As President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs rocked the U.S. markets this week, erasing trillions of dollars in value, a 1987 speech from then-President Ronald Reagan warning against tariffs has gone viral online.
Reagan’s words found new resonance, particularly among conservatives, appalled by Trump’s anti-free trade measures. In the radio address from April 25, 1987, Reagan says:
You see, at first, when someone says, ‘Let’s impose tariffs on foreign imports,’ it looks like they’re doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works — but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is: First, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs.
They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars.
The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.
The memory of all this occurring back in the thirties made me determined when I came to Washington to spare the American people the protectionist legislation that destroys prosperity.
Now, it hasn’t always been easy. There are those in this Congress, just as there were back in the thirties, who want to go for the quick political advantage, who will risk America’s prosperity for the sake of a short-term appeal to some special interest group, who forget that more than 5 million American jobs are directly tied to the foreign export business and additional millions are tied to imports.
For those of us who lived through the Great Depression, the memory of the suffering it caused is deep and searing. And today, many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation, passed back in that period called the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, greatly deepened the Depression and prevented economic recovery.
“This Reagan guy sounds pretty good on tariffs,” wrote Reason’s Nick Gillespie, sharing the clip. “Not a real conservative according to JD Vance,” jabbed the Washington Examiner’s David Harsanyi.
As Reagan’s speech was shared online, so were past remarks from President George W. Bush and 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
In March 2016, Romney gave a scorched earth speech slamming then presidential candidate Trump, calling him “a phony” and “a fraud.”
During his remarks, Romney also took aim at Trump’s love of tariffs.
“If Donald Trump’s plans were ever implemented, the country would sink into a prolonged recession. A few examples. His proposed 35% tariff-like penalties would instigate a trade war, and that would raise prices for consumers, kill our export jobs, and lead entrepreneurs and businesses of all stripes to flee America,” Romney said in the speech, adding:
It would be very bad for American workers and for American families. But you say, wait, wait wait. Isn’t he a huge business success? Doesn’t he know what he’s talking about? No, he isn’t. And no, he doesn’t. Business genius, he is not. Successfully bringing jobs home requires serious policy and reforms that make America the place businesses want to come, want to plant, and want to grow. You can’t punish business into doing what you want.
On January 24, 2011, former President Bush joined a C-SPAN Q&A and warned against the “3 dangerous isms.”
“What’s interesting about our country, if you study history, is that there are some ‘isms’ that occasionally pop up. One is isolationism, and its evil twin protectionism, and its evil triplet nativism,” Bush said at the time, adding:
So if you studied the 20s, for example, there was an American first policy that said, who cares what happens in Europe? What happened in europe mattered uh… eventually because of World War II there was Smoot-Hawley which is a part of an economic policy which basically said we don’t want trade now there was a still a barriers.
And there was an immigration policy, I think during this period that argued we had too many Jews and too many Italians, therefore we should have no immigrants, and my point is we’ve been to this kind of period of isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. I am a little concerned that we may be going to the same period. I hope that these “isms” pass, which would then allow for a more orderly look at immigration and a rational immigration policy.
Below are some reactions to their remarks:
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