Donald Trump hopes to reclaim the presidency in part by riding a wave of economic discontent. Here are the central tenets of his economic policy agenda.
During his first term, Trump oversaw an economy that expanded every quarter of his presidency, save during the pandemic, and featured low unemployment before the pandemic took hold, a scenario that Team Trump is trying to recreate should he win in November.
The former president is looking to contrast his economic agenda with that of President Joe Biden, who, despite boasting strong job numbers and a post-pandemic economic expansion, has been mired in low economic approval ratings due to high inflation and high interest rates.
Renewed and escalated trade war
Trump’s four years in office featured a historic shift in trade policy, particularly for a Republican president, given the GOP’s longtime focus on free trade and the reduction of barriers to global commerce. A second Trump presidency would not only continue the trend of higher tariffs and more restrictive trade policies, something that Biden has largely continued, but would go even further.
The centerpiece of Trump’s trade proposals is the passage of a law called the Reciprocal Trade Act, which would allow the president to unilaterally impose tariffs of equal size placed by other countries on the U.S.
“We have been a country that was disrespected on trade, and frankly, disrespected on just about everything,” Trump said in a video posted to his campaign website.
Trump has also floated 10% across-the-board tariffs, which would be an aggressive escalation.
Trump’s tariff policy proposals are billed as narrowing the trade deficit and supporting domestic manufacturing jobs. The push is also advertised as safeguarding the country’s supply chains, which, as the pandemic exposed, are often reliant on foreign nations for critical goods such as medicines and certain minerals.
The trade platform planks also come with a major element of competition with China. One of Trump’s advisers on trade, former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, is a top China hawk. He contends that the shift in China policy ushered in under Trump is here to stay.
“It’s hard to remember how we thought about China six years ago, but certainly the Obama administration and most Americans didn’t realize the extent to which they were a hostile force and a hostile adversary,” Lighthizer told the Washington Examiner last year.
And that logic has held up. Biden has largely maintained the China tariffs imposed under Trump, and just this week the president directed his trade representative to increase tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act on $18 billion of imports from China.
Removing Biden energy rules
Biden dramatically expanded rulemaking during his time in office and, in particular, made prioritizing efforts to curb climate change a priority. A second Trump presidency would be expected to unravel many of those regulatory changes.
For instance, in late March, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule that enacts stronger tailpipe emission standards for vehicles, such as freight trucks and buses, created between 2027 and 2032. Last month, the agency finalized rules to limit power plant emissions that Republicans say would shutter coal plants.
Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner during an interview on Monday that while there will be some energy rules that Trump, if he gets a Republican-controlled Congress, will be able to roll back quickly using a legislative tool called the Congressional Review Act, others will take a bit more time.
A GOP-controlled Congress can efficiently reverse final regulations using the CRA if the Biden-era rules in question are introduced 60 working days before this session of Congress ends. The deadline for that is thought to be around the end of May.
When Trump entered office back in 2017, he used the CRA to rescind more than a dozen Obama-era rules, many of which related to energy and the environment.
Crews said other rules a second Trump administration may target come largely from both the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. Because those rules won’t meet the 60-day deadline for a CRA, the Trump administration would have to work a bit harder to unravel them.
“So what will happen with those rules instead is there will be court challenges, and then the Trump administration will try to rewrite those rules,” Crews said of the rules prior to the CRA deadline.
The Biden administration seems aware of the possibility of Trump sweeping into office and bulldozing its legacy of environmental regulations and is trying to jam through final rules now in order to avoid rescission by CRA.
“Biden is making it as difficult for Trump as possible by putting these big fat rules through really quickly, getting them in before the summer, and they’re vulnerable to overturn,” Crews said.
Limiting immigration
Trump and Republicans have made paring back immigration and protecting the border their top campaign priority. Trump has made the immigration issue not only one of law and order and public safety but also an economic issue.
In a series of videos posted to his campaign website, Trump noted that the U.S. is trillions of dollars in debt and said Biden is trying to give public benefits to migrants through higher taxes.
“So not only is Crooked Joe surrendering your borders and your sovereignty, he is stealing your hard-earned money to redistribute it to people who have no business being in our country,” Trump said.
For years, there have also been fears that waves of immigrants would replace jobs for Americans who are already in the U.S. Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said the jobs that are replaced are typically those at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who need them the most.
“Historically, whenever you’ve got people coming in at the lower end of the economic spectrum with very limited skills, they don’t tend to eat the lunch of journalists and academics,” Hankinson told the Washington Examiner. “They eat the lunch of Americans who have maybe a high school diploma at best … in many ways the new illegal immigrant wave is competing with the last wave of legal immigrants.”
Tax cuts
The biggest legislative change to economic policy during Trump’s first term was the passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, known as the Trump tax cuts or Republican tax cuts. That law lowered taxes for both individuals and corporations, although many provisions of the bill are set to expire next year — and some already have.
Dan Savickas, director of policy at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, said that preserving and extending those provisions will be a major priority for a new Republican administration.
“So implementing something that has a little bit more staying power or building off of what TCJA started … I think that’s the spot to start,” he told the Washington Examiner, “because a lot of those benefits and a lot of those things for businesses that they have come to rely on or see as permanent are not in fact permanent.”
Steve Moore, an informal Trump adviser and a Heritage Foundation economist, said he thinks a major priority for Trump will be keeping individual tax rates low in order to avoid tax hikes for the middle class.
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“We want to make sure the lower rates stay in effect,” Moore told the Washington Examiner, noting that the cut in the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% was permanent.
Moore also pointed out that the Trump tax cuts doubled the standard deduction that the vast majority of taxpayers take instead of itemizing.
