Would America Still Vote For Trump?

Key Points: President Trump is enacting the aggressive trade policies he openly campaigned on, including universal baseline tariffs, steep duties on China, and dismantling existing trade frameworks, leading to a predicted “tariff hell” of price spikes, supply shocks, and inflation.

-Voters arguably chose this path not from deception but from a deep-seated desire for “revenge” against a perceived failed neoliberal economic order.

-While Trump’s economic nationalism may lack a coherent long-term strategy and risks significant disruption, it represents a potent populist realignment.

-Its ultimate success will depend on whether any perceived benefits can outweigh the considerable economic pain.

The Trump Question We Had to Ask

Would America still have voted for Donald Trump if it knew what he planned to do?

Not the broad strokes – “America First,” “tariffs on cheaters,” “stop the invasion” – but the real, granular, lived reality of what the next 90 days now look like. A world of tariff hell, collapsing trade deals, supply shocks, inflation spikes, and a politicized Fed under siege.

The answer, I suspect, is yes. But not because Americans were deceived – because they were desperate.

Let’s not pretend voters didn’t have the information. Trump telegraphed all of this. He said it on the campaign trail. He said it in interviews. He said it on Truth Social, at rallies, and in closed-door meetings with donors. His people have been talking for months about a universal baseline tariff of 10 percent, tariffs of 60 percent on China, tearing up Biden’s watered-down Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, tanking the WTO, politicizing the Federal Reserve, and turning the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative into a kind of economic war room. The only reason any of it sounded implausible was because our pundit class still thinks Trump operates within the same reality they do. He doesn’t. And neither do his voters.

The truth is: Trump is doing exactly what he promised. The press didn’t believe it. The Democrats didn’t believe it. The markets didn’t believe it. And now the country is on the edge of a post-neoliberal earthquake – and everyone’s scrambling to catch up. But there’s a deeper truth underneath the headlines, one that gets to the heart of this new era: most Americans don’t want a return to neoliberal orthodoxy. They want revenge. And Trump, for all his chaos and incoherence, offered them a chance to settle accounts.

That’s what no one in the “centrist” or center-left world seems willing to grasp. Trump didn’t just beat Biden. He outlasted and outmaneuvered an entire political class. Both the Democratic and Republican establishment’s standard-bearers lost their seats – figuratively and literally. The Democrats’ technocratic internationalist, Biden, is gone. So is the GOP’s pre-Trump conservative-libertarian hybrid, personified by Haley. Trump won not just the presidency but the argument. And what he’s about to do – on trade, monetary policy, industrial policy – is not a detour. It’s the destination.

Of course, that destination won’t be pleasant. Tariff hell is real. By the end of this summer, you’re going to feel it. Prices on consumer goods will spike. Supply chains will seize up. Foreign retaliation will hit U.S. exporters hard. And that’s before Trump escalates to the full “America First 2.0” agenda: secondary sanctions on noncompliant allies, forced onshoring of strategic industries, dismantling the last vestiges of WTO compliance, and turning USTR into a blunt-force weapon to batter competitors into submission. This is not the policy of a man who thinks he’ll be judged by Wall Street. It’s the policy of a man with a score to settle – with Beijing, Berlin, and the bipartisan class that built the old system.

The irony? None of this is particularly strategic. It’s reactive. It’s rooted in grievance, not foresight. Trump has no unified theory of global political economy. His worldview is still grounded in early 20th-century protectionism, filtered through talk radio and Fox News. But that doesn’t make it any less potent. Because for the first time in a generation, economic nationalism isn’t a fringe movement – it’s federal policy. And the old architecture—the trade deals, the supply chains, the export hubs – is not going to survive it intact.

There’s an enormous cost coming. The 10 percent baseline tariff is only the beginning. If Trump goes full-bore on his China tariffs – 60 percent or more – you can expect a retaliatory trade war that hits Midwest exporters, West Coast ports, and key strategic sectors like semiconductors and agriculture. Inflation will surge just as the Fed comes under political pressure to cut rates. That pressure will grow intolerable as Trump and his advisors push for a subservient Fed – one that lowers rates to juice growth even as price instability mounts. Combine that with fiscal populism and a ballooning deficit, and you’re looking at a volatile macroeconomic brew – stagflation with an authoritarian edge.

And yet, people voted for it. Not blindly. Not because they didn’t know. But because they’ve had enough of the old system and no longer trust those who built it. The promise of cheaper goods and global integration rings hollow when your town’s been hollowed out and your wages have stagnated for decades. Trump offered a different kind of deal – not efficiency, but dignity; not growth, but revenge. And in 2024, that proved more persuasive than any centrist promise of technocratic management.

Here’s the hard truth: this isn’t just about Trump. It’s about what comes after him. The center didn’t hold, because it didn’t deserve to. For years, the bipartisan consensus outsourced risk and moral hazard to the margins of American life. Now those margins have come roaring back to seize control. Trump is just their vessel. The real question is whether anything of the old consensus can survive the purge. And whether what replaces it will be any more coherent – or any less brutal.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Trump is a disruptor, not a strategist. But disruption is sometimes enough. If you believe the system is broken – and millions of Americans clearly do—then even a flawed hammer looks like a useful tool. That’s what Trump understood. That’s what the commentariat still doesn’t get.

So no, this isn’t a bait-and-switch presidency. It’s not a con. It’s the most honest expression of populist fury we’ve seen since the 1930s. The only question is whether the institutions of American government – and the broader global economic order – can withstand the stress test he’s about to administer.

One final point: the fact that both opposition leaders – the standard-bearers of the old order – lost their metaphorical parliamentary seats is more than symbolic. It’s proof that Trump didn’t just win an election. He won a realignment. Whether it holds depends on how brutal the next two years are. If tariff hell burns through the heartland and shatters what’s left of the American consumer economy, Trump may yet face a reckoning. But if he can ride the chaos, blame the pain on enemies foreign and domestic, and deliver even the illusion of reindustrialization, then he’ll not only survive—he’ll reshape the country.

Would America still have voted for Trump had it known what was coming?

Of course it would have. Because deep down, it did know. And it voted not for hope, but for punishment.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.

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