Trump Was Right About Tariffs

In case you didn’t see it, late Friday afternoon President Trump posted an op-ed piece on the Wall Street Journal website entitled: “My Tariffs Have Brought America Back,” and it appeared in the Saturday morning print edition.

I don’t think people focused on it because everybody was talking about Mr. Trump’s superb nomination of Kevin Warsh to be Fed chairman. Yet it’s worth revisiting his piece, which is kind of a rebuttal to all the criticisms by the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, regarding Mr. Trump’s tariff policies.

Anyway, the president makes a lot of important points. For one thing, he notes that there was never any retaliation against his tariffs, and therefore all the Smoot-Hawley 1930s talk turned out to be false alarms.

Instead of retaliation there were deals, and Mr. Trump points out deals with Communist China, Great Britain, the European Union, Japan, and a number of countries in Southeast Asia.