A recent interview in Foreign Affairs acknowledges: it’s hard to name someone alive today who has had more of an effect on how America thinks about trade policy than Robert Lighthizer. In “The New Trade Order,” he lays out the case against free trade. For decades, he says, Washington chased a free-trade fantasy. The “trifecta of stupid” (his phrase for NAFTA, the WTO, and permanent normal trade relations with China) exposed our markets, caused the “China shock,” and shipped millions of manufacturing jobs overseas. The narrative result is a hollowed-out heartland where wages stagnated while coastal areas like San Francisco and New York City boomed, $27 trillion in wealth signed over to foreigners, and industrial towns so broken that men without college degrees now die eight years sooner than those with them.
By Lighthizer’s account, our pursuit of free trade has caused all of this. “Nobody really believes in free trade,” he told Foreign Affairs last week, “with the exception of the Harvard economics faculty and a few Anglophone politicians.” This harkens back to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s indictment of economic models being a product of “elite consensus,” as opposed to real world evidence.
There’s just one problem. Today, with mountains of evidence, the verdict is in. As we’ve understood for 250 years now, protectionism has not led to the reindustrialization of America, has raised hardly any revenue, and has made us less safe, not more.
The Public Isn’t Buying It
The American people seem to have noticed the pernicious effects of tariffs and other forms of protectionism. New polling among 3,000 registered voters in late July finds that support for free trade beats the opposition by more than four to one in every single income bracket. Further, it’s popular with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, and those with and without college degrees. Navigator Research finds that 59 percent of Americans view tariffs unfavorably against just 29 percent favorable. YouGov finds 72 percent of Americans understand that tariffs raise prices while just three percent think they lower them. And another poll finds that 64 percent of Americans disapprove of how the president has handled tariffs.
As if that weren’t enough, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds that, for the first time in decades, “Democrats lead Republicans 37 percent to 36 percent on stewardship of the US economy.” While a great deal of that can be attributed to high gas prices and the war with Iran, the public’s verdict on protectionism is not in doubt.
Tariffs were sold as a means of supporting the “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid” against the “coastal elites.” Despite this, the forgotten man wants free trade and overwhelmingly so. Non-college voters, the very people that Lighthizer is concerned about and wants to help, back free trade. Why have the supposed beneficiaries of tariffs turned against the very policy that was promised to deliver jobs, wealth, and security? The answer is simple: on all three counts, tariffs are not working.
Jobs: Are We More Industrialized?
Start with the promise of reindustrialization. On April 29, 2025 President Trump held a rally in Michigan celebrating his hundredth day in office. There, he made several claims about how his administration was going to completely revitalize the state and its economy. As he said, “And a lot of auto jobs coming [sic]. Watch what’s happening. The companies are coming in by the tens. You got to see what’s happening. They all want to come back to Michigan and build cars again. You know why? Because of our tax and tariff policy.”
Automotive manufacturing employment in Michigan today is unchanged since Liberation Day. Nationwide, the automotive sector has shed over 22,000 jobs over the same timespan and manufacturing writ large in the US is down 64,000 jobs. Sixteen months after Liberation Day, the oft-promised boom in manufacturing hasn’t shown up in the data.
But perhaps those jobs are coming in the future. To that end, the President has assured us that countries are investing in the US to the tune of trillions of dollars. The White House lists all of the investments that the President has secured, pointing to trillions of dollars in “manufacturing and industry” alone. At this time, it’s not clear where that money is going. Total construction spending on manufacturing remains high by historic norms, but has fallen precipitously throughout 2025 and 2026. Arguing that things would have been worse if it weren’t for Trump and his ability to secure investments undermines the argument that tariffs are working even further.
Revenues: Are We Reducing Deficits?
