The age of trade protectionism returned to America in 2025 with the shudder of a closing customs gate. President Donald Trump has long professed his love of tariffs, once calling them “the most beautiful word” in the dictionary. In February 2025, barely a month into his second term, Trump breached the trade agreement he himself negotiated with Canada and Mexico in 2018, and imposed new tariffs on both countries. In February and March 2025, he moved to impose tariffs on China.

April 2025 turned out to be the cruelest month: Trump announced tariffs on imports from virtually all countries. Those tariff actions were shocking not only because Trump invoked a law that no other president had used to impose tariffs, but also because he raised rates—on adversaries and allies alike—to levels unseen since the 1930s.

Americans noticed and began acquainting themselves with the world of tariffs. Internet searches for “tariff” noticeably trended up throughout 2025 and the word entered daily conversations and supermarket aisles. But tariffs aren’t new. Tariffs are one of the oldest tools of American economic policy.

After its birth as a nation, the United States used tariffs to ensure a steady flow of revenue to finance its government and support its infant industries. After the Civil War, the U.S. didn’t rely heavily on tariffs to generate revenue but used them to protect domestic industry—northern industrialists and Midwestern farmers—from European competition.  For years, Congress set tariff rates item by item, and the debates over each line were susceptible to capture by special interests.

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The pattern was on blatant display in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930: conceived to protect farmers, it quickly expanded into something larger. The economic disruption that followed forced a rethink of trade policy, and Congress responded by ceding more authority to the President. Democrats and Republicans continued squabbling over the content of trade policy, but the protectionist impulse largely receded and was replaced by a consensus that lower trade barriers would support economic recovery and advance broader foreign policy goals. Today, that consensus has reversed.

A bipartisan shift toward trade protectionism in the United States came about in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the rise of China, and the fading of America’s unipolar moment. Unlike earlier periods of protectionism, this new chapter was not triggered by a single external economic shock so much as by the accumulation of domestic anxieties.

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The first Trump Administration’s move to raise and entrench tariffs in 2017, justified in the name of “economic security” marked the start of this era. President Joe Biden largely followed the same course. The trend is likely to continue unless it results in significant and persistent economic pain and political backlash.

At the start of President Trump’s second term, the average U.S. tariff rate stood at roughly 2.4 %. Today, the overall effective tariff rate is 16.8 %, the highest it’s been since 1935, according to the Yale Budget Lab. While the scope and scale of tariffs was comparably smaller in his first term in office, Trump did start a trade war with China, and slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum, while........

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