A protectionist has never before been elected, or been re-elected President of the United States. William Jennings Bryan ran three times while promising to de-link the dollar from gold in order to allegedly boost exports. His stance was a protectionist one, and he lost three times.
Herbert Hoover was voted into the White House on the strength of the Harding/Coolidge/Mellon economy. It was a year into his presidency that he signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill; one that raised record levels of taxes on foreign goods. The taxes rendered it difficult for foreign producers to sell in the U.S., and by extension difficult for U.S. producers to sell goods outside the U.S. The vibrancy of the U.S. economy plummeted thanks to a stroke of President Hoover's pen that mindlessly erected barriers to the very division of labor that frees us to the do the work that most amplifies our talents. Hoover lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, and FDR among other things wisely ran on shrinking the burden of Hoover's biggest error.
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