Before Trump’s re-election in November 2024, progressive commentators often advocated higher US tariffs to achieve three overlapping goals: improve jobs and wages for workers; boost the manufacturing sector; and reduce US trade deficits. A few populist commentators on the right voiced the same agenda. But President Trump’s chaotic tariff proposals since his inauguration far exceed the prescriptions of policy advocates outside the president’s inner circle. With that context in mind, it’s worth summarizing what tariff advocates say, now that Trump’s agenda dominates the headlines.
AFL-CIO
For decades, the nation’s premier labor organization has opposed nearly all trade agreements and has endorsed restrictions on manufactured imports, such as autos (strict rules of origin in the USMCA), steel and aluminum (Trump 1.0 tariffs). But AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler issued the following statement in response to Trump’s tariffs against Canada and Mexico:
While we support the targeted use of tariffs to protect workers from unfair competition, the Trump administration’s blanket tariffs run the risk of causing unnecessary economic pain for America’s workers without addressing workers’ core economic priorities. The tariffs on Canada are particularly damaging…
Representative Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)
Rep. Kaptur is the longest-serving Congresswoman (since 1983). She was a strident opponent of NAFTA, and supports tariffs on manufactured imports, particularly steel. But Kaptur has energetically opposed Trump’s tariffs on the House floor and in the media. This is one quote from BlueSky:
The Trump Administration’s imposition of a 25% tariff on US-Canada trade will severely impact jobs and companies in the Great Lakes region, including across Northwest Ohio. Canada is our best trading partner and these unneeded tariffs are about to raise your prices on everything.
[image or embed]— Marcy Kaptur (@repmarcykaptur.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Kaptur urges Trump to focus his tariffs on China and other countries that run large trade surpluses with the US.
Lori Wallach, American Civil Liberties Project
As a leader in the litigation group Public Citizen, Lori Wallach founded and directed the Global Trade Watch in that organization. Currently she is director of the Rethink Trade program at the American Civil Liberties Project. In these roles, Wallach fought against NAFTA, the WTO, and the TPP. In her own words, “I opposed corporate-rigged trade deals/hyperglobalization and supported industrial policy before it was cool.”
Wallach’s views are largely posted on videos and YouTube appearances. Here is an excerpt from a recent interview:
Tariffs are part of the formula of the tools you use to try and reestablish our ability to make things here that we need and create good jobs for the two-thirds of Americans who don’t have a college degree, so making solar panels, medicine, EVs… But slapping on tariffs on Mexico and Canada, ostensibly about migration and drug trafficking, is not just ineffective — I mean, it’s like trying to do surgery with a saxophone instead of a scalpel — but also is going to be damaging. It’s going to cause enormous disruption, but without any of the outcomes and goals that one might actually want to use a tariff to achieve to help working people or build our resilience.
Economic Policy Institute
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has long criticized trade agreements and advocated tariff protection for the manufacturing sector. Thea Lee, a recognized progressive voice on trade issues, was president of the EPI from 2017 to 2021 before serving as Deputy Undersecretary for International Labor Affairs in the Department of Labor from 2021 to 2025. Lee and EPI chief economist Josh Bivens have shaped the EPI’s trade agenda.
In February 2025 (updated in March 2025), EPI published a “Fact Sheet” on tariffs with extensive comments on Trump’s agenda. Key excerpts:
Tariffs can do a number of useful things…[But h]igh and broad-based tariffs [cannot] fix the US trade deficit or rebuild manufacturing employment…mostly because high and broad-based tariffs will also reduce exports along with imports, and this will leave the balance of trade mostly unchanged.” Moreover, “American households will bear most of the burden of higher tariffs. This will mostly come through higher prices for imported goods and, crucially, higher prices for domestic goods that compete with imports.”
Tariffs should not become a significant revenue source for government spending because, “Tariffs are essentially a tax on consumption and are, hence, more regressive than most current federal revenue sources.”
And to conclude, “Narrow, strategic tariffs can be a useful tool. Trump’s broad-based, chaotic tariffs would cost consumers in every state.”
Clyde Prestowitz, Economic Strategy Institute
Founder of the Economic Strategy Institute, Prestowitz served in the Reagan Administration as a Counselor to the Secretary of Commerce. Along with over 130 former Republican officials, in 2020 Prestowitz signed a statement indicating Trump was unfit to serve another term in office. Prestowitz advocates high tariffs on manufactured goods as a pro-growth policy, argues that the economics profession has wrongly castigated the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, and contends that liberalizing trade with China was an historic mistake. But Prestowitz severely criticizes Trump’s tariff agenda for targeting Mexico, Canada, and the European Union.
Michael Pettis
A finance professor at Peking University and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Pettis published an article in Foreign Affairs shortly after Trump’s election, titled “How Tariffs Can Help America”. Arguing that economists distilled the wrong lesson from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, Pettis contends that high tariffs today could depress consumption, increase savings, and thereby improve the US trade balance, especially in manufactured goods. Accordingly, he sees tariffs as a policy tool to boost growth and raise American living standards.
But reflecting on Trump’s proposal for uniform 10 percent or 20 percent tariffs, Pettis posted this comment on X:
Actually I think across-the-board import tariffs, if properly implemented, can indeed reverse the US role in accommodating global savings and trade imbalances, but as I’ve said many times before, they are the least efficient way, in part because they are very blunt…
In March 2025, Pettis had this to say about Trump’s tariff agenda:
For now, I don’t think Trump’s tariffs will have much impact on the overall US trade deficit, which I expect to be as large this year as it was last year. It is only once the US takes serious systemic steps to reduce its trade deficit that real trade disruption will occur.
Oren Cass, American Compass
Founder and Chief Economist of the conservative American Compass, Oren Cass ranks among the most avid defenders, outside the White House circles, of Trump’s tariff agenda. Like other right-of-center populists, Cass sees the decline of manufacturing jobs as an American calamity:
I think what we are seeing in the US economy today is sort of a fundamental disorder that is a function of saying that manufacturing just doesn’t matter, that we don’t need to make anything. We can have our iPhones designed in California and it doesn’t matter where they’re actually produced.
Writing in the Washington Post in February 2025, Cass declared,
For all the lamentations about President Donald Trump’s unconventional volley of tariff threats over the past week, the result is remarkably sane — approaching ideal.
No duties had actually been imposed on imports from Mexico or Canada, though both countries stepped up their border controls, but “Trump has delivered [tariffs against China] with a precision strike, refuting claims that tariffs cannot be done well.”
Bipartisan Dissent from Bad Ideas
Among the progressives sampled, no enthusiasm can be found for Trump’s tariff agenda. The same is true of three left-of-center Washington policy institutes: the Center for American Progress, the Institute for Policy Studies, and Third Way.
Progressives are distressed by threatened tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and are visibly concerned about the regressive cost-of-living impact Trump’s agenda will have on lower-income households. Beginning with the NAFTA debate during the Clinton Administration, progressive voices provided the ideological foundation for a high tariff agenda, but they are far from pleased with Trump’s implementation.
Populist conservatives cited in this blog are a mixed bag. All three favor high tariffs on the manufacturing sector, believing that cheap consumer goods are a false objective, and are very critical of China’s industrial prowess. But only Oren Cass truly embraces Trump’s tariff agenda. On April 2, 2025, Trump will reveal his falsely labeled “reciprocal” tariffs, seemingly designed to confront every US trading partner with higher tariffs. Trump has designated April 2 as “Liberation Day.” The verdict of progressive and populist tariff advocates remains to be seen.