Nearly one year after President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” speech on April 2, 2025, in which he announced the imposition of tariffs on nearly every country in the world, the administration’s tariffs remain highly unpopular with the nation. According to a recent poll by YouGov, 60 percent of Americans strongly or somewhat approve of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision to strike down the sweeping levies.
At the time, Trump had boldly declared that Liberation Day would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” claiming that the tariffs would raise “trillions and trillions of dollars” to reduce taxes and pay down the national debt. “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country … and ultimately, more production at home will mean stronger competition and lower prices for consumers,” he added.
Yet today, the promises of those in power must be constantly trimmed to account for their negative side effects. Those with memories longer than a news cycle will recall that the response from the equity, debt, and currency markets to the April 2 “declaration of economic independence” was so immediately and overwhelmingly negative—the S&P 500 declined 10 percent, the dollar fell, and bond prices plummeted—that Trump had to reverse course, suspending the tariffs and then lowering them. Currently, 52 percent of imported items are exempt from tariffs because of trade agreements, exemptions, and carve-outs.
Over the past year, most of us have grown nauseated by the near-constant refrain from tariff advocates that Liberation Day has not led to economic disaster. Elites and globalists are part of a global free trade conspiracy, the argument goes, and don’t know what they’re talking about, especially when it comes to tariffs.
Yes, the tariffs haven’t led to disaster, but we’ve also been dealing with a moving target in tariff rates, tariff-affected goods, delays in implementation, and exemptions. And the need for this breathing space amid the tariffs seems to support the broader free-trade argument against them. Taxes stall commerce, both within nations and internationally among producers and buyers.
Ironically, Trump’s tariffs have failed because they are based on the reasons he used to justify their implementation. Those with economic knowledge or common sense have long understood that the damage caused by such extensive tariffs would outweigh any benefits to specific producers or industries. What is notable is that Trump’s economic nationalist rhetoric, which has shaped our view of trade policy for more than a decade, has been proven wrong by the very results of the policies that those appeals promoted. The evidence is so strong that we need to evaluate where a policy driven solely by this ideology has brought us.
Has American industry been “reborn,” as Trump claimed it would be? Perhaps the more important question ignored by economic nationalists is whether it was ever truly dying in the first place. We have clear signs that once the tariffs were enacted, domestic metal producers saw higher prices for their goods and improved profit margins. However, the entire manufacturing sector, which relies heavily on imported unfinished and intermediate goods, has faced rising costs for steel, aluminum, and other inputs. Employment in export-focused manufacturing firms has fallen. Overall, manufacturing employment decreased by roughly 100,000 jobs in 2025, continuing a trend that Trump promised to reverse through his sweeping duties on foreign industry. Was this the promised liberation, or simply the loss of a paycheck?
Trump predicted the return of jobs and factories, but the opposite has occurred. In reality, his policies have impeded one of the world’s most productive manufacturing sectors. A stubborn fact, rarely mentioned, is that the American manufacturing sector needs workers, particularly skilled ones. This would suggest an industry in potential growth mode, not decline. These openings have not been created by or in response to Trump’s tariffs. In 2025, the industry had more than 400,000 unfilled positions, representing between 6 and 7 percent of all open jobs in the U.S. This has been a consistent annual number of job openings in the manufacturing sector, dating to at least 2010.
How many more new jobs, engineered by tariffs or industrial policy, does the manufacturing sector need to be considered “roaring”? What the sector most needs are skilled workers who should emerge from a range of incentives that help people access the training needed to work in these positions.
The manufacturing industry had a value-added economic output of more than $2.9 trillion in 2025, a number that has steadily grown even as its overall workforce has declined over the past 40 years. In 2024, the manufacturing sector employed 12.8 million workers, a decrease of 6.7 million from its peak in 1979. Nonetheless, during this period, the sector’s productivity has increased by around 60 to 65 percent. These gains plateaued after the 2008 financial crisis, but we must also consider the overall dynamism of the American economy, with sectors such as services, finance, health care, and technology continually advancing productivity, fueled by consumer demand. This is what the manufacturing sector competes against in an economy that grows wealthier, where consumers increasingly spend their money outside the manufacturing sector, on things such as new phones, Ubers, and eating out.
To support manufacturing, we should reduce the federal regulations that drain around $350 billion per year from the sector, a burden that, to varying degrees, also constrains every other sector. The energy and capital expensing policies under the Trump administration are steps in the right direction. Trump’s energy policies aim to unleash energy production through deregulation and the easing of licensing and permitting requirements. The capital expensing policy allows companies to deduct the full value of capital investments from their taxes in the first year they are made. These are pro-growth measures. Tariffs are not.
The president also assured American consumers that their dollars would not be used to pay for the tariffs. But that claim, which never had merit, stands refuted by the results of his policies. It’s not for nothing that Kevin Hassett, Trump’s chief economic adviser, excoriated New York Federal Reserve economists for their research showing that 86 to 90 percent of the costs of the tariffs had been borne by American companies and consumers. Hassett stated they should be “disciplined” for producing research that supported the traditional view that prices respond adversely to negative government interventions in the economy.
Prices for imported goods have risen by 5 to 6.6 percent, while competing domestic goods have increased by 2.5 to 3.8 percent as U.S. firms necessarily take advantage of the situation. Average household costs grew by $1,000 in 2025. The most affected items include appliances, electronics, furniture and home goods, apparel, and industrial inputs. Many of these essentials are used by every American, including the working and middle classes, whose budgets are now stretched even thinner. Walmart stated in February during an earnings call that its prices rose by more than 3 percent between October and December of last year. Trump’s claim that his tariffs would “mean stronger competition and lower prices” has turned him into Lewis Carroll’s White Queen, making us believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Nor has Trump’s promise that the tariffs would raise “trillions” come to pass. An analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that tariffs raised only $288 billion in federal revenue in 2025, equivalent to 4 percent of total federal revenue for that year.
The record of Trump’s tariffs becomes that of just another federal incursion into the private sector, one that brings neither liberation nor desperation, only more pressure on the world’s most impressive economy. Worryingly, it is also an incursion that is sustained by the guilt and grievances of a political class that vows to manipulate the economy for its own purposes. Too many Americans, including conservatives, have fallen prey to these verbal tricks. The outcome has been clearly negative for their personal finances and for many of the companies they work for.
The U.S. is now facing its own challenges as allies and trading partners work to protect their interests. America accounts for 25 percent of the world’s GDP, leaving 75 percent outside its influence. Today, Canada is seeking a trade agreement with China while the European Union looks to both China and India for deals. Just as water naturally flows downhill, our trading partners affected by tariffs will eventually regroup and strengthen their own trade relationships to offset the impact we have imposed on their economies.
Tariffs are a very blunt form of taxation. They tax not only imported consumer goods but also intermediate capital goods. They lower workers’ real wages by making certain goods more expensive. They reduce the productivity of companies and capital by raising the prices of inputs and other goods used in business while protecting domestic industries, leading to inefficiencies and job losses in other sectors. We were promised liberation. Instead, we have relearned that tariffs are just taxes that slow down our strong economy and weaken America’s power.