In 2024, then-candidate Trump floated the idea of an “all-tariff” federal revenue system, whereby tariff revenue would replace revenue raised from income taxes. There are two problems with this idea. First is the gargantuan sum of money collected from income taxes alone in the US: an estimated $2.7 trillion in 2025. Even under Peter Navarro’s bombastic claim that tariffs would generate some $600-700 billion in revenue per year, actual revenues fell grossly short of this, coming in around $190 billion — before the refund window opened.
Tariffs would need to raise another $2.1 trillion this year just to eliminate our annual deficit. That figure is projected to rise in the coming years, and tariff revenue would need to rise commensurately. The level of taxation required to raise that kind of revenue would very quickly put us on the “wrong side” of the Laffer curve.
Tariffs were never going to simultaneously promote jobs and raise tremendous revenue. A tariff can only raise revenue if imports are coming into the country. Thus, tariffs can protect some domestic producers and raise revenues at the same time, but it cannot maximize both objectives simultaneously. Revenue requires a stream of taxable imports while protection works by reducing that stream. The more successful a tariff is at one of these, the less successful it must be at the other.
National Security: Are We Safer Among Nations?
In 2025, as in 2018, many of the tariffs that President Trump imposed appealed to “national security.” The Section 232 tariffs on steel, aluminum, and copper, for example, were justified along these grounds. Production of these materials is so important, the logic goes, that we should willingly overpay to promote domestic production, in support of America’s army and fleet.
To be clear, domestic production is one way to ensure that America has a ready supply of these materials. By the same logic, every family could ensure a ready supply of food if they grew their own vegetables and raised their own livestock. What matters is not protecting domestic production, but making sure that domestic access continues unabated in times of war.
Let’s take steel as an example. The question we should ask is “how dependent on foreign steel are we, really?” The American Iron and Steel Institute reports that only 23 percent of finished steel in the US was imported; the remaining 77 percent was produced domestically. The Association for Iron & Steel Technology finds that the US is currently the third-largest steel producer in the world, behind only China and India. And the US International Trade Administration reports that the US imports steel from, in order of most-to-least: Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Korea, Germany, Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, India, Turkey, and 68 other countries. In other words, if Canada decided to stop selling steel to the US, we would still have 78 other countries, each with plenty of steel firms within them, from whom to buy this critical material.
Still, national security is a legitimate concern and promoting it is perhaps among the most legitimate functions a government can perform. To that end, free trade and globalization have done far more to promote a safer nation than any protectionist policy. A report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies evidences that increased trade between nations reduces the likelihood of war in the first place. Globalization, likewise, ensures a robust and diverse web of potential suppliers such that if war were to break out, access to critical materials would continue largely unabated.
Compare this to the 2026 experience. After a tumultuous 2025, which saw tariffs and other trade restrictions levied or threatened against virtually every country in the world, the US has had to largely go it alone in the current conflict in Iran. When President Trump threatened to cut off trade with Spain after they refused to assist in the Iran conflict, Spain (and Italy, for that matter) responded by closing their bases and airspace to the US for military operations. The same is largely true of Europe writ large. In other words, the tariffs and other forms of protectionism have pushed our friends and allies away.
The Verdict
Today’s protectionist program, architected in part by Robert Lighthizer, set out to rebuild American industry, fill the Treasury with new revenues, and make the country safer. Two years of evidence demonstrate the opposite. We have shed tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs, the promised factories exist almost exclusively in press releases, and the tariff revenue is a rounding error against a $2.1 trillion deficit and $2.7 trillion in income tax revenue. Turning abroad, the tariff wall meant to protect us from the world accomplished something our adversaries could only dream of: turning our allies against us, closing airspace to American forces, and leaving us to face Iran largely alone.
Rather than being an elitist viewpoint, free trade is the preferred policy of Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Americans with and without college degrees, and the “forgotten man” Lighthizer claims to champion. If anyone is clinging to a lonely and unpopular faith, it’s the protectionists.
I believe in free trade. I believe in it because 250 years of theory and evidence combined with what we have witnessed over the last two years all point in the same direction. And as it turns out, I’m not alone. Most of America believes in free trade, too.
