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After former President Donald Trump’s surprise victory in 2016, his administration imposed several rounds of tariffs on China on everything from washing machines to steel. The move was described by the nonpartisan conservative organization the Tax Foundation as one of the “largest tax increases in decades.” And yet, protectionist economic thinking has since gained traction in both parties. In a rare instance of agreement, President Joe Biden retained most of his predecessor’s tariffs—and imposed even more earlier this year.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen described her own evolution on this topic succinctly: “People like me grew up with the view: If people send you cheap goods, you should send a thank-you note. That’s what standard economics basically says … I would never, ever again say, ‘Send a thank-you note.’” Essentially, Yellen used to think that if China wanted to flood the United States with cheap goods, why complain? Well, now she appears more concerned about the cost of all those cheap goods to the nation’s domestic manufacturing base.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by the Cato Institute’s vice president of general economics, Scott Lincicome, to examine this popular narrative—one that he doesn’t put much stock in, largely because the high cost of tariffs are disproportionately borne by poorer people, but also because of the political dysfunction they sow:

“The economics of trade are counterintuitive,” Lincicome explains. “And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Jerusalem Demsas: There was an interesting policy exchange about tariffs between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris during their debate last month.

Kamala Harris: My opponent has a plan that I call the Trump sales tax, which would be a 20 percent tax on everyday goods that you rely on to get through the month. Economists have said that that Trump sales tax would actually result, for middle-class families, in about $4,000 more a year because of his policies and his ideas about what should be the backs of middle-class people paying for tax cuts for billionaires.

Demsas: Then Trump hit back, pointing out that the Biden-Harris team had been all too happy to keep the tariffs going.

Donald Trump: First of all, I have no sales tax. That’s an incorrect statement. She knows that. We’re doing tariffs on other countries. Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world. And the tariff will be substantial in some cases. I took in billions and billions of dollars, as you know, from China. In fact, they never took the tariff off, because it was so much money, they can’t. It would totally destroy everything that they’ve set out to do. They’ve taken in billions of dollars from China and other places. They’ve left the tariffs on.

Demsas: This exchange flew by many people. There was a lot going on in that debate, and this happened in the first few minutes. But Trump is pointing out something interesting here—that while Harris is calling his tariffs a sales tax, she and Biden kept the majority of his tariffs when they came into office.

Looking back on 2019, Biden had similarly criticized Trump’s trade policy, arguing at the time that “any freshman econ student could tell you that the American people are paying his tariffs.”

While I think it’s important to highlight this similarity, it’s also important not to overstate it. Trump is now promising a 60 percent tariff on goods from China and a 20 percent tariff on everything else the U.S. imports. And in a speech last week, Trump said he’d “impose whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.” This is far greater than anything Biden or Harris have publicly considered.

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Demsas: Welcome to Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host, Jerusalem Demsas, a staff writer here at The Atlantic. And today we’re talking tariffs, trade, protectionism, and more.

The standard economic narrative around tariffs is pretty negative. As my guest today has explained in a quip now famously memorialized on a novelty T-shirt: “Tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way.” It’s a busy shirt.

Scott Lincicome is the vice president of general economics at the Cato Institute and has written broadly, including here at The Atlantic, about why the parties shouldn’t be so quick to embrace tariffs.

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Demsas: Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott Lincicome: Well, thanks for having me.

Demsas: We’re going to talk about tariffs today, so I’m going to start with the simplest question: What is a tariff?

Lincicome: A tariff is a tax applied to an imported product, usually a good but, in theory, you could try to apply tariffs to services, as well.

Demsas: What kinds of things that people commonly buy have tariffs on them in the United States?

Lincicome: I think one of the most common examples we use is pickup trucks. In the 1960s, there was a dispute with the Europeans over chicken, of all things. That led to a tax on pickup trucks—

Demsas: Wait. Wait. Wait. Slow that down. How do we get from chickens to pickup trucks?

Lincicome: They were going after our chickens, so we put tariffs on their pickup trucks, and they stayed. Now we still have a 25 percent tax—tariff—on imported pickup trucks from everywhere except a few free-trade-agreement countries, like Mexico. So one of the reasons why we don’t have some of those cool little pickup trucks that you might see in Japan or whatever is because they’re subject to really ridiculous tariffs. And automakers abroad don’t want to have to deal with all the regulatory compliance and that kind of stuff and then pay another 25 percent tariff.

It’s actually a great example of the things that tariffs do beyond just raising prices. They limit availability and consumer choice, and they stick around forever. We have tariffs on the books on shoes and clothing and other things that go back to the Smoot-Hawley days. They’re really hard to remove once you get them into place.

Demsas: You just said something interesting. Who pays the tariff?

Lincicome: It’s a little complicated. Legally, the importer in the United States, in almost all cases, is paying the tariffs. If you are a U.S. company and you are importing stuff, you’re going to be paying the tariff, by law. There’s a little exception to that, but we don’t need to worry about that. The more complicated thing comes in who actually pays, because, in theory, a foreign exporter can lower his price to essentially absorb the tariff costs.

Let’s say you’re shipping widgets into the United States, and they’re $100. All of a sudden, a 25 percent tariff gets attached to it. You have, really, two basic choices: still sell at a hundred and have the importer pay $25 (25 percent of a hundred), or you lower your price to 80 and then have the importer pay $20 in tariffs. But to the importer, it’s all the same thing, right? It’s still $100. So the tariff hasn’t changed the calculus. In that sense, the foreign exporter is bearing the incidence of the tariff.

Then we have the empirical question. So the empirical question is: What actually happens? Well, what actually happens is, in the vast majority of cases, importers and consumers pay the tariffs. You only have a situation where foreign exporters pay tariffs when the market that the foreign exporter wants to sell into is just massive—really important—and the exporter says, You know what? I just want to maintain market share, so I’m going to lower my prices.

Typically, that’s not what happens. Typically, the consumer, the importer is going to pay the tariff. It might not be a hundred percent; the exporter might discount by a few bucks here and there. But, overall, as an empirical matter, typically consumers, importers pay. And that was certainly the case with the Trump-era tariffs on steel and aluminum and Chinese imports. Studies show that about 95 percent of the tariff incidence fell onto American companies and consumers.

Demsas: And so as any listener listening to this can tell, you don’t really like tariffs. Economists, in general, don’t really like tariffs. Why is that? Can you walk us through the standard economic story for why tariffs are bad?

Lincicome: I’ll start out with saying that economists are okay with tariffs in certain contexts—national security, for example. There’s a legitimate case that the United States—I’d say, a strong case the United States—shouldn’t be buying its tanks and planes and laser-guided missiles from China, that tariffs can serve a role there.

But economists don’t like tariffs for a few reasons. First is that they’re costly. A tariff is a tax. It’s a tax typically borne by consumers and importers. Those consumers and importers typically are poorer, so it’s a regressive tax, meaning: More burden is paid by poorer people. They spend a larger share of their incomes on, say, tariffed bananas or whatever.

But the second reason is that they are very inefficient taxes, meaning—so good tax policy is: You want a very broad base, and you want it to be very transparent, and you want to minimize gaming and other things that can poke holes and make the tax less distortionary.

A tariff doesn’t qualify for anything I just said, right? It’s applied on a narrow set of products. It’s very opaque. Unlike a sales tax, you don’t get a receipt on that pickup truck that says, Oh, you just paid an extra 25 percent for this, right? It’s subject to all sorts of gaming because tariffs will vary, typically, based on the type of products. You get what’s called tariff engineering, where you’ll classify—I’ll go back to cars. There’s a famous example: Ford vans were imported without seats to get a lower tariff, and then, literally at the docks, they installed the seats and then drove them off to the warehouses. So it’s a really distortionary and inefficient way to raise revenue or do anything else you want to do with them.

The other big thing, though, is that they’re pretty ineffective at boosting the companies that are getting protected and the workers that are getting protected. For example, I mentioned we have tariffs on shoes. Some of them are ridiculously high, more than 34—almost 40 percent. We have not saved any shoe jobs in the United States. We have almost no jobs in shoe manufacturing. You basically are just having consumers pay a tax for little to no good reason. And in case after case after case, what you see is: Most companies that are protected by tariffs either end up going away after the tariffs are lifted, or they’re seeking perpetual protection, right?

The other big thing is that tariffs, by insulating companies from competition, discourage them from innovating. If you have a guaranteed market, you’re probably not going to be hyper-focused on staying lean and mean and really focused on delivering the best value to your customer. You will get fat, lazy, and happy. You’ll spend a lot of money on lobbying to maintain the tariffs, less money on being productive.

For example, U.S. steel. So there’s probably no industry in the history of the United States that has received more protection than U.S. steel. It’s definitely on the Mount Rushmore of protectionist industries. And U.S. Steel is notoriously inefficient, in part because of that protection. It’s now trying to be bought out by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company. And the goal to—supporters of that deal, including U.S. Steel, by the way, say that Nippon Steel will help it innovate, provide it with better management practices, an influx of capital to upgrade its services.

So put that all together, and economists say, You get high cost, you don’t achieve your objectives, and this is pretty bad. And then you throw in—the historians have looked back at tariff history, especially in the 19th century but even most recently. And tariffs are really historically associated with corruption and cronyism. And that goes back to them being kind of a hidden tax. Also, they target foreigners, and that makes it easier to sell. The economics of trade are counterintuitive. And so tariff policy is notoriously corrupt. And so there’s a lot of political dysfunction, along with just hiring all those lobbyists to get special tariffs or special exemptions. But also, it’s just a very politically perilous policy, as well.

Demsas: You said a lot there. And I want to dig in on a few of these things, but I think as a broad overview, obviously, the idea is: You have to do a benefit-cost analysis of tariff policy. And you’ve obviously articulated a lot of reasons why there are high costs to tariffs, but, as you mentioned with national security, for instance, there are a lot of noneconomic things that policymakers are concerned with that they may want to use tariffs for. And so you think about the implications of what tariffs are trying to do, and often there’s this goal of, We want to spur some sort of industry in the United States. Often, it’s domestic manufacturing, right? You kind of asided to that with the shoe example.

