Published March 7, 2025
President Trump’s address to the joint session of Congress Tuesday night was overlong, self-congratulatory, and highly partisan. It also contained a strong, if still underdeveloped, argument in favor of his signature economic proposal: tariffs.
Trump, or some of his economic surrogates in the Cabinet, will likely need to develop that argument if they are to rally and sustain public support in the face of the near unanimous opposition of global economic, intellectual, and political elites. That extended explanation can build on the key points Trump raised—fairness, national security, and economic revitalization—and marry them to a mature exposition of precisely how tariffs can achieve Trump’s stated goals.
Trump’s three basic points are sound. America does often levy lower tariffs and impose fewer non-tariff barriers to trade than many of our trading partners. His desire to install reciprocal tariffs and barriers—the United States will match whatever another country does regarding trade in a particular good or service—will strike most Americans as simple fairness. No longer will a nation like China or Germany have access to our huge domestic market to export goods in which they have a comparative advantage, while effectively blocking Americans from shipping goods in which they have an advantage to their nations.
National security is another likely key selling point. In his address, Trump used the examples of shipbuilding and steel, emphasizing that we need to be able to produce our own steel and build our own vessels if we are to defend ourselves in the event of war.
This is especially poignant as America is often dependent on its primary adversary, China, for many goods it needs for its military. In other cases, the nations we depend on—such as South Korea and Japan for ships and Taiwan for high-end computer chips—are close enough to China to risk supply lines to the United States in the event of a war.
That’s intuitively sound, as any glance at a map would show. Over 70% of Americans already see China as an enemy or an adversary. Present them with this argument, and many will likely support government intervention in these crucial industries to make us secure.
The third point, economic revitalization, is more contested but still holds widespread appeal. The effect of Chinese competition alone cost millions of Americans their jobs and decreased the incomes of many others. Add the impact of competition from other nations, and we can see why tens of millions of Americans don’t think the system works for them any longer.
Educated Americans with six-figure jobs may enjoy the flood of cheaper goods. However, the national interest requires that we act to ensure a more broadly shared prosperity, one that depends more your willingness to work and less on a piece of paper you earned in your teens.
Trump’s argument delivered at the joint address, however, remains incomplete because he hasn’t carefully explained how tariffs will realize his goals. One point, tariff reciprocity, could even work against his ideas as it implicitly gives our trading partners the initiative in setting trade terms with us. China, for example, could simply remove the barriers and tariffs they have installed and rely on their lower labor and energy costs to beat American competition.
It’s also incomplete because it fails to recognize how Trump’s other economic programs—lower corporate taxes for goods produced in the United States, ending subsidies to favored firms like those embodied in the CHIPS and Sciences Act, and ending illegal immigration—work in tandem with tariffs. Take one of these pillars away, and the incentives to relocate provided by tariffs alone may fail to create a brighter future.
Finally, Trump’s argument crucially does not explain that these measures will take years to work. The global trading system wasn’t built overnight, and it will not be reoriented overnight either. It takes years to build new factories or find new markets for existing goods. That readjustment period will likely bring short-term pain before the renewed economy starts to produce tangible gain.
Put all these elements together and a Trump economic address—a much shorter one than his address to Congress—could look something like this:
Globalism was started with the best of intentions. Free trade would let us bring American values to the world, reducing poverty and conflict. American producers would make things more cheaply, helping consumers, while American workers would increase their skills and earn more working in fields that American ingenuity gave us an economic leg up. Peace, prosperity, and freedom—what’s not to like?
We all know it didn’t turn out that way. Nations took advantage of our open markets and didn’t play by the rules. That let them unfairly undercut American producers and put American workers out of a job. China, in particular, didn’t become a free nation as it became rich; instead, a renewed Communist Party created a techno-totalitarian state at home and tried to spread their system abroad.
Poor nations got richer, but too many Americans got poorer. And China’s rise meant the risk of war went up, not down.
Illegal immigration hurt America even more. Crime and deaths from smuggled fentanyl ravaged communities, and illegal workers undercut American wages. Why should employers invest in giving Americans new skills when they can hire someone else for a fraction of the price?
My plan ends this. Tariffs raise the cost of importing goods from overseas, and extra tariffs on China push Americans away from paying for our own potential destruction. Cutting corporate tax rates for companies that make things in America pulls producers to our communities—without the corruption that comes from picking winners and losers through subsidies like those in the CHIPS Act.
Ending illegal immigration cuts off the cheap labor force that is unfairly reducing American wages and jobs.
These changes will work: America is too large of economy for producers not to come back here. But it took years to dig the hole we’re in now, and it will take years for us to get ourselves out of it.
In the short term, we may see prices rise a bit for some things, and some companies dependent on cheap labor or imports may get hurt. But that’s the short-term pain we have to go through to reach long-term gain.
America has done it before, and it can do it again. Franklin Delano Roosevelt didn’t get America out of the Great Depression all at once, and Ronald Reagan had to increase unemployment for a while to crush double-digit inflation. But Americans could see where these great leaders were headed and gave them time for their plans to work.
They did work, and Americans entered into decades of growth as a result. Trust me, and we’ll make America even greater, again.
Who knows if the administration has plans to make an argument of this type. Trump’s speech Tuesday night, however, gave them the tools with which to craft it. Do that, and Trump will be better positioned to ride out the inevitable economic bumps ahead.
Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, studies and provides commentary on American politics. His work focuses on how America’s political order is being upended by populist challenges, from the left and the right. He also studies populism’s impact in other democracies in the developed world.
