One year ago today, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden and declared Liberation Day. He announced sweeping reciprocal tariffs to end decades of unfair trade, bring factories and jobs back, and restore economic independence. The language was bold: factories and jobs would come “roaring back,” and we would “supercharge our industrial base.”
Early predictions were dire. Olivier Blanchard, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, warned that broad tariffs combined with uncertainty would trigger a recession, with any apparent trade-balance improvement proving temporary as the dollar appreciated and undid the gains. Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary and ex-president of Harvard, floated massive estimates of economic damage. Many mainstream voices insisted the policy would fail on every front.
The results after one year show the tariffs are working.
These tariffs arrested the long-running upward trend in the trade deficit, forced trading partners to negotiate, generated substantial revenue, and revealed underlying strength in manufacturing. While employment headcount didn’t roar back yet, factory payrolls have stabilized. While we were never going to undo decades of damage to the American manufacturing sector in a matter of months, we’ve made more progress than even optimists had the right to expect.
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