But there’s a history of this, right? Actually, last week, we just had on the show Oliver Kim, who was talking to us about the East Asian development miracle. And one thing that a lot of East Asian countries are credited with doing is having protected native industries and ensuring that those industries were able to succeed on the world market. And there was a lot of protectionism that was involved in doing that, including tariffs.

And so what I guess I would ask you is, firstly, do you feel like that is a goal the U.S. government should have of trying to spur domestic manufacturing? Do you think that’s an important goal?

Lincicome: No. At least not via tariffs. I think there is a million things that the United States government could be doing to boost the manufacturing sector. I should note, of course, the United States is the world’s second-largest manufacturing nation in terms of output, in terms of productivity. So the stuff we make per worker—we’re absolutely crushing it. No. 1 in the world, basically, for large, industrialized nations, so it’s not like the United States is this weak, nothing-burger nation when it comes to manufacturing.

But that aside, there’s a couple caveats I think you need to include when you talk about Asian protectionism and industrial policy. First is: That came with a lot of free trade too. While, certainly, there was some protection for certain industries, there was also a lot of exposure to competition in export markets, in particular, but also in import markets. And, though, there was a lot of tariff liberalization for the things that manufacturers they were trying to support—that they needed. So it wasn’t this just blanket protectionist policy.

The second big thing, though, is that there is a bit of a correlation-versus-causation thing in a lot of East Asian industrial-policy narratives because they were doing a lot of other stuff at the exact same time. And there’s a great book by Arvind Panagariya, who actually looks at South Korea and Taiwan and others and says, Actually, these economies performed better when they weren’t being protectionist—when they weren’t engaging this heavy-handed industrial policy—than when they were. So we need to be a little bit cautious there.

But the third, and I think the most important one for the United States, is that the East Asian miracle applied to a radically different economy than the one in the United States in two big ways. One: Those were developing countries really trying to push infant industries, whereas most U.S. protection is—I mean, the U.S. is certainly not a developing economy. We’re a very developed economy. And most of our protection actually goes to lagging industries. It is not on the cutting edge, and one of the reasons—we have a lot of cutting-edge stuff. But typically, our protection goes to, again, shoes and steel and stuff like that—legacy industries.

But the other thing is that the United States has far-more-developed capital markets than Asian economies did—very open, very fluid. And that means we have much-more-efficient investment where there might be the potential for that success and that innovation. And so it’s less likely that government planners in the United States are going to be able to pick the right industries, pick the right companies, pick the right whatever, as opposed to capital markets and VCs and private equity and all that great stuff. And in general, though, it’s just a radically different environment than what existed in, say, South Korea in the 1970s.

Demsas: But then let’s take a look at the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, right? That’s the 2022 law Joe Biden signed to bring semiconductor manufacturing to the United States. So during the pandemic, there’s a real concern about semiconductor chips, that we’re not going to be able to have as many. There’s obviously this big shortage. We’re really reliant on Taiwan, which is, of course, concerning because of its proximity to China and the threat that China poses to Taiwan’s freedom.

It’s clear that there is a need to produce, at least in—if not domestically, we need to “friendshore.” We need to make sure can get those supplies from ally countries that we’re less worried about having some kind of future political risk with, but also just domestically because there might be supply-chain problems in the future that are unprecedented, like a global pandemic that we had not been expecting.

And so the CHIPS Act is an industrial policy where there is a real push to get chips made here in the United States. We have factories opening up. I believe they are already producing chips. There’s an Arizona factory.

Lincicome: Yeah. TSMC is not quite up yet.

Demsas: Okay. Not up yet. But basically, we brought Taiwanese expertise to the United States, and they’re building here. We have American jobs that are being created here. And you may care about parts of that or not, but that seems like a policy where that’s on the cutting edge. It’s not confusing to make these chips, but it is a cutting-edge technology. It’s not a legacy industry. So how do you view the use of protection there?

Lincicome: Yeah. Two things: One is that it’s really important to start by noting that this CHIPS Act is subsidies and not tariffs. Now, Biden just imposed some tariffs on semiconductors from China but, in general, the CHIPS Act is just about throwing money at companies.

In general, if you’re going to ask an economist, What would you prefer: a domestic subsidy or a tariff? they’re going to say, A subsidy, nine times out of 10, right? That’s important because you’re at least—granted you’re subsidizing the production, but you’re at least—once the company gets up and running, going to be subjecting it to market forces and competition and its production and output and the rest. You’re not going to be artificially raising prices for downstream consumers and that kind of stuff. So a subsidy is definitely preferable to a tariff.

And in fact, we actually applied tariffs to semiconductors in the 1980s. We had a big industrial policy push in the ’80s related to chips, Japanese memory chips. We applied a bunch of different tariffs, any dumping duties. There was a trade agreement restricting Japanese semiconductors. And what happened? Well, it raised the price of semiconductors and pushed computer manufacturers offshore from the U.S. computer manufacturers. So tariffs, again—historically not very good at achieving your objectives.

But the other thing with the CHIPS Act is: It is starting to reveal some of the problems with industrial policy that we saw back then too. For example, back then, we actually picked—we, the government—picked the wrong type of semiconductor. The Department of Defense in the ’80s thought memory chips were going to be the big innovative thing of the future. So we targeted memory chips. Well, it turns out that the entire industry was actually moving towards logic chips, which are what we use today. And the government totally missed that, while imposing all of those costs.

Right now, we might have a bit of a similar situation because you mentioned TSMC—and TSMC is a global leader. Okay. Cool. But also, the biggest subsidy recipient was Intel. Intel is our national champion. Intel is struggling like crazy.

Intel is slated to receive as much as $45 billion in total subsidies because the CHIPS Act had grants, loans, and tax credits. So Intel is really in trouble.

So did we, once again, pick a loser, along with TSMC? So that’s, I think, a concern we have to deal with. And that’s a traditional issue with industrial policy. Now, why did Intel get all that money? Well, Intel is an American company. Intel has an army of lobbyists in Washington, was instrumental in getting the CHIPS Act passed. Intel decided to locate its facilities in Ohio, a politically important place. And thus, there are questions about whether the government should, again, be giving $45 billion taxpayer dollars to a struggling company like Intel.

Demsas: You’re pointing out a glut of good reasons why it’s not the most optimally efficient policy. But it seems obvious to me, at least, that it’s important for us to make semiconductors here or at least friendshore them. Is there an alternative way to do this?

Lincicome: Yeah. Sure. Well, let me say one more thing about TSMC’s [fabrication facility], and then we’ll move onto your question. The other problem—and the thing I’m worried about—is that we’re actually not subsidizing bleeding-edge technology. TSMC’s fab that’ll be up and running next year is going to be very small, relative to its factories in Taiwan, and it’s not going to be producing the tippy-top-most innovative chip. It’s going to be producing four-nanometer chips instead of the industry two.

It’s also insanely costly. Apparently, it’s costing about 50 percent more to build. And then, of course, a lot of other chip companies that aren’t TSMC are getting money, too, and not just Intel. And they’re getting money to produce what we call legacy chips. So these are clunky commodity chips that really have no security or even, really, innovative nexus. So I think we should be concerned. I don’t know the answer yet. You know, it’s still early in the ballgame, but there are some warning signs.

Now, what could we do instead? A lot, because the big reason why companies weren’t producing a lot of chips here—although that’s a bit of a myth. About half of all chips consumed by American companies were still made in America before the CHIPS Act. But beyond that, we did lose some bleeding-edge capacity. Now, why did that happen? No. 1 reason is because of Intel. Intel was at the frontier and then totally botched it at 10 nanometers and has just become extremely behind the curve. So it’s just a corporate decision-making thing, nothing related to industrial policy.

But the other big reason is because it costs a darn fortune to build a semiconductor facility in the United States. Now, some of that is just because we’re the United States. Things are more expensive than in a developing country. But a lot of it is permitting issues and materials issues and immigration issues. The semiconductor industry is one of the most immigrant-dependent industries in the United States.

So tax issues, as well—we tax the construction of large structures at a much higher rate than we tax things like software and the rest. So you combine all these things, and there’s a free-market path to encouraging the onshoring of large manufacturing facilities, whether it’s semiconductors or anything else, and you could have tax reform and immigration reform and trade reform. Maybe we don’t put tariffs on construction materials and steel and everything else. So that’s a big part of it.

And to the extent even that didn’t do the job, then you could see a role for the government to provide a targeted subsidy for national-security-related chips, so things our Defense Department needs or the tippy-tippy-bleeding-edge stuff that we need for, like, government supercomputers and the rest. But we didn’t get that. You know, that’s maybe a $5 billion bill. And, instead, we got this $60 billion—and then plus another $200 billion in potential tax credit—slush fund that just goes to anything and everything. So I think that’s a problem. And that’s a problem with industrial policy. What starts out as maybe a decent idea on paper just morphs into kind of a political albatross.

Demsas: The only argument that I’ve seen that defends broad-based tariffs—because very few people will defend the, like, 60 percent tariff on goods from China, 20 percent on everything else the U.S. imports. I don’t think we even grow bananas. Even stuff we don’t actually make, no industries—coffee, stuff like that.

But the one argument I have heard is that, while you don’t see increases in domestic manufacturing from these smaller tariffs, if you were to do this really broad-based tariff, it would just force industries to invest in the American economy, because American demand is just both lucrative but also, it would just reshape how capital markets thought about where to invest in companies. It would reshape the kinds of entrepreneurship that would happen, because now we do have to figure out how to satiate this American demand that they’ve been priced out of buying these cheaper goods from abroad.

So setting aside the question about whether or not that would be good for the American consumer to have to now pay double or triple or whatever it is for these basic goods, why wouldn’t that work? Or what do you think would happen in a world where you actually saw these massive tariffs? You can go even higher. Like, you can say 60 percent tariffs on all goods outside the United States. What would actually happen here?

