Just kidding! Actually, Trump has decided to take another course entirely: Stung by that expert opinion, he’s now corruptly wielding executive power to warn the relevant companies that they’d better not raise prices after his tariffs go into effect—or else.
This is getting attention as another abuse of power, akin to his extortion of law firms. But it’s notable for a different reason: It wrecks the spin Trump has offered on his tariffs on many different levels, and it highlights a glaring absurdity about his economic agenda that continues to be overlooked. While Trump’s stated goal of tariffs is to rebuild the nation’s industrial base, he’s gunning to reverse policies by his predecessor in a way that would kill large numbers of manufacturing jobs, including in the auto industry, simply because they would facilitate the transition to a green future.
Earlier this week, however, Trump declared that because his tariffs will cause an explosion of auto-manufacturing here, “you’re going to see prices going down.” Trump knows that’s false: He wouldn’t warn companies this way if prices were set to drop.
Instead, Trump said, they should be grateful for his elimination of what he called former President Joe Biden’s electric-vehicle mandate, which involved subsidies and emissions requirements to encourage electric-car production.
Trump’s effort to eliminate Biden’s “electric-vehicle mandate” is a reference to his January executive order that explicitly uses that phrase. In it, Trump vows to pursue the elimination of “unfair subsidies” that “favor EVs over other technologies,” meaning government incentives that make EVs competitive relative to fossil-fuel-powered vehicles.
Rolling all that back could lead to the cancellation of dozens of EV and battery factories and kill roughly 100,000 jobs, according to calculations by the Princeton Repeat Project. While you might think EV manufacturing jobs simply replace traditional auto-manufacturing work, Princeton professor Jesse Jenkins notes that China is aggressively cornering the global EV market even as global consumer tastes are trending toward EVs and the industry increasingly embraces self-driving vehicles, which optimally are electric.
Put it all together and here’s what you have: Trump is slapping tariffs on imported autos (and parts) to revitalize the future of American manufacturing (though economists say that won’t actually happen), even as he’s killing untold numbers of the American manufacturing jobs of the future.
I’d add one thing to all that: None of this makes sense even if you accept that Trump does have some sort of larger vision of what tariffs are supposed to accomplish. Trump’s tariff obsession is often described as a kind of mania, but there’s also a genuine worldview behind it: It’s the idea that revitalized manufacturing work will provide a sturdier future foundation for those seeking to live a virtuous working-class life. In his convention speech, JD Vance linked the need to “reinvigorate American industry” with his desire to “renew American family.”
Indeed, Vance has argued elsewhere that MAGA should represent the goal of fusing technological innovation with reindustrialization. If so, why don’t the green manufacturing jobs of the future point toward exactly that? Vance and Trump sometimes justify their hostility to such manufacturing by insisting it will make us vulnerable to China, given its control of renewable supply chains. But that gets it backward: Trump and Vance are ceding to China that control over supply chains—and over the future.
So no, none of this makes sense. When Trump effectively admits his tariffs will boost prices, and boasts about his hostility to EVs, he’s wrecking his own case for how he intends to achieve the future he wants—or the one he claims to want, anyway.
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