Donald Trump has never been on better terms with corporate America. Yet his ostensible trade agenda has never been more antithetical to the interests of big business.

In recent weeks, tech billionaires who’d once projected ambivalence (if not hostility) toward Trump — including Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates — have paid him their respects at Mar-a-Lago. The world’s wealthiest entrepreneur, Elon Musk, has become the new president’s righthand man. And Trump’s pick for treasury secretary, hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, won wide applause within the financial industry.

Even as Trump has cozied up to Big Tech and Wall Street, however, he has pledged to enact trade policies that would undermine both, along with myriad other US industries.

On the campaign trail, Trump pledged to put a tariff of between 10 percent and 20 percent on all imports to the United States, along with a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods and a 25 percent import surcharge on Canadian and Mexican wares — at least, until our neighbors choke off the flow of all migrants and drugs across America’s northern and southern borders.

This protectionist agenda is far more radical than anything Trump attempted during his first term. It threatens to hamper American tech companies by increasing the cost of semiconductors, depress stock valuations by reducing economic growth and fueling a global trade war, and disrupt the US auto industry, whose supply chains were built around the presumption of duty-free trade with Mexico.

Thus, American investors, executives, and entrepreneurs watched Trump’s first day in office with bated breath: Would his inaugural address and initial executive orders prioritize corporate America’s financial interest in relatively free global exchange — or his own ideological fixation on trade deficits?

Trump’s Day 1 actions did not fully clarify his priorities on this front. In his inaugural speech, the president reiterated his broad commitment to protectionism. Meanwhile, his administration

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