Lincicome: Yeah. So basically North Korea, right? And I joke, but the reality is that tariffs also come with a deadweight loss, an economic loss in terms of economic growth and the rest. Yes. The United States is a big, diverse country with a very productive workforce and a lot of smart people and wonderful capital markets. But if you started imposing giant tariff walls, you’d have a few problems—the biggest being slower economic growth.

By pushing workers into less productive industries, you would effectively be ensuring that the workforce, as a whole, is less productive. That means lower wages, less innovation outside of the sectors you’re targeting, right? You would push a lot of workers and resources into lower-value production. And let’s just leave aside the fact that you’d need giant greenhouses for bananas and stuff like that. We’ll leave that out.

Demsas: Or we just don’t have bananas. No bananas. Yeah.

Lincicome: Right. Heaven forbid. But I do think that’s the other thing that you would have to also consider. You would not just have lower economic growth and slower wages, but I think non-financially, it’d be a lower quality of life. And the grocery store is a wonderful example of that. I can remember back in the 1980s, the grocery store was not nearly as incredible as it is today. And a lot of that, today, is owed to open trade, globalization. And you would lose some of that. You would lose the variety and some of the things that make our lives richer. And I don’t just, by the way, mean bananas. And I don’t just mean food, although that’s a big one.

We have this big globalization series going on. And we talk about fashion and film, and you can go down and on and on down the list. And there’s a lot of aspects of trade and open markets that make our lives fuller and richer in ways that aren’t just about where we’re working or how much we’re making, right? And so that would mean a little less, if not a lot less, of that too. I mentioned at the beginning those cool European and Asian pickup trucks we don’t get. Well, we wouldn’t get those either. We would just have fewer varieties of those things, even if, let’s assume prices are a little bit higher. Sure. But we just also wouldn’t have the variety.

Demsas: I agree with you on this, but then it also gets to a point where sometimes I’m talking to people, and I realize there’s a difference in value. Some people don’t care about this, or they think it’s less important. They think that if we could get more manufacturing jobs in the United States, then it’s okay for us not to have bananas. It’s okay for us not to have a great variety of trucks. Is that stuff important? And I wonder, doesn’t this fall then down to political value judgment about what kind of world looks best?

Lincicome: Yeah—yes and no, because I think if you started saying things like, Well, would you accept less medical innovation? Would you accept less scientific innovation outside of that? because resources are finite—so I think that if you gave people the fuller picture of the price of autarky, I think they would recoil. Particularly if you added things like, And also, your 401(k) is going to be smaller. Your houses are going to be smaller, there’s going to be less resiliency, not more.

You might remember the baby-formula crisis, right? Well, we made all baby formula in the United States, except—because of protectionism. We had walls— tariff wall, non-tariff wall—around the country. Ninety-eight percent of baby formula consumed here was made here. We had a one factory closure, and the entire supply chain collapsed for a year. So you would have actually a more brittle economy than a more resilient one. We would not, at the end of the day, enjoy the much lower living standards, overall, just because we had a few more manufacturing jobs that people don’t even want.

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Demsas: We’re going to take a quick break. More with Scott when we get back.

[Break]

Demsas: Something you mentioned earlier on I always think is interesting is: The connection between tariff loving and immigration hating I always find very bizarre. We’re at low unemployment right now, so if you’re trying to spur more people to work in domestic manufacturing, it means you’re moving people out of other industries to work towards manufacturing. And if you have the kind of broad-based tariffs that are being proposed by the Trump-Vance ticket—I mean, they’re proposing, like, 60 percent on goods from China and up to 20 percent on everything else from the U.S. imports. These are massive, massive tariffs.

That sort of thing means that you’re going to have the U.S. producing a ton more of the goods that Americans consume. And that would indicate that you would want more people coming here and working here. But at the same time, they’re opposed to immigration. So why do you think the anti-immigration and pro-tariff sentiments have gone hand in hand? They’re trying to deport millions of people too. I forgot about that.

Lincicome: Nationalist sentiment, right? Look—I don’t think there’s a lot of logic or coherence in most economic nationalist arguments. And I think this is just a great example of it, for the reason you said, right? This isn’t 2014 anymore. Native-born employment has flatlined. We are an economy that needs more workers if it wants to grow at the rates we have grown accustomed to in the past. And that means we’re going to need just warm bodies. Just in terms of warm bodies, we’re going to need more of them. And obviously, immigration is a great source. I mean, babies are great, too, but they take at least 18 years to become workers, right? So we can’t do that tomorrow—at least, not that I’m aware of. I don’t know what the science is doing—

Demsas: Latest technology? I think it’s still 18 years.

Lincicome: Right. So we’re going to have a while on that. So immigrants are the obvious source for, you know—if we’re going to be making toasters in America again, like J.D. Vance wants, we’re going to need workers to do that. And robots are great, but robots can’t fill the gap entirely, particularly, again, in the near term. So there’s a huge disconnect there.

And the other thing I’d note is that native-born Americans, in general, just don’t want to work in manufacturing. And this is something totally missed. We at Cato did a very expansive poll over the summer, asking people all sorts of questions. One of the questions we asked was a two-parter: One, Do you think the U.S. should have more manufacturing jobs? And it was, like, 80 percent yes. Yes. More people should work in manufacturing. Then we said, Do you want to work in manufacturing? And it was, like, 20 percent said yes. It’s almost the exact flip.

There was a great article in Bloomberg a couple of years ago about furniture manufacturing here in North Carolina, talking about how they can’t find workers. And this was pre-pandemic, so it’s certainly gotten worse since then. You look at—the textile-manufacturing jobs in South Carolina pay $11 an hour to start. These are not the glamorous jobs that a lot of our politicians think they are. So to the extent we want these jobs in the United States, I am ambivalent. I want the market to determine that. Big surprise. They’re just going to have to come to the reality that we’re going to need more workers to do that. And, again, immigration’s the source.

But there is another thing that I think the nationalists miss entirely, is that free trade actually can help reduce some of the immigration pressures in places like Central America, for example, because it’s going to boost the local economies and boost the stability of these places. Because a lot of immigration is that push-pull, right? People are living in terrible places. They’re like, I got to get the heck out of here. But also, the U.S. economy’s pulling them in. So to the extent that a trade agreement—and allowing companies to access the U.S. market to sell us shirts and stuff like that—can actually boost the local economies in places like, say, Guatemala, that’s going to actually reduce some of that push pressure on immigration, legal or otherwise.

And there’s a fantastic study that actually showed everything I just said, most recently, and it said that you could reduce illegal border crossings by several hundred thousand if you had truly free trade with Central America for textiles, for the reasons I just described. So is that a panacea for the border issues? No. But would it help? Yes. And it is completely lost on our anti-immigration, anti-trade folks, the idea that trading more with places would actually reduce some pressures for more immigrants. They just want no trade and no immigrants, which just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Demsas: I want to get into some of the reasons for why tariffs haven’t been able to increase domestic manufacturing. There’s a really great study. Aaron Flaaen and Justin Pierce at the Fed—I hope, Aaron, I’m saying your last name correctly. I apologize if not. And they had this study where they looked at the Trump tariffs—the 2018, 2019 tariffs—and they find that the U.S. industries most exposed to tariff increases experienced reductions in employment.

And they also find that counties more exposed to rising tariffs show increases in unemployment—more people are unemployed in counties that are more exposed to rising tariffs—and, of course, declines in labor-force participation. So people are just exiting the labor force entirely there. Why is that happening? Because why is even this narrow case of tariffs—they’re big tariffs, but they’re nothing like they’re being proposed now—why did that not improve domestic manufacturing?

Lincicome: Right. For the moment, let’s just leave aside that the vast majority of us work in services. And if you work in services, you’re basically hurt by tariffs, regardless of anything.

Demsas: Okay. This is one of my hobbyhorses, that whenever everyone talks about the working class, we pretend like everyone’s a manufacturer, but really everyone’s in the service industry, and it’s like, No one cares about those people. McDonald’s? Don’t care about them. It’s just bizarre.

Lincicome: It’s crazy. Even for male-dominated professions—because we’re all worried about men not working and stuff—there are four times as many male-dominated, blue-collar jobs in services than there are in manufacturing. And we never talk about any of it, like you said. Whether it’s construction or security or repair, like automotive repair, you name it, there’s tons of jobs. Nobody talks about them. But anyway, we’re going to ignore all of those folks.

Demsas: Just like our political leaders.

Lincicome: Right. We’re going to ignore them. Sorry. Sorry, folks. We can get back to them later.

Manufacturing—there’s three big reasons why tariffs actually harm American manufacturing. The first is that American manufacturing today is very much global. About half of everything we import into the United States is actually stuff used by American manufacturers to make other stuff—things like steel or machinery and semiconductors. The huge example of that is: The most advanced semiconductor-production technology comes from the Netherlands.

We import that equipment to support semiconductor production in the United States, right?

Demsas: These are intermediate goods.

Lincicome: Yeah—intermediate. Oh, look at you! Nice. Yes. Exactly.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Lincicome: When people use trade wonky terms, I’m always impressed. That’s great.

So all these intermediate goods—you raise the price of those goods, which tariffs do, and you raise costs for manufacturers. That means those manufacturers spend less on employment and investment and the rest. You’re just raising their costs. It’s like a corporate tax but only for manufacturers that consume imports, which, again, is most of them.

The second big channel is the export side, and that is through retaliation. Foreign governments typically don’t just sit there after a tariff is imposed on products they’re exporting and say, Oh, you got us. We’re toast. No. They retaliate. And they retaliate because they have their own domestic political considerations. They have strategic considerations about preventing even more tariffs. So that harms American manufacturers that export—American manufacturers that are already hurt because they’re facing higher import costs. So those companies are getting hit two ways: higher input costs and retaliation.

The third channel is currency, and I won’t get into the weeds, but tariffs tend to increase the value of the domestic currency. So the dollar gets stronger. As the dollar gets stronger, there’s a good thing: That means that imports get a little cheaper. So it’ll offset some of that tariff pain. The bad thing is that it makes exports more expensive, and anybody who’s gone abroad and has a really strong dollar knows you can buy a ton abroad. That’s actually an import. You’re getting cheap imports. But if the dollar gets really weak and you go abroad, it’s the opposite. So just kind of think of it—it’s kind of those mechanisms, right?

