American Living Standards Are A Sacrifice Trump Is Willing To Make

WASHINGTON — Higher prices on shoes and televisions. A stock market in freefall. Job losses in the very manufacturing-heavy industries the tariffs are allegedly supposed to protect. 

For US President Donald Trump and his allies, the results of his massive and unprecedented tariffs restricting American trade with every country in the world are just a bit of tough love to help America get stronger and return to a glorious past.  

“We have communities and families with children, and dreams and aspirations for those children, and we’re no longer going to barter their future for cheap goods made in China,” Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) said on Friday on Fox Business. “We do need to reorient this economy.”

To defend the tariffs, which are incredibly unpopular in public opinion polling, Trump administration officials, Republican members of Congress and conservative influencers have settled on a message dismissing short- and medium-term economic pain and insisting costlier consumer goods are unimportant in the long run. All that’s necessary, they insist, is to trust Trump.

“Losing money means nothing. Digital ones and zeroes. In the end, you won’t miss any of it,” said MAGA influencer Benny Johnson. “Losing your country costs you everything. You will never get that back. Your kids will be slaves to foreign powers who hate us.”

It’s a stunningly different tune than Republicans sang all of last year when they decried rising prices as a crisis under Democratic President Joe Biden, which was a common sentiment among voters and may have been the single biggest contributor to Trump’s election victory. Moore, for instance, wrote that inflation “crushed” American families. 

Trump knew that the tariffs would disrupt the economy. 

“We may have, short term, a little pain, and people understand that,” he said in February. 

But the pain would be worth it, the MAGA thinking goes, and people need to wake up from their complacent consumption patterns anyway.  

“Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said last month. 

Brian Bethune, a professor of economics at Boston College, said it’s a mistake to dismiss the usefulness to US households of inexpensive products from Walmart, dollar stores and online retailers like Temu.   

“Yeah, they’re cheap, they’re low quality, but if you’re a low-income young person or young family, that’s kind of bread and butter for survival,” Bethune told HuffPost. 

“If you have young kids, you’ve got to buy them a new pair of shoes every year because they’re growing. Where do you get them? At Walmart. And they’re made in China,” he said. “Even if those prices increase by 30%, 50%, who’s going to open up a factory in the U.S. to produce that stuff? I don’t know if you’ll find anybody that will step forward to do that.”

Trump announced sweeping tariffs Wednesday on all imports, with higher taxes on the countries shipping the most stuff compared to how much they buy from the US Importers of clothing and electronics from Southeast Asia will face some of the highest tariffs, which they will likely pass along to consumers in the form of higher prices. 

The president also announced the government starting next month would no longer allow a “de minimis” tariff exemption for foreign shipments worth less than $800. A study published last year found canceling the tariff exemption for de minimis shipments from direct-to-consumer companies like Shein and Temu would disproportionately affect lower-income households and increase their costs by as much as $80 per person. 

“Shein and Temu steal the intellectual property of American creators, they use Chinese labor to produce products dirt cheap, and until now, they took advantage of a de minimis loophole to flood our markets with junk,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said this week. “This is a win for every American!”

Asked about his disdain for “cheap goods” in another interview last month, Treasury Secretary Bessent pointed to more important goods becoming more affordable in the future. 

“What I’m saying is the American dream is not, ‘Let them eat flat screens.’ That if Americans, American families aren’t able to afford a home, don’t believe that their children will do better than they are,” Bessent said. “The American dream is not contingent on cheap baubles they get from China. That it is more than that. And we are focused on affordability. But it’s mortgages, it’s cars, it’s real wage gains.”

Trump’s trade policy, at least in the short term, won’t help with housing affordability because the tariffs have already made the Federal Reserve less willing to lower interest rates, a major contributor to how much it costs to buy a house. 

“While tariffs are highly likely to generate at least a temporary rise in inflation, it is also possible that the effects could be more persistent,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Friday. 

As for cars, Trump himself has noted they would be more expensive, but said he didn’t care, because he hoped more of them would be made in the US.

In the past, Republicans have pointed to affordable consumer goods like video game consoles as evidence of America’s prosperity and a reason to doubt the hardship of poverty. 

“The median poor family with children in the United States lives in an air-conditioned home with three color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, a video game system (such as a Playstation or Xbox), a personal computer, and a kitchen stocked with every necessary appliance, including a refrigerator, both an oven and a stove, a microwave, and a coffee maker,” Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) wrote in a 2015 op-ed inspired in part by a 2011 Heritage Foundation report.

Hopefully the older video game systems can still sate the masses. Nintendo announced it would delay the release of its latest game system due to uncertainty over Trump’s tariffs.