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0America’s Brexit? Trump’s historic gamble on tariffs has been decades in the making
Trump’s economic assault on the world stunned economists and sent stock markets into a spiral. Who will pay the price?
April 5th, 2025, The Guardian
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Donald Trump’s vast overhaul of US trade policy this week has called time on an era of globalization, alarming people, governments and investors around the world. No one should have been surprised, the US president said.
The announcement of 10% to 50% tariffs on US trading partners tanked stock markets after Trump unveiled a “declaration of economic independence” so drastic it drew comparison with Britain’s exit from the European Union – Brexit.
But Trump, who won re-election promising that tariffs would make America great again, has advocated for the return of widespread tariffs with “great consistency” for decades. “I’ve been talking about it for 40 years,” he noted in the White House Rose Garden.
Many businesses, economists and politicians believe Trump’s trade plan is wrongheaded, flawed and risky. Some have even suggested it might have been written by ChatGPT. But he is unquestionably right when it comes to the number of decades he has argued for it.
“This is so unusual for Trump. He’s a conventional politician in one way: he doesn’t believe in much deeply,” Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. Tariffs are different. “This one thing, he seems to deeply believe in.”
As far back as 1987, when a fame-hungry real estate tycoon took out full-page ads in newspapers, the now president called for such a strategy. Other major economies are the “greatest profit machines ever created”, he argued way back when. “‘Tax’ these wealthy nations, not America.”