So those three channels, effectively, eliminate any benefit that manufacturers might get from tariff protection. And thus, like you said, the literature tends to show that countries with higher tariffs don’t have wonderful trade surpluses or burgeoning manufacturing industries. And in the United States, the empirical research from the Trump era shows much the same thing.

Demsas: You’ve talked about the narrow cases in which tariffs make sense to you, which I think, largely, is around national security. But I think once you accept that logic, then it just becomes a political question about what things people value, right?

There is this sense that people really care about protecting the manufacturing legacy of specific areas in the United States. And this is, I think, a legacy of 2016, when a lot of people were surprised by the victory of Donald Trump to the presidency. There was a lot of indexing on the fact that he won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania and seeing that this narrative—that he really spoke to the white working class who had been disaffected by free trade.

And this, of course, is right when the “China Shock” paper is becoming really central to the discourse. And so there’s a level here where I wonder if there’s a political-narrative thing that’s going on here, too, where, regardless of all the stuff that we’re talking about, if people want to win national elections, is this just necessary?

Lincicome: No. I’m a firm believer that a lot of what’s going on with our protectionist moment right now is political. The conventional wisdom in Washington today is that, to win national elections, you need to win a handful of gettable votes—so Obama–Trump voters, basically, people who flipped—in a handful of important places, mainly in the industrial Midwest. And to win those votes, you need to offer lots of protectionism and industrial policy too—manufacturing-centric policy.

And I think that is the reality—the conventional wisdom is. I think that is the case. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I’m not a political consultant, so I won’t dare to question it. And there was a good paper recently by Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, another person—the “China Shock” authors—that said that Republicans did gain a little bit in places, thanks to the tariffs. Even though those places didn’t actually benefit economically, the tariffs were a political winner for Republicans, thanks to the idea that they were being protected. They weren’t actually being protected. The economy was actually a little worse. But they thought they were, and they were rewarding politicians for that.

So I think that is the case. And it’s unfortunate because, first, I am not entirely convinced that tariffs and protectionism were what tipped the 2016 election.

There’s a lot of other stuff bubbling under the surface. But the other big thing is: You actually look at the effect of import competition on these places pre-Trump, and it’s not nearly as devastating as the narrative makes it sound. Whether it’s the China Shock or NAFTA or anything else, these things undoubtedly had a small but significant negative effect on certain places, but it was small. There’s a lot of bigger things going on in terms of manufacturing job loss, in terms of communities surviving or dying.

There’s a great study a few years ago from Brookings that found that, like, 80 percent of old industrial cities in the United States had transitioned to successful economies—places like Pittsburgh. So not every place ended up being like Youngstown, Ohio, right? Yet there’s this narrative that it was all trade, and every place got crushed. And that’s just not the reality, you know?

And the other thing we ignore entirely is interstate competition. A lot of the jobs in the Rust Belt manufacturing—they’re still in the United States. They’re just not in the Rust Belt anymore. They’re in the Sun Belt. We don’t talk about that at all, either. It is all trade, trade, trade. And I think that’s really unfortunate.

At the end of the day, what does that do? It means that the real solutions—and there are a lot of policies that could be pursued to help people adjust, to give them better training and education, to help them move if they need to move by lowering housing prices (you know all about that)—we don’t do any of those. Or, at least, we don’t focus on those. Instead, it’s like, Ah. We’ll just slap a tariff on a toaster, and suddenly Youngstown will be thriving again. And that’s just not reality, not just in the literature. It just doesn’t make any sense. But that’s politics for you, right?

Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. I also think that one of the things that I wanted to get your—because you’ve thought about this for years as someone who’s working in trade. The political dynamics of tariffs, I think, are really important to understand. I think, broadly, my question for you is: Why are tariffs so popular if they’re so harmful? What is going on that, if you’re right, it’s creating all these problems, from baby-formula shortages, which is extremely politically costly, other kinds of shortages during the pandemic—very, very costly. If it’s leading to lower growth—all this stuff—what’s happening? Why doesn’t the political party just win 300 electoral votes by campaigning against tariffs?

Lincicome: Right. Because they are extremely politically attractive to voters.

There’s a guy named Bryan Caplan who wrote a wonderful book several years ago called The Myth of the Rational Voter. He’s a George Mason economist, libertarian guy. But this is more political-science oriented. He ticks through a bunch of biases we all have. And bias is kind of a bad connotation, but I don’t mean it that way. I just mean things that we innately feel.

And tariffs check all of the boxes: an anti-foreign bias, a make-work bias. We like things that produce jobs, right? We have a status-quo bias. Like, we want to protect things that we see that are right in front of us. We are less inclined to want the unseen or the things we don’t know. We can, in fact, fear them. You can go down the list, and tariffs check all of those boxes. So that’s the first thing. Voters innately think, Oh, that’s great. You’re going to protect jobs with that tariff. Wonderful.

But beyond that, the economics of tariffs are hard. It is counterintuitive that a tariff might actually reduce manufacturing output, right? It is counterintuitive, I think, that a trade deficit isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It sounds terrible, right? And it’s counterintuitive that if you cut imports, you actually cut exports too. So there’s all these little things in trade economics that make it a hard sell.

And then, finally: It’s opaque. I mentioned before, when you go to the gas station, you see how prices change. So even some voters that are somewhat connected to the news can be like, Oh, wow. There’s this new conflict with Iran and Israel, and gas prices are going to go up. I get that connection. You don’t really get that with tariffs.

Demsas: So you need a tariff ticker in grocery stores to show—

Lincicome: Yes. I’ve actually long said we need—just the gas station ticker, you need that as well. I think that if you got a receipt from the grocery store and a lot of the line items was the tariff amount, I think that probably would change a few minds. And then, finally, the other thing is that tariffs are oftentimes a corporate tax, and corporate taxes can be hidden. They can either be absorbed by companies or passed on to consumers, again, in invisible ways. And that makes it hard too. So it’s a very, very tough sell.

Now, I’ll note: We’ve known everything I just said for decades, if not centuries. And politicians came up with a fix. It’s called a trade agreement. Trade agreements are not, contrary to popular belief, primarily economic or even about foreign policy. They’re primarily political. There are ways for governments to tie their own hands when it comes to tariff policy. They’re like, I can’t be trusted with this. We went through Smoot-Hawley and all these other bad tariff episodes. We can’t be trusted with guiding tariff policy. So we’re going to delegate it all to the president, which, by the way, that was not the best idea, given Trump. But beyond that, we’re entering into agreements that essentially say that if we go back on our promises, well, what happens? Then the countries we’re trading with can retaliate, there can be litigation and the rest. And that can act as a check.

The other big thing is: We’re going to offset import-competing industries. We’re going to offset their political power with exporters, and trade agreements are going to do that too. Because that’s the other political attractiveness, right? Concentrated benefits and diffuse costs. The benefits of protectionism are very narrow, like the steel industry. Costs of protection are diffused. We all bear those little costs—again, an invisible cost.

So how do you offset that? Well, a trade agreement does that, too, because you have exporters that are like, Oh, but I want access to that market. And I don’t just mean Boeing. I mean financial services and other companies. And so that was the political solution. Now, trade agreements have problems, but they were reasonably successful for 80 years in liberalizing trade, integrating economies, and checking the protectionist impulses of our political class. It was only in the last decade that Donald Trump hacked the whole machine. And we’re basically dealing with the aftermath.

Demsas: Yeah. This diffuse-benefits, concentrated-cost thing—I think it’s just so key. Also, because even after the political constituency has died, it’s kind of hard—in general, once a law gets passed, it’s really durable. Repealing that law, on not just tariff policy but all policies—it kind of just lives on its own. It develops a constituency, whether it’s in the government or outside the government, that wants its continuation. And there’s also very few people who are going to make their political hobbyhorse to do good-governance reforms.

But I write about housing policy a lot. And it’s funny—everyone is talking about housing policy now. Everyone’s talking about how to reduce the cost of housing, make it easier to do construction, all this sort of thing. I’ll have people who are in the Democratic Party or in the administration saying things like, Jerusalem, we need to lower costs. We need innovative ways for the federal government to do this. It’s really hard. It’s all at state and local level.

And I’ll often just say, Hey. Did you guys know there are, like, massive tariffs on Canadian lumber, on Canadian softwood lumber? And they doubled those tariffs in August. And there’s none of this thinking about the diffuse costs to the American people. Like, Congress isn’t working on fixing that. It’s just a level at which I believe that they all care about lowering the cost of housing. I think that’s not a fake thing that they’re talking about here. But we don’t even think about tariff policy when we’re thinking about broad economic costs to the public. We only think about them narrowly in the question of, How does it hurt or benefit this specific industry? and not, What is the harm to the rest of the public?

Lincicome: For sure. And every time you bring up potentially lifting the tariffs that are in place, what happens? Well, big lumber comes to your congressional office or big dairy when the—the dairy industry in the United States, highly protected. When the baby-formula thing was going down, they were vigorously opposing a long-term elimination of the tariffs on baby formula. Now, think about that for a second: baby formula. And these guys are out there, big dairy is out there fighting it. And it worked. Congress has not eliminated those tariffs, even though it’s the most sympathetic consumer possible, right?

Demsas: And it was broadly unpopular. It’s very unpopular, what happened with the baby formula.

Lincicome: Exactly. And every time you scratch a tariff, there’s a crony underneath, and they’re going to fight like heck to keep their windfall profits.

And they’re paying attention. They’re editing Wikipedia pages to make the protectionism sound better. They are the ones laser focused on keeping the protection in place, while the rest of us are like, Well, five cents for some food that’s subject to a tariff, a few dollars here and there extra for a refrigerator or washing machine. Oh, well.

