I've noticed the technique of saying it's his "policies" has become popular among the non-deplorables within the Republican party. You know the people that realize that Trump's character and conduct are reprehensible, so rather than endorsing that, they endorse his policies. In a similar way that they excused their 2016 vote as being for conservative judges. I suspect that these are generally the old guard conservatives, who remember back when their party wasn't a cult of personality and actually had some concept of guiding principles, like free markets.
Of course rather than actually describe the policies they like, they tend to describe their desired end result: lower inflation! Sealed border! The best economy!
Well here was Trump yesterday in North Carolina on his tariff policy:
Former president
Donald Trump on Wednesday appeared to open the door to significantly expanding his plans to impose sweeping new tariffs if he returns to office, suggesting an escalation in proposals that many experts already see as likely to cause a global trade war.
Previously, the Republican presidential nominee
had called for levying tariffs of 10 percent on all U.S. trading partners, aiming to create a “ring around the collar” of the national economy. But during remarks on the economy in Asheville, N.C., Trump for the first time floated tariffs of between “10 and 20 percent” on imports to the United States.
The Trump campaign sought to play down the significance of the comment and said the former president did not specify that the 20 percent tariff would apply to all nations. Still, the new figure represented an intensification of Trump’s trade proposals, which have already alarmed some Republican donors wary of disrupting the global trade order and have faced heavy criticism from Democratic lawmakers.
“We’re going to have 10 to 20 percent tariffs on foreign countries that have been ripping us off for years,” Trump said Wednesday. “We’re going to charge them 10 to 20 percent to come in and take advantage of our country.”
The tariff remark could draw renewed attention to the former president’s economic plans and his first-term approach to global trade.
A 10 percent universal tariff, coupled with a tariff of as much as 60 percent on China that Trump has also eyed, would cost a typical middle-income household roughly $1,700 per year, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a pro-trade Washington-based think tank. Doubling that would increase its costs to U.S. households, while probably doing more to shield domestic producers from foreign competition.
“It has been 10 percent universal across the board — 20 percent would be a doubling of that, and all analyses have already shown that would be detrimental to the economy,” said Erica York, an analyst at the Tax Foundation, a conservative-leaning think tank. “It’s an escalation of what would already be an escalation from his first term.”
Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, said: “He has clearly floated the 10 percent, and if he’s now saying ‘10 to 20 percent’ you can assume the baseline is the same — that seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.”
Holtz-Eakin said many business leaders are concerned with the seemingly erratic nature of Trump’s policy process. “If you go to 10 to 20 percent in North Carolina, who is to say you won’t go to 40 percent in Wisconsin?” he added.
