A little example of this uncertainty: “We’re doing this for the Christmas season.” That’s a quote from the president. Let’s go back to the summer of 2019. In June, the US had been imposing a 25 percent tariff on $250 billion in Chinese imports, roughly half. Later in the month of June, the president agreed not to impose additional tariffs and to restart trade negotiations with China. Then, about five weeks later, the president abruptly changed his mind and imposed a 10 percent tariff on the remaining $300 billion of imports, effective September 1st. Then a few weeks after that, the president said, “Oh, we’re not going to do that until December.” When asked why, the president said, “we’re doing this for the Christmas season.” That’s a remarkable statement from the president, given that he had spent years telling the American people and telling businesses that the trade war would not have any adverse effect on them.

This is an example of the kind of climate created when you enter into a trade war. How are businesses supposed to make investment decisions when there’s so much uncertainty about what the trade policy regime would be? This, I think, undermined the success of the 2017 tax law, at least for now. But in addition, it undermined the argument that conservative analysts and economists put forward, which is that businesses will respond to these incentives. And if we have a President Biden, and he raises the corporate tax rate, people on the right and economists who are more in favor of free markets who want to reduce the corporate tax rate again are going to have a much harder time doing that because of the president’s trade war.

Let me just say a word about populism over the long-term. I think a key part of the president’s populism has been to stoke racial, ethnic, and religious animosity. This must have some effect on consumer spending on business formation, particularly if it’s sustained over the longer term. The president has supported protectionism and attacked the post-World War II liberal international order. That’s a direct threat to prosperity. Those institutions in that regime have been the bedrock of prosperity on both sides of the Atlantic for seven decades. By attacking it and by weakening it, the president risks threatening a key foundation of that prosperity.

And by weakening the rule of law — and the cultures and norms reinforcing it — the president has eroded the foundations of a strong economy by attacking institutions. By labeling the Federal Reserve Chairman as an enemy, the president has weakened confidence in the Fed. The president’s hostility toward immigrants threatens the United States’ place as the global destination for many of the world’s best, brightest, and most ambitious people, which, of course, has a significant longer-run economic effect.

The extent to which this damage occurred over the last four years, I think, is surprising and considerable. The extent to which it will be lasting, I think, is more of an open question. But all of this, I think, is problematic from an economic perspective. And all of it, I think, flows from the president’s populism. These are all manifestations of the populist impulse, and I think that they contribute to my verdict, which is that Trumpian populism has not succeeded.

The foundation of the president’s message, as Casey referred to the president’s inaugural address is “American Carnage” — that people have been doing terribly and many parts of the country are a wasteland. I think this is just at odds with the facts. It is not in line with the economic record of the past three decades, which is something I spend a lot of time on in my book. America is upwardly mobile. Wages and incomes aren’t stagnant. Workers do enjoy the fruits of their labor. The game is not rigged. Capitalism is not broken.

The president has argued on each of these points that I am wrong. And I believe the evidence suggests that the president and the populists are wrong. You hear exactly the same charges from populists on the political left as well, from Senator Sanders and Senator Warren. Populism is pessimistic, populism is inward-focused, and I think we should be optimistic, and we should be outward-focused. We are not in a zero-sum conflict with each other. We can be open to the world, and we can be confident in the future. And those aren’t just sentiments. We can be confident, we should be open, and we are not in a zero-sum conflict, because that is what the economic record shows. Thank you for tuning in. And I look forward to the discussion.

Thanks a lot, Mike. So Casey, is Mike, right? Are the successful parts of Trumpian populism — tax cuts and deregulation — actually just Republicanism and conservative economics?

Mulligan: Nope. I think if you look — and someone should do a word analysis of Trump’s speeches, he’s given a lot of speeches — you’ll find the individual mandate and prescription drugs coming in there, way more than trade. If you look at all four years together, there have been periods of time where he was emphasizing trade more. But every other day, he is bragging about getting rid of the individual mandate. Now, you want to say that’s a Republican thing? Okay. I think the mandate came from Heritage, but whatever.

As I explain in the book, the way Trump learned that the individual mandate was terrible and that he should get rid of it — as a leader of the people rather than the elites — was to ignore what the experts were saying about how it’s needed for adverse selection and all those really terrible analysis. He listened to the people, not Washington.

Same with the prescription drugs that you hear about in Washington. Again, he heard from the people. And those prescription drug regulations were there in the Bush administration, and he was a Republican last I checked. He had a brother that tried to run for this spot that Trump beat pretty handily.

The opioid epidemic, in fact, as I explain in the book, is a bipartisan failure. Those subsidies up and down the supply chain, a lot of them came in under Republicans. In fact, some of the people who worked for Bush on those issues are still in the Trump administration and are burying the evidence about this. So these are major things that the president has been doing, and if Republicans want to take credit at the end, that’s fine, but at least the people got what they wanted.

Regarding tariffs, I think, first of all, Michael’s way too focused on the tariffs. If you look at the amount of revenue involved with the tariffs, it’s like just one of these deregulations. It’s fairly small.

Now, do you remember the Reagan trade war? I don’t either. If you heard Reagan talk about free trade, it was so beautiful. It literally brings tears to my eyes to hear Reagan talk about trade. But I explain in the book that once I wipe the tears away and actually look at what Reagan did, Reagan was every bit as protectionist as Trump. Does that mean that protectionism is populist or Republican? I don’t know. Reagan is the iconic Republican. But he was so protectionist.

What he did differently and the reason there weren’t Reagan trade wars, is that he did quotas. He protected the industries with quotas rather than tariffs, which means that the revenue and extra money consumers pay goes to foreign companies rather than our Treasury. That’s the big difference. In those days, it was Japan, and today it’s China. But otherwise, it was the same thing with intellectual property problems in Japan and other places in East Asia.

Reagan was threatening tariffs, threatening protectionism, and delivered this number of quotas to try to deal with that. And in his second term, Reagan got the Japanese and some other East Asian countries to agree to some intellectual property protections, copyrights, and so on. The same thing is going on with Trump. In fact, Trump has a lot of the Reagan people. Lighthizer is the lead trade guy now, and he was the number two trade guy under Reagan. You have Kudlow there from Reagan. You have the speechwriter who worked on “tear down this wall.” So there’s a lot of the same people. Protectionism, I think, is a bipartisan affair that has been around long before populism.

Michael, I would recommend looking at the tariff list. Download Lighthizer’s tariff list and just take a look at what’s there. The stuff you’re talking about is tiny, even relative to that list. We have a number of outright import prohibitions that have been around my entire lifetime, when there’s been no populist president. You can’t make pickup trucks in a foreign country because there’s a massive tariff on it — that’s been there forever. And Obama and Bush never once dreamed about eliminating it. In fact, another import prohibition we have is the Jones Act. Bush, Obama, and Reagan all promised special interests that they were going to keep that prohibition on importing coastal shipping services. Trump is the first one who has not promised to that lobby that he will keep it. In fact, as I explained in the book, he has tried, and so far has failed, to get rid of it. But he is not telling the special interest that they can keep that.