But that stuff adds up, of course. Studies show that if you eliminated all of the protectionism that’s remaining in the U.S. economy—and we’re a pretty open economy—you would save consumers hundreds of dollars a year, if not more. And yet, because it is 10 cents here and 10 cents there, it just doesn’t resonate. And the other side is extremely motivated.

Demsas: Well, thank you so much, Scott. I have one last question for you. And it’s: What’s an idea that you had that seemed good at the time but turned out to only be good on paper?

Lincicome: Yeah. I struggled with this question.

Demsas: Because you’ve always been right? Yeah. (Laughs.)

Lincicome: Well, no, no, no. Because I wanted to find a good one. Self-checkout is my answer.

Demsas: Oh, yeah?

Lincicome: Yeah. I am a huge fan of self-checkout. And being me, I’m also a big fan of just efficiency, right? Waiting in line is terrible. I wrote a whole column about why you should never wait in line, because of the opportunity cost of doing so.

So self-checkout—in theory, self-checkout is this amazing life hack. And I still love it, but I’m realizing that—let’s face it—and companies are realizing that self-checkout is not nearly the labor-saving, time-saving miracle that we think. And that’s because humans, alas, are still human. And for every guy like me who literally treats it like I’m trying to beat my best time ever at Costco when I’m going through the self-check—my daughter’s, like, handing me stuff. I mean, we’re literally gamifying it. It’s so great.

Demsas: This is how I feel in the airport security line. I get so angry.

Lincicome: For every person like me, who’s trying to get out of there as soon as possible and trying to break his own personal record, there are, like, 74 other people who are utterly confused by the technology, in no rush, wanting to maybe chat with the person behind the counter, wanting to pay by a check, confused by their coupons, or trying to steal. That’s the other big thing. And so, unfortunately, it has turned out that self-check is not the miracle technology that I was hoping. So it looked good on paper but less so in reality.

Demsas: There’s a Safeway near my house. I moved recently, so I was checking out the nearby grocery stores. And the self-checkout is, like, I don’t know, an armed state. It’s so insane. You can’t exit the checkout without scanning your receipt. And I usually just throw my receipt away immediately, so I had to go get the receipt out of the trash. It wasn’t even functioning. Someone had to come and let me out and then look at all my stuff and make sure I wasn’t stealing. It was just this level of just—it genuinely would have taken me so much less time to wait in this line. But every time, I still go to the self-check. I don’t know why I’m doing it to myself.

Lincicome: Of course. No. And I have a dream of opening up my own supermarket where we actually time people, and there’s, like, posted records of all this. But no. Alas, it still runs into problems.

Demsas: Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Lincicome: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Great talk.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Lincicome: I’ve really worked this out on Twitter a few times. You’d put a bar right at the checkout area, so people could watch, and stadium seating around it. It’d be great. Scott Mart!

Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump’s second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington’s historic accomplishments—his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington’s most important contribution to the nation he liberated.

“He went home,” Kelly said.

The message was unambiguous. After leaving the White House, Kelly had described Trump as a “person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about.” At Mount Vernon, he was making a clear point: People who are mad for power are a mortal threat to democracy. They may hold different titles—even President—but at heart they are tyrants, and all tyrants share the same trait: They never voluntarily cede power.

The American revolutionaries feared a powerful executive; they had, after all, just survived a war with a king. Yet when the Founders gathered in 1787 to draft the Constitution, they approved a powerful presidential office, because of their faith in one man: Washington.

Washington’s life is a story of heroic actions, but also of temptations avoided, of things he would not do. As a military officer, Washington refused to take part in a plot to overthrow Congress. As a victorious general, he refused to remain in command after the war had ended. As president, he refused to hold on to an office that he did not believe belonged to him. His insistence on the rule of law and his willingness to return power to its rightful owners—the people of the United States—are among his most enduring gifts to the nation and to democratic civilization.

Forty-four men have succeeded Washington so far. Some became titans; others finished their terms without distinction; a few ended their service to the nation in ignominy. But each of them knew that the day would come when it would be their duty and honor to return the presidency to the people.

All but one, that is.

Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the “spirit of revenge” that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to “seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment.

Today, America stands at such a moment. A vengeful and emotionally unstable former president—a convicted felon, an insurrectionist, an admirer of foreign dictators, a racist and a misogynist—desires to return to office as an autocrat. Trump has left no doubt about his intentions; he practically shouts them every chance he gets. His deepest motives are to salve his ego, punish his enemies, and place himself above the law. Should he regain the Oval Office, he may well bring with him the experience and the means to complete the authoritarian project that he began in his first term.

Many Americans might think of George Washington as something like an avatar, too distant and majestic to be emulated. American culture has encouraged this distance by elevating him beyond earthly stature: A mural in the Capitol Rotunda depicts him literally as a deity in the clouds. In the capital city that bears Washington’s name, other presidents such as Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson are represented with human likenesses; Franklin D. Roosevelt even smiles at us from his wheelchair. Washington is represented by a towering, featureless obelisk. Such faceless abstractions make it easy to forget the difficult personal choices that he made, decisions that helped the United States avoid the many curses that have destroyed other democracies.

For decades, I taught Washington’s military campaigns and the lessons of his leadership to military officers when I was a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. And yet I, too, have always felt a distance from the man himself. In recent months, I revisited his life. I read his letters, consulted his biographers, and walked the halls at Mount Vernon. I found a man with weaknesses and shortcomings, but also a leader who possessed qualities that we once expected—and should again demand—from our presidents, especially as the United States confronts the choice between democracy and demagoguery.

The votes cast in November will be more consequential than those in any other American election in more than a century. As we judge the candidates, we should give thought to Washington’s example, and to three of Washington’s most important qualities and the traditions they represent: his refusal to use great power for his own ends, his extraordinary self-command, and, most of all, his understanding that national leaders in a democracy are only temporary stewards of a cause far greater than themselves.

I

A CITIZEN, NOT A CAESAR

Popular military leaders can become a menace to a democratic government if they have the loyalty of their soldiers, the love of the citizenry, and a government too weak to defend itself. Even before his victory in the Revolutionary War, Washington had all of these, and yet he chose to be a citizen rather than a Caesar.

It is difficult, in our modern era of ironic detachment and distrust, to grasp the intensity of the reverence that surrounded the General (as he would be called for the rest of his life) wherever he went. “Had he lived in the days of idolatry,” a Pennsylvania newspaper stated breathlessly during the war, Washington would have “been worshiped as a god.” He was more than a war hero. In 1780, when Washington passed through a town near Hartford, Connecticut, a French officer traveling with him recorded the scene:

We arrived there at night; the whole of the population had assembled from the suburbs, we were surrounded by a crowd of children carrying torches, reiterating the acclamations of the citizens; all were eager to approach the person of him whom they called their father, and pressed so closely around us that they hindered us from proceeding.

Washington was addressed—by Americans and visiting foreigners alike—as “Your Excellency” almost as often as he was by his rank. In Europe, a French admiral told him, he was celebrated as the “deliverer of America.” Alexander Hamilton, his aide-de-camp during the war, later described Washington as a man “to whom the world is offering incense.”

At the war’s outset, Washington had believed that defeat and death—whether on the battlefield or on a gibbet in London—were more likely than glory. He worried that his wife, Martha, might also face threats from British forces, and was so concerned about her reaction to his appointment as commander of the Continental Army that he waited days before writing to tell her about it. Patrick Henry described a chance encounter with Washington on the street in Philadelphia, shortly after the vote approving Washington’s command. Tears welled in the new general’s eyes. “Remember, Mr. Henry, what I now tell you,” Washington said. “From the day I enter upon the command of the American armies, I date my fall, and the ruin of my reputation.”

Instead, Washington’s reputation grew. Yet despite his surprising successes as a general and his rise as the symbol of American liberty, he never allowed the world’s incense to intoxicate him. Although he was a man of fierce ambition, his character was tempered by humility and bound up in his commitment to republican ideals: He led an American army only in the name of the American people and its elected representatives, and he never saw that army as his personal property. His soldiers were citizens, like him, and they were serving at his side in a common cause. “When we assumed the soldier,” he said to a group of New York representatives shortly before he took command, “we did not lay aside the citizen,” a sentiment that he repeated throughout the war.

In the 18th century, Washington’s deference to the people’s representatives and the rule of law would have seemed almost nonsensical to his European counterparts. Most military officers of the time served for life, after swearing allegiance to royal sovereigns whose authority was said to be ordained by God. Often drawn from the ranks of the nobility, they saw themselves as a superior caste and found little reason to assure civilians of their good intentions.

Washington, however, insisted that his men conduct themselves like soldiers who tomorrow would have to live with the people they were defending today. Despite continual supply shortages, he forbade his troops from plundering goods from the population—including from his Tory adversaries. Washington’s orders were prudent in the short term; his army needed both supplies and the goodwill of the people. But they also represented his careful investment in America’s future: Once the war was over, the new nation would depend on comity and grace among all citizens, regardless of what side they’d supported.

The painter John Trumbull’s depiction of George Washington resigning his military commission to Congress in 1783 (World History Archive / Alamy)

Most American presidents have had some sort of military experience. A few, like Washington, were genuine war heroes. All of them understood that military obedience to the rule of law and to responsible civilian authority is fundamental to the survival of democracy. Again, all of them but one.

During his term as president, Trump expected the military to be loyal—but only to him. He did not understand (or care) that members of the military swear an oath to the Constitution, and that they are servants of the nation, not of one man in one office. Trump viewed the military like a small child surveying a shelf of toy soldiers, referring to “my generals” and ordering up parades for his own enjoyment and to emphasize his personal control.

Trump was more than willing to turn the American military against its own people. In 2020, for instance, he wanted the military to attack protesters near the White House. “Beat the fuck out of them,” the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley. “Just shoot them.” Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper (a former military officer himself) talked their boss out of opening fire on American citizens.

