeals court has already found that most of Trump’s tariffs are illegal. The logic is simple—and the Supreme Court will be hearing arguments in the matter on Wednesday. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) shifts authority from Congress to the president to regulate economic transactions in the case of “unusual and extraordinary” threats or national emergencies. It would be preposterous to say that our trade partnerships with every country in the world (even those with which we have a surplus) are an unusual and extraordinary emergency, especially since most of those partnerships have been steady over time. And Trump often doesn’t even try to pretend that the “emergency” is real—he recently increased tariffs on Canada simply because they hurt his feelings in an advertisement.
... Democrats should loudly demand that Congress reassert control over trade policy, and they should do it in the context of taking power away from the President. ... Democrats should loudly proclaim what’s obvious—tariffs are bad policy, and Trump’s tariffs in particular are wrecking the economy. ... Democrats should loudly, publicly, repeatedly make the case that tariffs are taxes on the middle class. They should demand an end to Trump’s tariffs, promise to reverse them as soon as they regain power, and demand that trade policy return to its constitutionally appointed place with Congress. (read it all)
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