In “Trump’s Tariffs Weren’t Really About Trade Policy,” Harold Meyerson writes at The American Prospect:

Now that the Supreme Court has relegated Donald Trump’s tariffs to the history books, their obituaries need to make clear how utterly out of sync with any previous tariffs they actually were. Nothing in their raisons d’être or implementation bore any resemblance to any previous American tariffs.

(On Saturday, Trump levied 15 percent tariffs on goods from all nations under a different law, but that law stipulates that the tariffs are only good for 150 days unless Congress votes to extend them—a vote that would be tantamount to electoral suicide for many Republicans up for re-election in November.)

To begin, the tariffs of the 19th century, for which Trump has been volubly nostalgic, were enacted to protect America’s fledgling new industries, centered in Northern states, from competition from the more developed industries of Britain and Europe. By contrast, as early as the 1820s, leaders of the almost entirely agricultural American South, John C. Calhoun most particularly, railed against tariffs that had been enacted to give breathing space and growing room to these nascent industries (the “tariff of abominations,” Calhoun termed it). The Southern slave plantation owners whom Calhoun represented loathed having to pay more for the European-made luxury goods they enjoyed; the Southern industrialists—well, there were no Southern industrialists. But the owners of the New England clothing and iron mills, and later in the century the owners of the massive steel mills, welcomed tariffs that enabled them to grow their domestic markets free (or at least freer) from British competitors.

Trump’s innovation in tariff-ology is that the domestic industries he’s most insistent on protecting aren’t fledgling or new; they’re dying or dead. Far from being threatened by foreign competition, they’re industries that rival nations either are scaling back or have abandoned altogether. So Trump attempts to resurrect coal, while blocking the further development of wind and solar power. He promotes fossil-fueled cars and cripples the domestic sale and construction of EVs, enabling our chief economic competitor, China, to take a giant step toward cornering the burgeoning global market in EVs, and then cars in general. When it comes to our most cutting-edge industry, AI computer chips, Trump has allowed their manufacturer, Nvidia, to sell them to China so long as his government gets a take—25 percent of the proceeds—from every sale.

So Trump’s policy protects industries which our competitors are rapidly transferring away from, even as we abandon the essential industries of the future that our competitors are working furiously to develop. This isn’t to say that selective tariffs aren’t still sound policy in major American industries that remain central to the nation’s prosperity, autos and steel in particular. But both those industries (and the auto- and steelworkers they employ) would be in a lot better long-term shape if Trump allowed them to position themselves for future markets by going electric. Instead, his myopic view of transactional policy leads him to consider it a win when he wrangles a quarter share of Nvidia’s proceeds from bolstering Chinese power. In for a penny, out for a pound: That’s the economic logic behind Trump’s trade policies.

More here.