SIMI VALLEY, California—The timing of the first-ever Reagan National Economic Forum was somewhat ironic. As attendees were hearing from leaders such as Paul Ryan and Steve Mnuchin on Friday, President Donald Trump announced at a speech in Pennsylvania that he would raise tariffs on all steel imports from 25 percent to 50 percent.
Trump made his announcement the day after hundreds of government officials, business leaders, and policy experts had made their way up a winding mountain road to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Against a backdrop of sweeping views of the surrounding valley and just steps away from the 40th president’s final resting place, they gathered to discuss issues related to taxes, spending, regulation, and growth.
The event, hosted by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute, comes as many Republicans are struggling to reconcile the party’s past economic direction with Trump’s agenda. It’s one that many conservative thinkers believe is a far cry from the priorities pursued by Reagan roughly four decades earlier.
Trump’s relentless belief in tariffs as a means of ensuring American strength is where the president’s populism differs most profoundly from Reagan’s economic policy. Where Trump has imposed global tariffs without clearly defining what would make them successful, Reagan used targeted tariffs toward a specific goal. But even as he imposed heavy tariffs on Japan in 1987, alleging it was violating a trade agreement by not prohibiting its companies from dumping semiconductors in other nations and stymying American companies’ access to its markets, Reagan explained he was no fan of such taxes. “Because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: markets shrink and collapse, businesses and industries shut down, and millions of people lose their jobs,” he said at the time, emphasizing that his goal was not to start a trade war with Japan but to lift the import duties as soon as his administration believed the country to be within compliance.
Despite the obvious differences between Reaganomics and Trump’s tariffs-and-tax-cuts agenda, there were plenty of efforts to paper over differences between Reaganite policies and the ones Trump is pursuing.
Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota attempted to equate Reagan’s attitude with Trump’s current trade policy. “His point was,” Rounds said of Reagan’s rhetoric toward Japan, “you’re going to have a tariff, but, long term, the best thing for our producers is fair and free trade, not necessarily relying on the need for a tariff long-term. So I have no problem with the president coming out and saying, ‘Look at all these bad trade deals we’ve got.”
But though Trump has characterized his “Liberation Day” tariffs as a negotiating tactic, he has not espoused Reagan’s attitude that tariffs are merely a means toward the end of reciprocal free trade.
In a brief interview with The Dispatch after participating in a panel on the U.S. relationship with China, Rounds acknowledged that Trump has “a little bit different approach,” that the president sees “some value in the revenue that’s developed by” tariffs. But the greatest difference Rounds articulated between Reagan and Trump was one of the scope of conducting trade deals rather than their goals.
“Rather than doing it one country at a time like President Reagan was doing it, President Trump has tried to do a whole lot of countries at one time, and that takes a whole lot more just meeting and the ability to touch base with a whole lot of people in a very short period of time,” Rounds said. Thus far, the only trade agreements negotiated by the administration are with China and the United Kingdom.
During the dozen or so forum discussions on such topics as taxes, energy, trade, housing, spending, and more, multiple Republican officeholders attempted to cast in a Reaganite light the more populist policies and attitudes that Trump has made part of the GOP ethos. That they felt the need to do so reinforces several truths about the modern party. First, many Republicans in Congress and the executive branch—as well as those active in the conservative movement outside of the government—became conservatives before the rise of Trump, when Reaganism still dominated the movement and party. Second, ordinary Republican voters enamored with Trump do not see his policies as a rejection of Reaganite principles, but rather as a follow-up to them. During the 2024 election cycle, Trump did not attempt too much to distance himself from Reagan, even embracing him at times. A video the Trump campaign produced repurposed Reagan’s “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” monologue from the 1980 campaign to attack President Joe Biden’s record.
Similarly, Republicans who spoke at the forum argued that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which contains his key second-term legislative agenda, was in line with Reagan’s legacy. Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender cast the goals of the bill in especially Reaganite terms.
“The basic economic agenda is the combination of extending tax reform, some new pro-growth and pro-labor-supply elements to tax cuts 2.0, combined with bringing back energy dominance and deregulation, and then engaging in spending cuts,” he said. “We will simultaneously see a continuation or expansion of economic growth and deficits as a percentage of GDP come down.”
On another panel, moderator Neil Irwin of Axios asked Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri—who chairs the House committee that wrote the tax portion of the bill—whether there was a case for the more populist individual tax breaks—such as eliminating taxes on tips and overtime—based on the supply-side economics Reagan championed.
Smith noted that he and his colleagues created the tax bill “by going outside of Washington, D.C.” and receiving feedback from people across the country, but he managed to craft a pro-growth case for some of the bill’s provisions.
“You look at the no tax on overtime—this incentivizes people to be more productive at work when we already have a shortage in labor. This is very proactive,” he said. He also listed some parts of the legislation designed to boost manufacturing production, such as allowing a 100 percent tax deduction for machinery and an immediate deduction for research and development costs. “These are all things that, if you combine them, the effective tax rate for manufacturing in the United States would be right at 15 percent,” he told the attendees.
No Republican officials at the forum portrayed Trump and Reagan’s economic philosophies as diametrically opposed, but some who are no longer in public service or elected office offered a bit more skepticism of Trump’s trade policies. One such person was Ryan—who has a long history of policy differences with the current president—in assessing how Trump’s tariffs are likely to play out.
“I hope the trade fight is the Larry Kudlow plan like it was in Trump 1.0, which is, get to these reciprocal agreements,” he said during a panel with Faulkender and others on economic growth, referring to the head of the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. “I understand there’s a lot of negotiating and blustering, but if the goal of this is to get these reciprocal agreements where our allies—and we’re lowering trade barriers … then we have reduced that unpredictability, that uncertainty, which is right now kind of plaguing with the economy.”
Kudlow, who served in Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget, was moderating the panel, on which Trump’s first-term treasury secretary, Mnuchin, also spoke.
“The Mnuchin-Kudlow version of trade was to lower barriers as much as possible, tariff and non-tariff barriers. I’ll just leave it at that,” Kudlow replied to Ryan. His response elicited laughs from the panel and the audience.
