Trump again undercuts his administration’s messy tariffs rhetoric

One of the problems with evaluating claims made by President Trump’s administration about the tariffs imposed on products from China is that it can be hard to determine how much misdirection is built in.

Consider the crux of the issue: who is paying for the tariffs. It is certainly the case that very, very few American consumers are paying for the tariffs directly; Americans aren’t sending checks to the Treasury to cover increased import costs. Instead, they’re paying for the tariffs indirectly, through higher prices of products that are imported from China or that use components imported from China. A bad-faith representation of the situation could say, with accuracy, that consumers are paying very little, if any, of the tariffs simply based on that distinction.

A broader problem, though, is that the president’s rhetoric on the issue is all over the map and internally inconsistent — and also not the argument his team is making publicly.

View the complete August 19 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.