Just after taking the oath of office earlier this year, President Donald Trump vowed to overhaul America’s trade system, promising that under his policies, “the American dream will soon be back and thriving like never before.”
His plan: to tear down America’s decades-old network of trade deals and return domestic manufacturing to levels not seen since the 1950s.
Nearly three months later, we can see how poorly that’s working out so far. After Trump imposed a 10% worldwide baseline tariff and a whopping 145% cumulative tariff on imports from China, the stock market sank, other countries retaliated, our trade partners began looking for leadership elsewhere and Trump was forced to back down, while claiming this was the plan all along.
Through the tumult of the last week, one thing has become clear. The global economy is here to stay, with or without us.
For years, Trump has treated global trade as a zero-sum game and sold his supporters a pipe dream of gleaming American factories. But the domestic manufacturing heyday that Trump keeps promising to restore is just as obsolete as the coal reliance he’s trying to revive and just as outdated as the gilded ’80s aesthetic of his properties.
It’s taken just over a week for other countries to begin making plans for a global trade system in which the United States is a supporting cast member.
The full impact of Trump’s economic policy has yet to be felt, but it’s taken just over a week for other countries, including our allies, to begin making plans for a global trade system in which the United States is a supporting cast member.
Reports broke this week that our allies Japan and South Korea are pursuing trade talks with our mutual rival, China. This is a far cry from 2022, when the Biden administration established the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework — a coalition of more than a dozen countries in the region specifically designed to strengthen trade and supply chain resiliency while reducing Beijing’s influence in the region, all with the United States leading the way.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney pledged a $5 billion trade diversification initiative to reduce our biggest trading partner’s reliance on the United States. Carney has also said Canadians would have to “fundamentally reimagine our economy” in the face of Trump’s trade war.
Even with Trump issuing a slapdash 90-day pause on these tariffs in the face of crumbling markets, his constant waffling on the issue and the lack of clarity surrounding his endgame risk making the U.S. too volatile to be seen as a reliable partner.
Disrupting our national influence and making Americans’ lives harder is bad enough, but Trump’s tariff tantrum is playing with political fire, too.
For decades, voters have wrongly seen the Republican Party as the party of fiscal responsibility. The 2024 election was no different. In NBC News’ final poll before Trump and then-Vice President Kamala Harris faced off this past November, Trump held a 10-point lead in voter perception on handling the economy and a 12-point lead on dealing with the cost of living. If the worst impact of Trump’s tariff obsession comes to fruition, he risks single-handedly wiping out what has been perceived as his party’s strongest electoral issue. We’re already seeing the ground shift, as a recent Wall Street Journal poll found 52% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s economic policies — a massive change from the pre-election Journal poll, where voters approved of Trump’s economic plan by double digits. So combustible is Trump’s economic recklessness that even some Republican lawmakers are sheepishly sounding the alarm. Americans will begin casting their ballots in the 2026 midterms in a year and a half. Trump had better think carefully about what he wants their wallets to look like when they choose which names to check. For more thought-provoking insights from Symone Sanders-Townsend, Michael Steele and Alicia Menendez, watch “The Weekend” every Saturday and Sunday at 8 a.m. ET on MSNBC.
Symone D. Sanders Townsend is an author and a co-host of "The Weeknight."
Evan Brechtel
Evan Brechtel is a segment producer on MSNBC's "The Weekend." 
