STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
We find out soon just how far President-elect Trump will take his interest in tariffs. He started a trade war with China during his first term, and those tariffs have endured. President Biden kept them. Now Trump turns his attention to the rest of the world. And while he's given a very wide range of possible tariffs on various countries, it seems clear that he has changed a party that once stood for free trade. Here's NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: If you want to see how much the GOP has changed on trade, go back and listen to past presidential nominees. Here was George W. Bush in 1999.
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GEORGE W BUSH: In order to promote the peace, I believe we ought to be a free-trading nation in a free-trading world. Because free trade brings markets, and markets bring hope and prosperity.
KURTZLEBEN: There was John McCain in 2007.
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JOHN MCCAIN: I'm the biggest free marketer and free trader that you will ever see.
KURTZLEBEN: And Mitt Romney in 2011, who had a few more reservations.
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MITT ROMNEY: I love free trade. I want to open markets to free trade, but I will crack down on cheaters like China.
KURTZLEBEN: And then there's Donald Trump, who has now twice won the presidency while breaking with Republican orthodoxy around free trade. Here he was at an October rally.
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DONALD TRUMP: The word tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary. More beautiful than love. More beautiful than respect.
KURTZLEBEN: Free trade is about making it easier to sell U.S. goods overseas and easier to buy foreign goods in the U.S. That generally means trade agreements and reducing tariffs, which are taxes American importers pay on foreign goods. How different is Trump? Doug Irwin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, says you have to think back almost a century.
DOUG IRWIN: To have a president that is - across the board thinks trade is bad and thinks that tariffs are really good - you have to go back to Herbert Hoover to someone who took that stance.
KURTZLEBEN: Free trade has had plenty of bipartisan support. Still, Irwin says, the modern GOP was long seen as the party of big business and was more firmly pro-free trade. But, importantly, he's talking about elites. Voters have had more mixed views. In some manufacturing-heavy states, for example, Americans have seen job losses, especially as trade increased with China. And this is where Trump comes in. Diana Mutz is a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania.
DIANA MUTZ: What he did was to move the Republican Party's position to something closer to what the average American's position was on trade, which was more negative than they saw the party elites' being on trade.
KURTZLEBEN: And his voters have responded. The Pew Research Center has found that Republican voters increasingly think that the U.S. has lost more than it has gained from trade. In addition, Trump made voters think more about trade, period, and he did it in a very Trumpy (ph) way. He made trade about fighting.
MUTZ: Trade was emphasized by Trump as a means of dominating other countries, as a means of becoming the winner and them the losers.
KURTZLEBEN: An economics textbook would tell you trade isn't about winners and losers. The idea is that two countries trade so they both can benefit. And trade is complicated. A trade deal can lead to job losses, but it can also boost the economy and lower prices. Economists broadly agree that Trump's proposed tariffs will create higher prices, and that's why some old-guard Republicans disagree sharply with Trump.
PAT TOOMEY: There's no question Donald Trump is a protectionist. He has been for decades. He's been consistent. I think he's been consistently wrong, but he has been consistent.
KURTZLEBEN: Before he left the Senate in 2023, Pennsylvania's Pat Toomey was known as a free trader. Congressional Republicans have fallen in line behind Trump on many issues. Whether current members push back on tariffs depends in part on how far Trump goes once he's back in the White House. Toomey isn't convinced Republicans will go along if voters are threatened by higher prices.
TOOMEY: Republicans are going to be hearing from their constituents if there are these broad, significant new tariffs imposed. So I think it's premature to decide that the Republican Party has gone all protectionist.
KURTZLEBEN: For now, Trump isn't backing off of his tariff threats. In just over a month, he may start following through. Danielle Kurtzleben, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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