Trade policy came up at last week's presidential debate, with a somewhat traditional discussion of tariffs at the start, and then a shift at the end to security-related issues.
Kamala Harris started it off by referring to Trump's proposed universal baseline tariffs as a sales tax:
... My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20% tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that Trump's sales tax would actually result for middle-class families in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.
She has been consistent in criticizing his tariffs, going all the way back to when she was running for president in 2019.
Trump then responded as follows:
First of all, I have no sales tax. That's an incorrect statement. She knows that. We're doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we've done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off because it was so much money, they can't. It would totally destroy everything that they've set out to do. They've taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They've left the tariffs on. When I had it, I had tariffs and yet I had no inflation.
(Let me interject a couple points here: 1) Trump continues to misrepresent who pays tariffs; 2) I would like to hear what Harris has to say about keeping some of Trump's tariffs in place; and (3) saying there was "no inflation" is a distraction from that fact that prices rose for the goods on which the tariffs were imposed.)
Moderator David Muir then asked this follow-up:
Mr. President, I do want to drill down on something you both brought up. The vice president brought up your tariffs, you responded, and let's drill down on this because your plan is what she calls ... essentially a national sales tax. Your proposal calls for tariffs as you pointed out here, on foreign imports across the board. You recently said that you might double your plan, imposing tariffs up to 20% on goods coming into this country. As you know many economists say that with tariffs at that level costs are then passed onto the consumer. Vice President Harris has argued it'll mean higher prices on gas, food, clothing medication arguing it costs the typical family nearly four thousand dollars a year. Do you believe Americans can afford higher prices because of tariffs?
Trump responded with more of the same:
They aren't gonna have higher prices, what's gonna have and who's gonna have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years. ... I was the only president ever, China was paying us hundreds of billions of dollars and so were other countries and you know if she doesn't like 'em they should have gone out and they should have immediately cut the tariffs but those tariffs are there three and a half years now under their administration. We are gonna take in billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars. I had no inflation, virtually no inflation, they had the highest inflation, perhaps in the history of our country because I've never seen a worse period of time. ...
Muir then asked Harris the question I had in mind about Biden keeping some of the tariffs:
Vice President Harris, I do want to ask for your response and you heard what the president said there because the Biden administration did keep a number of the Trump tariffs in place, so how do you respond?
In response, Harris criticized Trump's tariffs in general terms, and then, interestingly, turned this into more of a China security issue:
Well, let's be clear that the Trump administration resulted in a trade deficit, one of the highest we've ever seen in the history of America. He invited trade wars, you wanna talk about his deal with China, what he ended up doing is under Donald Trump's presidency he ended up selling American chips to China to help them improve and modernize their military, basically sold us out when a policy about China should be in making sure the United States of America wins the competition for the 21st century. Which means focusing on the details of what that requires, focusing on relationships with our allies, focusing on investing in American based technology so that we win the race on A.I. and quantum computing, focusing on what we need to do to support America's workforce, so that we don't end up having the, on the short end of the stick in terms of workers' rights. ...
Trying to figure out what Trump thinks can be a challenge, but it seems to me that his big concern on trade is the trade deficit, and the fix he wants to use is tariffs. (He misunderstands both of these issues, but let's put that aside). By contrast, he does not appear to be particularly concerned about the security issues related to China that most Republicans and many Democrats in Washington are worked up about these days. For example, Trump has said several times that if Chinese companies want to sell autos in the U.S., they should produce them here. But I'm not sure many other national Republican politicians would want to let such investments happen. And while a lot of people in Washington are focused on winning the technology race with China, Trump seems to envision the economic contest as one over older industries such as steel and traditional autos, rather than advanced tech. I don't think I've ever heard him talk about the Chinese accessing Americans' data, which many other people in Washington worry about and which is why there are concerns with Americans driving Chinese autos full of software that can gather data.
More broadly, I'm not sure Trump thinks of China as much of a security threat. The main threat that he sees -- from China, the EU, and others -- is a trade threat. He thinks their trade policies and our trade policies, working together, have cost American jobs. His analysis is all wrong here, but that seems to be what he thinks.
Having said all that, I wouldn't say this means a Trump administration would not have a security focus. In all likelihood, Trump will hire a lot of people who share the security concerns that most Washington policymakers have.
