President Trump prides himself on being a destroyer of “woke nonsense” like affirmative action. “Our country will be Woke no longer!” he proclaimed to a joint session of Congress in March. “Whether you are a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, or an air traffic controller, you should be hired and promoted based on skill and competence, not race or gender.”
Trump is correct to denounce identitarian bean-counting. A growing majority of Americans agree that hiring decisions and college admissions should be based on merit, not immutable traits. According to Gallup, 68 percent support the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision to end race-based affirmative action at universities. Support for DEI policies has also waned.
Unfortunately, Trump’s crusade against affirmative action ends right where his trade policy begins. Within days of launching a holy war against affirmative action, he embraced its economic analogue—protectionism—with extreme gusto, and a striking lack of self-awareness.
That irony might be lost on the president, but it’s not lost on economists. To us, protectionism is just affirmative action in patriotic drag. Advocates of affirmative action seek to elevate underrepresented groups by insulating them from the full gale of meritocratic competition. Similarly, protectionists seek to prop up inefficient domestic firms over more efficient foreign competitors. Peel back the patriotic rhetoric and nationalist accoutrements, and one detects a policy not of strength but of surrender—a form of affirmative action transposed from corporate HR departments to the Oval Office. Call it “America First,” or “affirmative action.” Either way, it’s an assault on meritocracy.
One needn’t dig too deep in the annals of history to learn this lesson. A quick trip back to Trump's first term will suffice.
Consider the steel industry, long the poster child of protectionist coddling. Back in 2018, Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel was sold as a patriotic defense of “national security.” Yet by the Commerce Department’s own accounting, each steel job “saved” costs Americans roughly $900,000 per year in higher prices. US automakers, construction firms, and manufacturers—the industries that actually use steel to make things—were punished to subsidize bloated and inefficient steel producers. That’s not national security—it’s affirmative action veiled in protectionist gobbledygook.
Or take Trump’s 2018 tariffs on washing machines, which were sold as protecting American jobs. Did U.S. washing machine manufacturers use these tariffs as a catalyst to deliver high-paying jobs or groundbreaking innovations? Of course not. They hiked prices and pocketed the windfall without lifting a finger toward efficiency. A 2019 NBER study found that tariffs inflated prices by 12 percent, costing U.S. households over $1.5 billion a year, while preserving a mere 1,800 American jobs. That’s $833,000 per job saved—not a great return on investment for jobs that only pay $75 grand. As the late, great French economist Frédéric Bastiat would remind us: think of all the other, better jobs we could’ve created had Americans been free to spend those billions of dollars on other things.
America’s heartland has also endured intense blowback from Trump’s trade war. When Beijing slapped retaliatory tariffs on U.S. soybeans in response to Trump’s 2018 tariffs, the White House responded with $28 billion in emergency aid over three years. Now, with China threatening retaliation against his latest round of tariffs, whispers abound of another $10–50 billion bailout in the offing. Had the president studied the failure of the Depression-era Smoot-Hawley tariffs, he might’ve seen this retaliation coming. Apparently, he skipped this lecture à la Ferris Bueller.
Today’s trade war has also placed American tech companies in the crosshairs of foreign retaliation. Since “Liberation Day,” China has threatened to restrict rare-earth exports to U.S. AI firms like Nvidia and Qualcomm. Trump responded by taking a page out of the CCP’s socialist playbook and purchasing equity stakes in Intel and other domestic tech firms. Trump might euphemistically call this gamble an “investment in America.” A more apt description would be “corporate welfare.”
Trump is correct that meritocracy should be paramount in domestic affairs. But why should it only reign supreme within our nation’s borders? Why shouldn’t it extend to the realm of international trade? Basing economic decisions on arbitrary, immutable traits—be it race, gender, or, in the case of trade, geography—isn’t a formula for remedying injustices. It’s a recipe for institutionalizing inefficiency.
The essence of protectionism is not to foster innovation, but to forestall it. Access to foreign markets, talent, and, yes, competition isn’t an albatross around the neck of the American economy. It’s a wind at our backs––a competitive spur that propels American producers to stay at the top of their game, all the while ensuring American consumers have access to world-class products.
King Solomon wisely observed that “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” This proverb applies just as much to international trade as it does to interpersonal relations and sports. Competition breeds excellence. Los Angeles Dodgers fans can attest that having access to world-class talents like Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto is a blessing, not a curse. As the fall of Rome and medieval Venice illustrate, even the strongest economies can be slowly ground to dust by cutting off trade and rewriting the rules to favor entrenched interests over meritocracy.
In the pantheon of American politics, Trump’s tariffs stand as monuments to the twin gods of identity politics and economic protectionism. Americans should reject both of these false idols. Meritocracy, not mercantilism or identitarianism, is the secret to restoring American greatness.