[From the November 2023 issue: How Mark Milley held the line]

Senior officers during Trump’s term chose loyalty to the Constitution over loyalty to Donald Trump and remained true to Washington’s legacy. Such principles baffle Trump—all principles seem to baffle Trump, and he especially does not understand patriotism or self-sacrifice. He is, after all, the commander in chief who stood in Arlington National Cemetery, looked around at the honored dead in one of the country’s most sacred places, and said: “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

A year ago, Trump suggested that Milley should be executed for actions he’d taken in uniform, including reassuring China of America’s political stability both before and after January 6, 2021. Esper has said that he thinks he and Milley, along with other senior defense officials and military officers, could be arrested and imprisoned if Trump returns to office. In a second term, Trump would appoint senior military leaders willing to subvert the military and the Constitution to serve his impulses. He already tried, in his first term, to bring such people to the White House, naming Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, for example, as his national security adviser. Flynn was fired after only 23 days for misleading White House officials about lying to the FBI and now travels the country promoting outlandish conspiracy theories. Trump has praised Flynn and promised to bring him back in a second term.

Trump is desperate to reclaim power, and he is making threats about what could happen if the American people refuse to give it to him. Washington, even before he became president, was offered an almost certain chance to take ultimate power, and he refused.

In 1783, Washington was camped with most of the Continental Army in Newburgh, New York. Congress, as usual, was behind on its financial obligations to American soldiers, and rumbles were spreading that it was time to take matters into military hands. Some men talked of deserting and leaving the nation defenseless. Others wanted to head to Philadelphia, disband Congress, and install Washington as something like a constitutional monarch.

Washington allowed the soldiers to meet so they could discuss their grievances. Then he unexpectedly showed up at the gathering and unloaded on his men. Calling the meeting itself “subversive of all order and discipline,” he reminded them of the years of loyalty and personal commitment to them. He blasted the dark motives of a letter circulating among the troops, written by an anonymous soldier, that suggested that the army should refuse to disarm if Congress failed to meet their needs. “Can he be,” Washington asked, “a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country?”

Then, in a moment of calculated theater meant to emphasize the toll that eight years of war had taken on him, he reached into his pocket for a pair of eyeglasses, ostensibly to read a communication from a member of Congress. “Gentlemen,” he said, “you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Some of the men, already chastened by Washington’s reproaches, broke into tears. The Newburgh conspiracy, from that moment, was dead.

The presidential historian Stephen Knott told me that Washington could have walked into that same meeting and, with a nod of his head, gained a throne. “A lesser man might have been tempted to lead the army to Philadelphia and pave the way for despotism,” Knott said. Instead, Washington crushed the idea and shamed the conspirators.

Nine months later, Washington stood in the Maryland statehouse, where Congress was temporarily meeting, and returned control of the army to the elected representatives of the United States of America. He asked to be granted “the indulgence of retiring from the service of my country” and handed over the document containing his military commission. Washington, in the words of the historian Joseph Ellis, had completed “the greatest exit in American history.”

Jean-Antoine Houdon’s sculpture of George Washington makes explicit reference to the Roman military leader Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who relinquished power and returned to his farm after delivering victory on the battlefield. (iStock / Getty)

Decades ago, the scholar S. E. Finer asked a question that shadows every civilian government: “Instead of asking why the military engage in politics, we ought surely ask why they ever do otherwise.” The answer, at least in the United States, lies in the traditions instituted by Washington. Because of his choices during and after the Revolution, the United States has had the luxury of regarding military interference in its politics as almost unthinkable. If Trump returns to office with even a handful of praetorians around him, Americans may realize only too late what a rare privilege they have enjoyed.

II

A MAN IN COMMAND OF HIMSELF

Washington’s steadfast refusal to grasp for power was rooted not only in his civic beliefs, but also in a strength of character that Americans should demand in any president.

When he returned to Mount Vernon after the war, Washington thought he was returning permanently to the life of a Virginia planter. His mansion is small by modern standards, and his rooms have a kind of placidity to them, a sense of home. If you visited without knowing who once lived there, you could believe that you were wandering the property of any moderately successful older gentleman of the colonial era, at least until you noticed little details, such as the key to the Bastille—a gift from Washington’s friend the Marquis de Lafayette—hanging in the hall.

The estate is lovingly cared for today, but in 1783, after nearly a decade of Washington’s absence, it was a mess, physically and financially. Its fields and structures were in disrepair. Washington, who had refused a salary for his military service, faced significant debts. (When Lafayette invited him in 1784 to visit France and bask in its adulation, Washington declined because he couldn’t afford the trip.)

[Barton Gellman: What happened to Michael Flynn?]

But Washington’s stretched finances did not matter much to the people who showed up regularly at his door to seek a moment with the great man—and a night or two at his home. Customs of the time demanded that proper visitors, usually those with an introduction from someone known to the householder, were to be entertained and fed. Washington observed these courtesies as a matter of social duty, even when callers lacked the traditional referral. More than a year would pass after his return to Mount Vernon before he and Martha finally enjoyed a dinner alone.

Like many of the other Founders, Washington embraced the virtues of the ancient Stoic thinkers, including self-control, careful introspection, equanimity, and dispassionate judgment. He tried to overcome petty emotions, and to view life’s difficulties and triumphs as merely temporary conditions.

In the words of his vice president, John Adams, Washington had “great self-command”—the essential quality that distinguished him even among the giants of the Revolution and made him a model for future generations of American political and military leaders. Like anyone else, of course, he was beset by ordinary human failings. As his letters and the accounts of friends and family reveal, he was at times seized by vanity, anxiety, and private grievances. He was moody. His occasional bursts of temper could be fearsome. He never forgot, and rarely forgave, personal attacks.

But Washington was “keenly aware” of his own shortcomings, Lindsay Chervinsky, the director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, told me, and this self-knowledge, bolstered by his sense of personal honor, governed nearly all of Washington’s actions. He rarely allowed his pride to congeal into arrogance, nor his insecurities to curdle into self-pity. He refused to carry on public feuds—or to tilt the power he held against those who had slighted him.

Washington’s embrace of Stoicism helped him to step outside himself and confront the snares of his own ego and appetites, and especially to resist many of the temptations of power. His favorite play, Cato, was about Cato the Younger, a noted Stoic thinker and Roman senator who opposed the rise of Julius Caesar. Washington studied the examples of the great Roman republicans, particularly the story of Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman military leader who saved his nation on the battlefield and then returned to his farm. (Washington would later serve as the first president of the Society of the Cincinnati, an organization of Revolutionary War veterans.) As the president and CEO of Mount Vernon, Douglas Bradburn, told me during a visit to the estate, Washington genuinely regarded the Roman general as an example to be followed.

The Stoic insistence on merciless honesty, both with oneself and with others, is what allowed Washington to act with vigor but without venom, to make decisions without drama—another of the many grim differences between the character of the first president and that of the 45th. The Washington biographer Ron Chernow writes that “there was cunning in Washington’s nature but no low scheming. He never reneged on promises and was seldom duplicitous or underhanded. He respected the public” and “did not provoke people needlessly.” He desired recognition of his service, but hated boasting.

Americans have long prized these qualities in their best presidents. Trump has none of them.

Washington’s personal code had one severe omission. I had to take only a short walk from the mansion at Mount Vernon to see the reconstructed living quarters of some of the 300 enslaved people who worked his fields. Like other southern Founders, Washington did not let his commitment to freedom interfere with his ownership of other human beings. His views on slavery changed over time, especially after he commanded Black troops in battle, and he arranged in his will to free his slaves. But to the end of his life, Washington mostly left his thoughts on the institution out of public debates: His goal was to build a republic, not to destroy slavery. He did not right all the wrongs around him, nor all of his own.

But Washington did set the standard of patriotic character for his successors. Some failed this test, and long before Trump’s arrival, other presidents endured harsh criticism for their belligerence and imperious ego. Andrew Jackson, for example, was a coarse and rabid partisan who infuriated his opponents; the New York jurist James Kent in 1834 excoriated him as “a detestable, ignorant, reckless, vain and malignant tyrant,” the product of a foolish experiment in “American elective monarchy.”

Many presidents, however, have emulated Washington in various ways. We rightly venerate the wartime leadership of men such as Lincoln and FDR, but others also undertook great burdens and made hard decisions selflessly and without complaint.

When a 1980 mission to liberate American hostages held in Iran ended in flames and the death of eight Americans in the desert, President Jimmy Carter addressed the nation. “It was my decision,” he said, both to attempt a rescue and to cancel the operation when it became impossible to continue. “The responsibility is fully my own.” Almost 20 years earlier, John F. Kennedy had taken the heat for the disastrous effort to land an anti-Communist invasion at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs, when he could have shifted blame to his predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, from whom he’d inherited the plan. The day after JFK was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson began his tenure as president not by affirming his new power, but by convening Kennedy’s Cabinet and affirming instead the slain president’s greatness. He asked them all to stay on. “I rely on you,” he said. “I need you.”

Gerald Ford ended up in the Oval Office due to the failures of Richard Nixon, unelected and with no popular mandate to govern. And yet, at a time of great political and economic stress, he led the nation steadily and honorably. He pardoned Nixon because he thought it was in the nation’s best interest to end America’s “long national nightmare,” despite knowing that he would likely pay a decisive price at the polls.

President Joe Biden displayed a common sentiment with these leaders when he declined to run for reelection in July. Biden, reportedly hurt that he was being pushed to step aside, nonetheless put defeating Trump above his own feelings and refused to exhibit any bitterness. “I revere this office,” he told the nation, “but I love my country more.”

None of these men was perfect. But they followed Washington’s example by embracing their duty and accepting consequences for their decisions. (Even Nixon chose to resign rather than mobilize his base against his impeachment, a decision that now seems noble compared with Trump’s entirely remorseless reaction to his two impeachments, his inability to accept his 2020 loss, and his warnings of chaos should he lose again.) They refused to present themselves as victims of circumstance. They reassured Americans that someone was in charge and willing to take responsibility.

