Donald Trump was upset that other countries were taking advantage of the United States. The debt was growing. The stock market had crashed. He freely shared his opinions.
“I believe very strongly in tariffs,” he said. “All of the many nations that abuse the United States should pay a major tax – like a 15 or 20 percent tax on any product they sell in the United States.”
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It was the late 1980s. Not much has changed.
The seeds of President Donald Trump’s latest tariff plans were planted decades ago, when the brash businessman from New York was still just toying with a political career but already developing a zero-sum view of the competitive landscape of the global economy. Forged over a long career in real estate over which many of his clients were wealthy foreigners, Trump grew to believe that the U.S. economy was letting others profit from our markets. He didn’t blame them for taking advantage. He blamed U.S. policy for allowing it to happen.
Now, that view is being tested on the global stage – with vast amounts of wealth, as well as longtime trade alliances, on the line. Trump’s tariff frenzy sent markets into turmoil and left U.S. investors, corporate officials and even pro-Trump Republicans warning of a recession. They worry the president doesn’t understand how global trade works. Other countries get U.S. dollars, but Americans get products they want.
“The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe,” hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a Trump supporter, wrote on X last week.
“This is a moment of testing for the president’s advisers,” former treasury secretary Larry Summers said Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week.” “The intellectually honest ones know that this reflects a presidential 40-year fixation, not any kind of proven economic theory.”
The change has caught so many investors off guard that many rushed to sell off stocks in one of the biggest market drops in years. It equally stunned world leaders, about 70 of whom have called the White House to set up meetings with Trump or somehow gain a reprieve from the plan.
Amid attempts to negotiate and stock market volatility, Trump on Wednesday announced a 90-day pause on many of the tariffs while also simultaneously raising levies on Chinese imports to 125 percent.
“We have to put America first,” he told House Republicans at a formal dinner Tuesday evening. “Put. America. First.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said recently that the new policy amounts to “monumental change” – exactly what Trump is after.
“The president is focused on restructuring the global economy – on restructuring the domestic economy as well. The politicians in this city have not seen a president who is actually willing to take the steps to implement such change, really, in modern history.”
To those who have followed his long career, the moves came as little surprise.
“The most beautiful word in the dictionary to me is tariff,” he said during a Warren, Michigan, rally in November 2024. “I think it’s the most beautiful word. It’s going to make our country rich.”
His first term as president was also marked by tariffs, particularly on China. But many of the guardrails that were there eight years ago – including several Cabinet members who challenged his views and advised him to take a different tack – are no longer there, replaced by people who are largely aligned with his worldview. The circumstances have also changed, White House officials say, with a stronger economy that can withstand the turmoil required for his plans – a view that economists dispute.
“His entire professional life – if you go back to interviews with President Trump in the 1970s – he’s been speaking passionately about this issue,” Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff, said during a panel discussion of White House officials last week. “And he warned in the 1980s about all of our critical industries moving to, at that time, Japan. And he warned for years about the loss of our automotive industry.”
For a time, his view of the international economy came through apartment sales at Trump Tower, he wrote in his 1987 book “The Art of the Deal.” Middle Eastern buyers came when oil prices rose. South American and Mexican buyers were next, when their economies were strong and the dollar was weak. Wall Street buyers surged with the stock market, and the Japanese when their economy improved.
“They rarely smile and they are so serious that they don’t make doing business fun,” he wrote. “Fortunately, they have a lot of money to spend, and they seem to like real estate.”
“What’s unfortunate is that for decades now they have become wealthier in large measure by screwing the United States with a self-serving trade policy that our political leaders have never been able to fully understand or counteract.”
Trump most prominently began articulating his current beliefs in 1987, as he began weighing a run for the presidency. He spent $100,000 on an ad he termed an “open letter” that was published in The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe.
He focused his ire on Japan, a nation that was rising economically and becoming a stronger competitor. He was also watching as Japanese interests bought American icons such as Rockefeller Center in New York. He bought the Plaza Hotel, just up the street across from Central Park, from a Japanese corporation.
“Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States,” he wrote, complaining that the American military was taking care of military defenses while Japan spent money to build “a strong and vibrant economy with unprecedented surpluses.”
“‘Tax these wealthy nations, not America,” he wrote. “End our huge deficits, reduce our taxes, and let America’s economy grow unencumbered by the cost of defending those who can easily afford to pay us for the defense of their freedom.”
Jennifer M. Miller, a professor at Dartmouth College, wrote a paper examining how Japan’s rise to global economic prominence influenced Trump’s worldview and approach to the global economy.
“What’s very, very striking about this is just how consistent it has been,” Miller said. “That does tell us that this seems, at this point, to be how he understands the global economy and America’s place in it.”
Trump has always described tariffs as a tax on imports that other countries would pay to the United States. History shows that’s not typically how it works. Importers pay the taxes, but often they, manufacturers and retailers pass those costs on to American consumers.
“He wouldn’t use the word tariffs but he would use a tax of other countries,” Miller said. “We see that today in this notion that other countries are going to pay for it – not something that Americas are going to pay for, even though that’s now how most economists think this is going to play out.”
Trump also considers tariffs not so much a tool of Congress – but of a strong executive. Shortly after taking out the newspaper ad nearly 40 years ago, Trump went to New Hampshire and railed against the tax system as he toyed with a presidential bid.
“I’m tired of nice people already in Washington,” he said. “I want someone who is tough and knows how to negotiate. If not, our country faces disaster.”
Trump eventually dropped his presidential run, but he continued railing against the global trade system.
“If you ever go to Japan right now, and try and sell something, forget about it, Oprah,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988. “Just forget about it. They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies.”
Then as now he didn’t blame the foreign countries for taking advantage of favorable policies. He blamed the United States leaders for allowing it to happen.
“Why are we so stupid? We cater to these people and the end result is they don’t respect us,” he said at an aviation conference in 1989 in which he said the nation’s leaders were “the biggest suckers in the world” and called for a 20 percent tax on imports.
“That expression ‘a kinder, gentler’ America is the worst,” he said, a slam at then-President George H.W. Bush, who used the phrase to try to usher in an era of national civility in the face of a changing global landscape. “If we get any kinder or gentler, we’re not going to have any America.”
Trump also spoke all those years ago, as he does now, about how it isn’t only adversaries to be concerned with but allies too – who use favorable diplomatic relationships to gain an advantage.
“He would say, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. They’re laughing at us,’” Miller said. “‘There are not friends in the global economy. There are only competitors.’”
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