Voters remain unsupportive of the Trump administration’s proposals to impose tariffs on U.S. trading partners Canada, Mexico, and China, though there’s also considerable confusion throughout the country about how tariffs even work.
Such lagging support may influence how the White House handles future trade policy in the coming days, after it agreed to suspend planned 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico for the next month just two days after imposing them.
Overall, Americans seem unenthused about Trump’s threatened trade wars.
A January poll from Quinnipiac University found that just 42 percent of respondents believe the tariffs will help the U.S. economy, while 48 percent think they will do harm.
An Ipsos poll from last month, meanwhile, found that two-thirds of Americans, and especially Democrats, think the tariffs will raise prices for consumers. A separate poll from the firm found that 60 percent of respondents opposed tariffs on Canada.
The president’s trade war vision has some support, though, at least as it applies to U.S. rival China. Fifty-two percent of registered voters told the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll they supported levies on Beijing.
Gauging popular support for Trump’s policies is further complicated by the fact that Americans don’t really seem to know what a tariff is.
More than half of those polled by Ipsos in December about tariffs chose an incorrect answer when describing how these measures work, instead of the correct understanding that tariffs are a tax on imports from other countries paid by companies in the importing country, with costs often passed on to American consumers.
Even if Americans don’t quite understand tariffs, they don’t seem to want them.
Last month, just two percent of respondents told an Ipsos poll that Trump should focus on tariffs once he took office.
Trump himself seems to be admitting that tariffs might cause some economic chaos, despite campaigning aggressively against inflation during the Biden years.
Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not),” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday. “But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
As The Independent has reported, economists have consistently predicted large-scale tariffs of the kind Trump is proposing will raise consumer prices, fuel inflation and harm the U.S. economy.
