Former Senator Pat Toomey spoke last month at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit in Maryland on a panel hosted by Dominic Pino. Toomey’s insight into Trump’s view of tariffs obviously derived from personal experience arguing with Trump over trade. Here Toomey anticipated yesterday’s tariff announcement (the video below is cued at this point):
This, I’m afraid, is going to take us down a bad path, Dominic. I think that we’re going to experience more aggressive tariffs than a lot of people think, because the president really believes that — what he really wants to go after is the trade deficits. What he really objects to, and from all of my arguments with him, I’m convinced that he believes — and if you listen to his language — he believes that if you have a trade deficit with another country, that is the measure of the amount that country steals from you. And that of course disregards that we get something when we purchase products from other countries, but this is the way he views it. He thinks that the Canadians are ripping us off, because we buy some more goods from them than they buy from us (by the way, the difference is fully explained by oil imports that are quite useful and important to us). But this is where we are. We’re going to have to relearn this lesson. I do think the markets are going to respond very poorly, if I’m right and on April 2 we discover we’re having a more aggressive round of tariffs than we expect.
Jeffrey Blehar has extracted the quote and posted the video below in his comment at NR this morning (behind NR’s paywall).
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