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After Joe Biden kept most of the tariffs he inherited, America’s trading partners like to complain that the US president is a “continuity Trump” and wonder whether Kamala Harris will be a continuity Biden. The first moniker was never quite fair: Trump’s focus was on reducing trade deficits and gaining bargaining power, Biden’s main concern is industrial policy. Now Trump is threatening a massive and damaging escalation of trade protectionism, Harris just has to keep Biden’s policies, which she probably will, and by comparison she will look like a downright free-trade Clintonite (Bill, not Hillary).

Trump’s actual policy positions are never entirely clear, of course, but he seems determined to justify the superhero title of “Tariff Man” he gave himself during his first term as president. His platform calls for a policy of reciprocity, imposing import tariffs on trading partners equal to those imposed on U.S. exports. (American farmers, who hide behind high tariffs, might get nervous about exposing them to competition from low-cost foreign suppliers, but details, details.) He also wants a base tariff of 10 percent on all imports and 60 percent on goods from China, and hinted last week that the 10 percent could rise to 20 percent.

In private conversations, Trump is said to have floated the idea of ​​replacing federal income tax revenue entirely with tariff revenue. This idea is so stupid that it feels like it would spontaneously combust on contact with air: the plan would be literally impossible to implement, given how high tariffs of the required magnitude would choke imports. But in any case, Trump and Robert Lighthizer, his former trade representative and current adviser, are real nostalgics, thinking of the high tariffs of the 19th century, to which they attribute the rise of the United States to economic dominance.

Biden’s slogan was a “worker-centered trade policy,” although in practice that of course means protecting some workers (steel and aluminum, auto) at the expense of others. Democratic veterans of the Clinton and Obama eras inside and outside the Biden administration, including former and current Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers and Janet Yellen, argued for rolling back some of the Trump tariffs to reduce inflation. They lost that debate, but Trump’s tariff plans are so extreme that even Biden and Harris felt compelled to cite consumer interests as a reason for their opposition.

Fortunately, this message fits well with Harris’ recent policy shift to reduce consumer inflation by preventing “gouging,” an apparent attempt to counter the widespread, if erroneous, public belief that Biden’s stimulus plan caused the soaring price increases in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022. Harris’ anti-gouging plans are so vague that the range of possible outcomes ranges from business as usual to full-blown Soviet Gosplan communism with prices set by decree from Washington, with savvy investors leaning toward the status quo.

In any case, when she presented her price control plan last week, she explicitly rejected Trump’s new tariffs: “These measures are in stark contrast to Trump, who would increase costs for families by at least $3,900 with a new national value-added tax on imported everyday goods.”

The consumer-focused criticism is not new to this administration—Biden made similar comments about Trump’s across-the-board 10 percent proposal—but it highlights the divide that is opening up among Republicans in policy and messaging. And it has the advantage of being somewhat accurate. The various academic estimates of the impact of previous Trump tariffs on the U.S. economy vary somewhat; at least one concludes that the costs were absorbed by American businesses rather than passed on in prices. But most conclude that U.S. consumers suffered, in part because they had to buy more expensive substitute products than the taxed imports. One estimate of the impact of Trump’s 10/60 percent proposal estimates that it will cost low-income households 3.5 percent of their take-home pay.

To be clear, Harris has not rejected the trade and industrial policy elements of Bidenomics, and is unlikely to do so. But Democrats are at least pursuing a clear course that balances their desire to protect industries they consider strategic with the need to keep inflation low across the economy. Meanwhile, Trump is heading toward “Here Be Dragons” territory on trade policy. Clear blue waters are opening up between Republicans and Democrats, and the notion that Trump’s trade policy in his second term would resemble that of a Harris administration is fading fast.

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