Trump is unlike all of the men who came before him. Among his many other ignoble acts, he will be remembered for uttering a sentence, as thousands of Americans fell sick and died during a pandemic, that would have disgusted Washington and that no other American president has ever said, nor should ever say again: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

III

A PRESIDENT, NOT A KING

One of the defining characteristics of Washington’s approach to the presidency was that he was always trying to leave it. He had been drawn back into public life reluctantly, attending and presiding over the 1787 Constitutional Convention only after a violent tax revolt in Massachusetts, known as Shays’s Rebellion, convinced him that the republic was still fragile and in need of a more capable system of government. Washington returned to Mount Vernon after the meeting in Philadelphia, but he already knew from discussions at the convention that he would be asked to stand for election to the new presidency as America’s only truly unifying figure. His 1789 victory in the Electoral College was unanimous.

Washington had no intention of remaining president for the rest of his life, even if some of his contemporaries had other ideas. “You are now a king under a different name,” Washington’s aide James McHenry happily wrote to him after that first election, but Washington was determined to serve one term at most and then go back to Mount Vernon. In the end, he would be persuaded to remain for a second term by Hamilton, Jefferson, and others who said that the new nation needed more time to solidify under his aegis. (“North and south,” Jefferson told him, “will hang together if they have you to hang on.”)

An 1895 engraving of Shays’s Rebellion. The violent tax revolt convinced Washington that the United States was still fragile and drew him back into public life. (M&N / Alamy)

As he assumed the presidency, Washington was concerned that even a whiff of kingly presumption could sink America’s new institutions. Lindsay Chervinsky told me that Washington doubted the judgment and prudence of Vice President Adams not only because the vocal and temperamental Bostonian generally irritated him—Adams irritated many of his colleagues—but also because he had proposed bloated and pretentious titles for the chief executive, such as “His Highness, the President of the United States of America, and Protector of their Liberties.” Washington preferred the simpler title adopted by the House of Representatives: “President of the United States.”

The American people trusted Washington, but they didn’t trust an embryonic government created in a matter of months by a small group of men in Philadelphia. (When Washington took office, Rhode Island and North Carolina hadn’t even ratified the Constitution yet.) The first president sought to allay these suspicions by almost immediately undertaking a kind of reassurance tour, traveling throughout the states—the Virginian shrewdly chose to start in New England—to show Americans that the Constitution and the nation’s commander in chief were not threats to their liberties.

Donald Trump also traveled America once he was elected. After one of the most divisive presidential contests in modern American history, Trump embarked on a kind of victory tour through the states that had voted for him, and only those states. His campaign called it a “thank you” tour, but Trump’s speeches—praising his supporters, bashing his enemies—left no doubt about his intentions. “We are really the people who love this country,” he told a crowd in Mobile, Alabama. He was assuring his followers that although he now had to govern the entire nation, he was their president, an insidious theme that would lead directly to the tragic events of January 6.

In his first years in office, Washington could have shaped the new presidency to his liking. His fellow Founders left much in Article II of the Constitution vague; they disagreed among themselves about the powers that the executive branch should hold, and they were willing to let Washington fill in at least some of the blanks regarding the scope of presidential authority. This choice has bedeviled American governance, allowing successive chief executives to widen their own powers, especially in foreign policy. Recently, the Supreme Court further loosened the constraints of the office, holding in Trump v. United States that presidents have immunity for anything that could be construed as an “official act.” This decision, publicly celebrated by Trump, opens frightening opportunities for presidents to rule corruptly and with impunity.

Washington fought for the office rather than its occupant. Sharply cognizant that his every action could constitute a precedent, he tried through his conduct to imbue the presidency with the strength of his own character. He took pains not to favor his relatives and friends as he made political appointments, and he shunned gifts, fearing that they might be seen as bribes. He mostly succeeded: Those who came after him were constrained by his example, even if at times unwillingly, at least until the election of 2016.

Washington believed that the American people had the right to change their Constitution, but he had absolutely no tolerance for insurrectionists who would violently defy its authority. During his first term, Congress passed a new tax on distilled spirits, a law that sparked revolts among farmers in western Pennsylvania. What began as sporadic clashes grew into a more cohesive armed challenge to the authority of the United States government—the largest, as Ron Chernow noted, until the Civil War. In September 1794, Washington issued an official proclamation that this “Whiskey Rebellion” was an act of “treasonable opposition.” The issue, he declared, was “whether a small portion of the United States shall dictate to the whole Union.” He warned other Americans “not to abet, aid, or comfort the insurgents.”

In a show of force, Washington took personal command of a militia of more than 12,000 men and began a march to Carlisle, Pennsylvania—the only time a sitting president has ever led troops in the field. He had no wish to shed American blood, but he was ready to fight, and the rebellion dissipated quickly in the face of this military response. Later, in the first use of the pardon power, Washington spared two of the insurgents from the death penalty, but only after the legal system had run its course and they had been convicted of treason.

As the president’s second term neared its end, his advisers again implored him to remain in office, and again argued that the republic might not survive without him. Washington, his health fading and his disillusionment with politics growing, held firm this time. He was going back to Virginia. As with his retirement from military life, his voluntary relinquishment of power as head of state was an almost inconceivable act at the time.

In his farewell to the American people, the retiring president acknowledged that he had likely made errors in office, but hoped that his faults would “be consigned to oblivion, as myself must soon be to the mansions of rest.” In March 1797, the man who had sacrificed so much for his country that he had to borrow money to get to his first inauguration left Philadelphia as a private citizen. Less than three years later, he was dead.

IV

WASHINGTON BETRAYED

In a 2020 book about the first president, the historian Peter Henriques wrote that Washington “proved that his truest allegiance was to the republic by voluntarily surrendering power. It was the first of many peaceful transfers of power in the unprecedented American experiment.” Less than a year after the book’s publication, however, Trump would subvert this centuries-long tradition by summoning a mob against the elected representatives of the United States, after refusing to accept the result of the vote.

Trump stood by as insurrectionists swarmed the House offices and even the Senate chamber itself on January 6, in an attempt to stop the certification of the election by Congress. Hours later, after one of the worst single days of casualties for law-enforcement officers since 9/11, Trump finally asked his supporters to go home. “I know your pain,” he said, his words only emphasizing the delusional beliefs of the rioters. “I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us.” He has since referred to the people convicted in American courts for their actions on January 6 as “patriots” and to those held in prison as “hostages.” He has promised to pardon them.

[From the January/February 2022 issue: Trump’s next coup has already begun]

Washington’s character and record ensured that almost any of his successors would seem smaller by comparison. But the difference between Washington and Trump is so immense as to be unmeasurable. No president in history, not even the worst moral weaklings among them, is further from Washington than Trump.

Washington prized patience and had, as Adams put it, “the gift of silence”; Trump is ruled by his impulses and afflicted with verbal incontinence. Washington was uncomplaining; Trump whines incessantly. Washington was financially and morally incorruptible; Trump is a grifter and a crude libertine who still owes money to a woman he was found liable for sexually assaulting. Washington was a general of preternatural bravery who grieved the sacrifices of his men; Trump thinks that fallen soldiers are “losers” and “suckers.”

Washington personally took up arms to stop a rebellion against the United States; Trump encouraged one.

Some Americans seem unable to accept how much peril they face should Trump return, perhaps because many of them have never lived in an autocracy. They may yet get their chance: The former president is campaigning on an authoritarian platform. He has claimed that “massive” electoral fraud—defined as the vote in any election he loses—“allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” He refers to other American citizens as “vermin” and “human scum,” and to journalists as “enemies of the people.” He has described freedom of the press as “frankly disgusting.” He routinely attacks the American legal system, especially when it tries to hold him accountable for his actions. He has said that he will govern as a dictator—but only for a day.

Trump is the man the Founders feared might arise from a mire of populism and ignorance, a selfish demagogue who would stop at nothing to gain and keep power. Washington foresaw the threat to American democracy from someone like Trump: In his farewell address, he worried that “sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction” would manipulate the public’s emotions and their partisan loyalties “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

Many Americans in 2016 ignored this warning, and Trump engaged in the greatest betrayal of Washington’s legacy in American history. If given the opportunity, he would betray that legacy again—and the damage to the republic may this time be irreparable.

This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “Washington’s Nightmare.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In an otherwise confident debate performance on Tuesday, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, J. D. Vance, conspicuously dodged questions from the CBS moderators about his views on health care. For weeks, Vance has made clear his desire to dismantle one of the central pillars of the Affordable Care Act: the law’s provisions that require the sharing of risk between the healthy and the sick. On Tuesday, though, Vance refused to elaborate on his plans to reconfigure the ACA, instead pressing the implausible argument that Donald Trump—who sought to repeal the law, and presided over a decline in enrollment during his four years in office—should be viewed as the program’s savior.

Vance’s evasive response to the questions about health care, on a night when he took the offensive on most other subjects, exposed how fraught most Republicans still consider the issue, seven years after Trump’s attempt to repeal the ACA died in the Senate. But Vance’s equivocations should not obscure the magnitude of the changes in the program that he has signaled could be coming in a second Trump presidency, particularly in how the law treats people with significant health problems.

The ACA provisions that mandate risk-sharing between the healthy and sick underpin what polls show has become its most popular feature: the requirement that insurance companies offer coverage, at comparable prices, to people with preexisting conditions. In numerous appearances, Vance has indicated that he wants to change the law to restore to insurance companies the ability to segregate healthy people from those with greater health needs. This was a point that Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, accurately stressed during the debate.

The political paradox of Vance’s policy is that the trade-off he envisions would primarily benefit younger and healthier people, at a time when most young people vote Democratic. Conversely, the biggest losers would be older adults in their last working years before they become eligible for Medicare. That would hit older working-class adults, who typically have the biggest health needs, especially hard. Those older working people are a predominantly white age cohort that reliably favors the Republican Party; in 2020, Trump won about three-fifths of white voters ages 45 to 64, exit polls found. The threat that the GOP’s ACA alternatives present to these core Republican voting groups represents what I called in 2017 “the Trumpcare conundrum.”

