Just So We're Clear on the 2024 Election....

I have my issues with Joe Biden. I have way WAY bigger issues with Donald Trump.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Remember earlier this week, when I was pretty critical of the Biden administration’s trade agenda? Longtime readers are aware that this is a running theme for the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World. I have said it before and I will say it again: the greatest area of commonality between the Biden and Trump administrations has been on trade policy, and it is a policy that I do not think serves the national interest.

That said, there is an appreciable difference between the bad foreign economic policies that the Biden administration is pursuing…. and the galactically stupid and counterproductive foreign economic policies that Trump is promising to implement as president. And that difference matters a fair amount.

For example, one key source of the inflationary surge of 2022-23 was the snarling of global supply chains that, over time, became unsnarled.¹ It highlighted the fact that U.S. economic openness was one source of the low-inflation environment that most Americans took for granted right up until it was interrupted by the pandemic.

As an opposition candidate, Donald Trump has hit Biden hard on inflation. This is curious, since the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein notes that Trump’s foreign economic policies would do wonders for accelerating inflation:

With a substantial lead in the 2024 GOP presidential primary days before the Iowa caucuses, Trump has proposed imposing unprecedented new tariffs on trillions of dollars worth of imports and deporting undocumented workers on a vast scale. Both campaign pledges risk exacerbating the price spikes that have subsided over the last year, according to liberal and conservative economists alike, in addition to some estimates cited by the former president’s own advisers. If he’s elected, Trump could implement these policies at least in part without needing Congress to act.

Trump’s enormously disruptive policy proposals come as he appears likely to jettison the more cautious and establishment-friendly economic advisers that restrained his most nationalist and confrontational impulses during his first term. These advisers — such as former treasury secretary Steven T. Mnuchin — now find themselves either at war with Trump or receding from his inner circle, potentially empowering more fringe voices….

“The problem is what he’s proposing is so far outside historic experience there’s not even a decent set of estimates about it,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “I saw some clip where Trump was attacking Biden about inflation, and it’s like, ‘You’re going to massively restrict the supply of workers and do a 10 percent across the board tariff?’ On the economics, that’s completely insane.”….

Casey B. Mulligan, who served as chief economist for Trump’s White House Council of Economic Advisers, estimated in an interview that Trump’s 10 percent import tariff proposal would add an extra percentage point to inflation, or a quarter percent a year if spread out over four years. The Federal Reserve has been trying to wrestle inflation down from four-decade highs to the more normal level of 2 percent….

Some estimates are even higher. Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank, estimates that Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan would increase the overall consumer price index by two to three percentage points, which would amount to roughly doubling the current pace of inflation.

The rest of Stein’s story explains how Trump’s immigration policies and threats to the independence of the Federal Reserve would only stoke inflation further.

What about the claims that Trump will not follow through on his campaign promises? Remember that one of the few ways Trump was like other presidents is that he wanted to fulfill his campaign promises. Because he was an immature leader with a short attention span, however, Trump found it difficult to follow through on those pledges in his first term.

In a second term, however, Trump’s rhetoric and campaign reveal an embrace of unlimited executive power and intent to purge the bureaucracy of anything that smacks of personal disloyalty. This strongly increases the likelihood that he will enact what he is promising to do in the campaign. And that way lies economic ruin.

Donald Trump is an illiberal politician who uses threats of violence as a means to bully countervailing institutions into quiescence. His lawyers yesterday suggested in court that, “even a president directing SEAL Team Six to kill a political opponent would be an action barred from prosecution given a former executive’s broad immunity to criminal prosecution.”

It is also worth remembering, however, that Trump was a bad president proposing even more disastrous economic policies this time around.

So whatever beefs I have with the Biden administration — more on that later — I will vote for him over Donald Trump, and it’s not close. I just thought that should be explicit as the 2024 campaign heats up.

1. Gosh, I wonder if anyone suggested that those supply lines would unstick themselves?!