Americans on Tuesday went to the polls with the state of the economy top of mind, and their assessment of President Trump’s signature economic policy wasn’t kind. In addition to being costly, destructive, and often illegal, sweeping tariffs on nearly every country in the world have proven politically disastrous.
There’s an intense online debate over the relative contribution of the Iran war and tariffs to the GOP defeat that’s a topic for another day, although there’s no doubt that the war–driven increases in fuel and fertilizer prices were politically brutal. Those higher prices, though, were an unintended byproduct of the war,
