Kamala Harris is trying to draw a distinction from Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff campaign proposals, even as new Biden administration tariff hikes take effect this week, expanding on some former Trump-era policies.
Harris and her campaign have been slamming Trump’s new tariff plans, like his most recent proposal to implement a 200% tariff on John Deere if the company moves manufacturing to Mexico.
“You don’t just throw around the idea of just tariffs across the board, and that’s part of the problem with Donald Trump,” Harris said on MSNBC this week, after unveiling her campaign’s economic platform. “He’s just not very serious about how he thinks about some of these issues.”
She stopped short of addressing how her positions on tariffs would differ from the current Biden administration’s policies, which include additional hikes beginning this week on $18 billion worth of Chinese imports.
As the Harris campaign attempts to draw clear differences between her and Trump’s economic stances, the messaging is muddier with tariffs and trade policy — an area where the Biden administration maintained, and expanded, some of Trump’s tariffs.
Campaign surrogates have hesitated to go all out against Trump’s tariff policies, even defending ones he implemented as president. They’ve drawn distinctions between “extreme” tariffs — which is how the Democratic Party platform describes Trump’s plan for 10% to 20% across-the-board tariffs and the 60% increase on Chinese imports — and “strategic” tariffs.
“Not 100% percent of everything that the Trump administration did was wrong, right? Maybe it’s 95%, but not 100%,” billionaire Harris supporter Mark Cuban told reporters this week. “Where there’s a situation, like a strategic tariff that’s already been put in place, it’s great to continue it.”
Harris has focused on Trump’s new plans — saying they amount to the equivalent of a sales tax of “almost $4,000 a year” on Americans, a claim she repeated three times in the 25-minute MSNBC interview. Her new economic plan doesn’t contend with the current administration’s policies. It does, however, quote the “almost $4,000 a year” line seven times.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s tariff hikes on Chinese imports, announced in May, are taking effect this week. The upticks, beginning Friday, include increasing rates for electric vehicles to 100% and battery parts to 25%, according to details from the Office of the United States Trade Representative.
The Harris campaign did not respond to a NOTUS request for comment about the new tariff hikes, but has previously told news outlets Harris will “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy and hold our adversaries accountable.”
Trade experts say Harris’ relative silence on the Biden administration’s tariff policies is likely a political tactic to draw the strongest contrast with Trump.
“She’s not going to go out there and say, for instance, ‘When Trump imposed the tariffs during his administration, a lot of people thought they would be bad, but it turns out they were really great! And so guess what? We kept them in place, and they were so great that not only did we keep them in place, we actually expanded them,’” Nick Iacovella, senior vice president at the trade-protectionist advocacy group Coalition for a Prosperous America, said. “She has to design a message that creates a stark contrast between her and Trump.”
Another trade expert speculated that Harris’s recent hit on Trump’s past tariff policies as well as the new, sweeping ones could point to a potential split with Biden on tariffs as future president.
“She criticized Trump’s trade war with China directly, which her own administration has continued,” Inu Manak, a trade policy fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a tariff critic, said.
Manak pointed to a line in Harris’ new economic policy that says Trump “waged a disastrous trade war with China that cost American jobs, worked against American businesses, failed to increase exports and stunted our economic growth.”
“Now that’s a pretty biting criticism of the trade war, which I haven’t heard any other Biden administration officials say,” Manak said. “If I were to take that seriously, it would suggest that she might want to chart a new course there.”
As trade experts read the tea leaves, Democrats on the Hill defended “strategic” tariffs, like the Trump-era ones on China that Biden has kept in place, while the campaign arm tries to hype what Cuban called the “lunacy” of Trump’s proposal for higher, more sweeping tariffs.
“Selective use of tariffs for purposes of developing more manufacturing here in the U.S. or for purposes of moving supply chains to the U.S. is a smart long-term investment,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told NOTUS Wednesday ahead of Harris’ rollout.
“Some of those tariffs make sense,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal said of their continuation.
“There’s no doubt you’re going to have to use tariffs and subsidies in order to promote domestic industry,” Sen. Chris Murphy echoed. “You need to rebuild the CHIPS industry, the domestic battery industry, the domestic solar technology industry, and that can’t happen unless we mix together tariffs and subsidies.”
In Pittsburgh this week, Harris also pitched herself as tough on China. “While [Trump] constantly got played by China, I will never hesitate to take swift and strong measures when China undermines the rules of the road,” she said.
In a press release denouncing Harris’ economic rollout, the Trump team doubled down on his proposed tariffs but said the effort is to force companies’ hand to manufacture in the U.S. more than it is about an expectation of paying up.
“President Trump will put a 100% tariff on every automobile manufactured by a Chinese plant in Mexico — and the only way they’ll get rid of it is by building a plant in the U.S.”
Trump has also called tariffs” the greatest thing ever invented” on the campaign trail. Notably, the loudest critics of Trump’s trade policies during his presidency were Republican lawmakers.
His latest proposals also drew criticism from the GOP leader in the Senate.
“I’m not a fan of tariffs. They raise the prices for American consumers,” Sen. Mitch McConnell told reporters when asked about Trump’s 200% John Deere proposal this week.
But as the Harris administration tries to draw the strongest contrast possible with Trump, Democrats’ own tariff hikes this week just might slip under the radar in the final days of the election.
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.