“Going back to the pre-ACA days of segregated risk pools would lower premiums for young and healthy people, but result in increased cost and potentially no coverage at all for those with preexisting conditions,” Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan KFF (formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation), told me.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign hopes to exploit that tension by launching a major advertising campaign across swing states this week to raise an alarm about the plans from Trump and Republicans to erode the ACA’s coverage. Support for the ACA—in particular, its provisions protecting people with preexisting conditions—may be one of Harris’s best assets to hold support from older and blue-collar white women, who may otherwise be drawn to Trump’s argument that only he can keep them safe from the threats of crime and undocumented immigration.

[Helen Lewis: Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer?]

The efforts of Republicans like Vance to roll back the ACA this long after President Barack Obama signed it into law, in 2010, are without historical precedent: No other major social-insurance program has ever faced such a lengthy campaign to undo it. After Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, Alf Landon, the GOP presidential nominee in 1936, ran on repealing it. But when he won only two states, no other Republican presidential candidate ever again ran on repeal. And no GOP presidential candidate ever ran on repealing Medicare, the giant health-care program for the elderly, after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law in 1966.

By contrast, this is the fourth consecutive election in which the GOP ticket has proposed repealing or restructuring the ACA—despite polling that shows the act’s broad popularity. During Trump’s first year in office, House Republicans passed a bill to rescind the law without support from a single Democrat. The repeal drive failed in the Senate, when three Republican senators opposed it; the final gasp came when the late Senator John McCain voted no, giving a dramatic thumbs-down on the Senate floor.

Most health-care analysts say that, compared with 2017, the ACA is working much better today. At that point, the ACA exchanges had begun selling insurance only three years earlier, following a disastrously glitchy rollout of the federal website that consumers could use to purchase coverage. When congressional Republicans voted on their repeal plans, about 12 million people were receiving coverage through the ACA, and the stability of the system was uncertain because insurers feared that too many of those buying insurance on the exchanges were sicker people with more expensive health needs.

“In 2017, not only did we have rising premiums because insurance companies were worried the market was getting smaller and sicker, but we also had insurance companies exiting markets and raising the risk that parts of the country would have nobody to provide coverage,” Sabrina Corlette, a professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, told me.

Today, however, “we are in a very, very different place,” she said. “I would argue that the ACA marketplaces are thriving and in a very stable” condition. The number of people purchasing insurance through the ACA exchanges has soared past 21 million, according to the latest federal figures. Premiums for plans sold on the ACA exchanges, Corlette said, are rising, but generally not faster than the increase faced by employer-provided insurance plans. And enough insurers are participating in the markets that more than 95 percent of consumers have access to plans from three or more firms, according to federal figures.

Despite Vance’s portrayal of Trump as the program’s savior, the number of people receiving coverage through the ACA exchanges actually declined during Trump’s term, to 11.4 million, after he shortened the enrollment period and cut the advertising promoting it. The big leap forward in ACA participation came when the Democratic-controlled Congress in 2021 passed a major increase in the subsidies available to people for purchasing insurance on the exchanges. That made a mid-range (“silver”) insurance plan available for people earning up to 150 percent of the poverty level at no cost, and ensured that people earning even four times that level would not have to pay more than 8.5 percent of their income on premiums.

“The biggest criticism of the ACA from the start, which in many ways was legitimate, was that the coverage was not truly affordable,” Levitt said. “The enhanced premium subsidies have made the coverage much more affordable to people, which has led to the record enrollment.”

Neera Tanden, the chief domestic-policy adviser for President Joe Biden, told me that the steady growth in the number of people buying insurance through the ACA exchanges was the best indication that the program is functioning as intended. “A way to determine whether a program works is whether people are using it,” Tanden said. “No one is mandated to be in the exchanges, and they have grown 75 percent in the past four years. This is a program where people are voting with their feet.”

Conservative critics of the law nonetheless see continuing problems with the system. Michael Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, points out that many insurers participating in the ACA exchanges limit their patients to very narrow networks of doctors and hospitals, a trend acknowledged even by supporters of the law. And Cannon argues that the continued rise in premiums for plans sold on the ACA show that it has failed in its initial ambition to “bend the curve” of health-care spending, as Obama often said at the time.

The ACA “has covered marginally more people but at an incredible expense,” Cannon told me. “Don’t tell me it’s a success when it is exacerbating what everyone acknowledges to be the main problem with the U.S. health sector”—the growth in total national health-care spending.

Other analysts see a more positive story in the ACA’s effect on coverage and costs. The insurance exchanges established by the ACA were one of the law’s two principal means of expanding coverage for the uninsured. The second prong was its provision providing states with generous grants to extend Medicaid eligibility to more working, low-income adults. Although 10 Republican-controlled states have still refused to extend eligibility, nearly 24 million people now receive health coverage through the ACA’s Medicaid expansion.

Combined with the roughly 21 million receiving coverage through the exchanges, that has reduced the share of Americans without insurance to about 8 percent of the population, the lowest ever recorded and roughly half the level it was before the ACA was passed.

Despite that huge increase in the number of people with insurance, health-care spending now is almost exactly equal to its level in 2009 when measured as a share of the total economy, at slightly more than 17 percent, according to KFF figures. (Economists usually consider that metric more revealing than the absolute increase in spending.) That share is still higher than the equivalent figure for other industrialized countries, but Levitt argues that it counts as an overlooked success that “we added tens of millions of people to the health-insurance rolls and did not measurably increase health-care spending as a result.”

[David Frum: The Vance warning]

The ACA’s record of success underscores the extent to which the continuing Republican opposition to the law is based on ideological, rather than operational, considerations. The GOP objections are clustered around two poles.

One is the increase in federal spending on health care that the ACA has driven, through both the generous premium subsidies and the costs of expanding Medicaid eligibility. The repeal bill that the House passed in 2017 cut federal health-care spending on both fronts by a total of about $1 trillion over a decade. This spring, the conservative House Republican Study Committee released a budget that proposed to cut that spending over the same period by $4.5 trillion; it also advocated converting Medicaid from an entitlement program into a block grant. Every serious analysis conducted of such proposals has concluded that they would dramatically reduce the number of Americans with health insurance.

Even if Republicans win unified control of Congress and the White House in November, they may not be able to muster the votes for such a sweeping retrenchment of federal health-care spending. (Among other things, hospitals in reliably red rural areas heavily depend on Medicaid.) At a minimum, however, Trump and congressional Republicans would be highly unlikely to extend the enhanced ACA subsidies that expire at the end of 2025, a move that could substantially reduce enrollment on the exchanges.

The other main Republican objection is the issue that Vance has highlighted: the many elements of the ACA that require risk-sharing between the healthy and the sick. The ACA advanced that goal with an array of interlocking features, including its core protection for people with preexisting conditions.

In varying ways, the GOP alternatives in 2017 unraveled all of the law’s provisions that encouraged risk-sharing—by, for instance, allowing states to override them. That triggered the principal public backlash against the repeal effort, as Americans voiced their opposition to rescinding the ACA’s protections for people with preexisting conditions. But Vance has made very clear that a second Trump administration would resume the effort to resurrect a pre-ACA world, in which insurers sorted the healthy from the sick.

“A young American doesn’t have the same health-care needs as a 65-year-old American,” Vance argued recently on Meet the Press. “A 65-year-old American in good health has much different health-care needs than a 65-year-old American with a chronic condition.” Although “we want to make sure everybody is covered,” Vance claimed, “the best way to do that is to actually promote some more choice in our health-care system and not have a one-size-fits-all approach.”

Supporters of this vision, such as Cato’s Cannon, argue that it would allow younger and healthier people to buy less comprehensive plans than the ACA now requires, at much lower cost. As those more affordable options become available, Cannon says, cutting Medicaid spending to the degree Republicans envision would be more feasible, because people currently covered under that program could instead purchase these skimpier but less expensive private-insurance policies. Government-subsidized high-risk pools, the argument goes, could provide affordable coverage for the people with greater health needs whom insurers would weed out from their new, slimmed-down plans.

“If you want to make health care universal, you need to give insurers and consumers the freedom to agree on the prices and terms of health-insurance contracts themselves,” Cannon told me. “You need to let market competition drive the premiums down for healthy people as low as possible so they can afford coverage.”

Supporters of the ACA generally agree with the first point: that a deregulated system would allow insurers to create less expensive plans for young, healthy people. But they believe that all the arguments that follow are mistaken. Initial premiums might be lower, but in a deregulated system, even young and healthy families might find comprehensive policies, including such coverage as maternity benefits, unaffordable or unavailable, Georgetown’s Corlette told me. And when, before the ACA, states sought to establish high-risk pools for people with greater health needs, those efforts almost uniformly failed to provide affordable or adequate coverage, she pointed out.

Even if a reelected Trump lacks the votes in Congress to repeal the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements, he could weaken them through executive-branch action. In his first term, Trump increased the availability of short-term insurance plans that were free from the ACA’s risk-sharing requirements and its protections for people with preexisting conditions. Biden has shut down such plans, but if Trump won a second term and reauthorized them, while ending the enhanced subsidies, that could encourage many healthy people to leave the exchanges for those lower-cost options. Such actions would further the goal of Vance and other ACA critics of separating the healthy and sick into separate insurance pools.

Vance’s most revealing comment about this alternative vision may have come during a recent campaign stop in North Carolina, when he said that his proposed changes to the ACA would “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools.” But—as many health-policy experts noted to me, and Walz himself observed last night—that notion rejects the central purpose of any kind of insurance, which is to spread risk among as many people as possible—which, in fact, may be the point for Vance and other conservative critics of the ACA.

“The far right,” Tanden told me, “has always believed people should pay their own way, and they don’t like the fact that Social Security, Medicare, the ACA are giant social-insurance programs, where you have a giant pooling of risk, which means every individual person pays a little bit so they don’t become the person who is bankrupted by being sick or old.”

To date in the presidential race, health care has been eclipsed by two other major issues, each foregrounded by one of the nominees: immigration for Trump, and abortion for Harris. Under the glare of the CBS studio lights on Tuesday night, Vance was tactical in saying very little about his real health-care ideas. But the arguments he has advanced aggressively against crucial provisions of the Affordable Care Act have made clear that its future is still on the ballot in 2024.