If Republicans lose big in November, watch for them to move away from Trump and back toward Reagan.
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Donald Trump’s tariffs are hurting Americans. Real economic growth is slowing, consumer prices rising, and real wages stagnating. Now the Republican Party is set to pay for it.
Since the founding, tariffs have proved toxic to the party that implemented them. When Mr. Trump asserted executive authority to impose the highest tariffs in 90 years, Republican congressmen, though skeptical, remained silent. If tariffs hurt Republicans in the November elections as much as they have hurt the economy, the midterms could end up igniting a Reagan revival on trade, shifting the trajectory of the party and the country.
No American president was more passionate about trade liberalization than Ronald Reagan. He understood that free and open markets allow “more productive use of our nation’s resources, more rapid innovation, and a higher standard of living,” as he said in 1985. “The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and peace among nations.”
Most Republicans in Congress favor free trade. They voted by large majorities for the North American Free Trade Agreement, almost unanimously for free trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, in large numbers for giving President Obama trade promotion authority, and overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump’s U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.
The production disruptions and economic uncertainty that have come with Mr. Trump’s tariffs aren’t winning Americans over. Instead, the prevalence of the view that trade is “an opportunity for economic growth” has soared to 82%, twice the 2008 level, according to a March Gallup poll, which found that 74% of Republicans have a positive view of trade. Republican voters may tell pollsters they support Mr. Trump’s tariff policy, but that support is declining. A February Guardian-Harris Poll found 53% of Republicans say tariffs aren’t the right solution for improving the economy, and 64% said Mr. Trump’s tariffs caused higher prices.
Historically, presidents needed congressional approval for major policy changes. But while most Republicans in Congress supported the president’s decision to attack Iran to prevent it from producing nuclear weapons and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Mr. Trump’s use of executive authority to impose tariffs hasn’t been broadly supported by Republicans in Congress.
In this extraordinary circumstance, congressional Republicans, because of intimidation or party loyalty, failed to oppose Mr. Trump’s tariffs despite their own strong pro-trade records. The unwillingness of Republicans to serve as a check on Mr. Trump’s use of executive authority under almost any circumstance has strengthened the argument that a Democratic majority in Congress is needed to check Mr. Trump’s power. If the November elections go badly for Republicans, we can expect a Republican backlash against Mr. Trump’s tariff policies.
As Republicans struggle to find their way in the aftermath, we will find out whether the north star of the party is still Reagan’s commitment to open markets and free enterprise. Trade, in turn, could become a major issue in the 2028 presidential election. That campaign begins on Wednesday, Nov. 4, and Republicans can win by embracing trade. The case for ending the Trump tariffs, lowering consumer prices and expanding U.S. world commerce becomes stronger with American domination of artificial intelligence.
Americans have reaped enormous gains from the fall of protectionist barriers. Per capita gross domestic product has risen 367% in real purchasing power since 1947. In a paper for the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Gary Hufbauer and Megan Hogan estimated that from 1950 through 2022 America’s engagement in the world economy helped hundreds of millions of people worldwide escape poverty and added 10% to U.S. GDP.
U.S. agriculture needs foreign markets, and almost all U.S. manufacturing needs foreign components. Without low-cost inputs from abroad, many manufacturers can’t export their products. Our AI industry relies on foreign chips and other imported components to remain cost-efficient and will need open foreign markets to sell the explosion in U.S. production that AI dominance will bring. Now more than ever, U.S. companies have economic reasons to resist protectionism, creating an expanding political base for reducing tariffs that didn’t exist in the 1970s, when U.S. foreign trade was only 40% as large a share of GDP as it is today.
A postelection Reagan revival on the trade issue among Republican lawmakers could produce a majority in Congress to reassert the legislative branch’s powers over international commerce and taxes. If the lessons of the election are powerful enough, a Trump veto on trade could be overridden.
The 2028 Republican primaries could be an opportunity for this Reagan trade revival to reassert control of the GOP. The right candidate could run on “affordability,” committing to overturn the Trump tariffs and differentiating himself from Trump protectionism and industrial policy. He might win the nomination and then run in the general election, unencumbered by Mr. Trump’s record, on a platform of reviving the Reagan policies of free enterprise, open markets and limited government.
Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the Mercatus Center. Michael Solon contributed to this article.