When President Ronald Reagan was in office, the Heritage Foundation promoted a vigorous foreign policy that featured a strong commitment to fighting communism.
It turned kinder and gentler during the terms of the Bushes – backing the President's Emergency Plan for AIDs Relief,, trade deals, public diplomacy and other methods to integrate the US into the world and influence other countries from within.
Now, it is doing the same with Trump – explaining Trumpism as no other policy organization has. But some on the right who have issues with President Trump or with Heritage are attacking his policies as inconsistent with conservative ideals. Which sounds more like revenge for some past slight rather than an honest policy debate.
Trump has fulfilled more policy goals in the last year than all three Bush administrations combined over 12 years.
Trump has lopped off the Department of Education and wide swaths of the departments of Energy, State, Commerce, Interior, Labor and Housing and Urban Development. He’s returned the EPA to its core function – assuring clean air and water. He has wiped out USAID, NPR/PBS, and other agencies, and used DOGE to identify waste and fraud throughout government on scales never before seen. Nothing there that every Reaganite can’t celebrate.
He’s also closed the border, lowered drug prices, deposed an authoritarian strongman in Venezuela, remade the public health edifice in the country and eliminated DEI and all racial preferences. Attempts by China to gain a foothold in South America have been dashed by a stream of Trump actions in the region and victories by his political acolytes.
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But when it comes to tariffs, the outrage has been so shrill and disproportionate that we have to wonder what else is at play.
To be sure, tariffs weren’t in the conservative playbook in recent decades. Republican leaders made the decision to finance the government by running up huge deficits, enormous debt and an ever-growing burden on the families who pay taxes in America. There was nothing conservative about any of it.
Trump said no … shift some of the cost burden to business interests looking to operate in America’s highly profitable markets and to target countries with unfair trade practices against the US. Heritage backed the proposal as an unorthodox but effective way to stop financing the rest of the world’s economy on the backs of American taxpayers and address past unfairness that presidents of both parties had allowed to fester.
It’s easy to understand why the Democrats oppose it. Trump’s plan is working. Inflation hasn’t gone up as critics predicted. It has gone down to 2.3%, the lowest it’s been since Trump’s first term. We’re back to adding jobs – we’ve added 172,000 private sector jobs in January and 615,000 over the last year. We’re shedding government jobs – over 300,000 have been dismissed, bringing government employment to its lowest level since 1966 and its lowest ever as a percentage of the total workforce.
Unemployment has fallen to 4.3 percent overall, which is basically full employment, despite the government layoffs.
Companies are reshoring operations to avoid tariffs, which has led to an uptick in factory building, which is why the US added 33,000 construction jobs in January – a famously poor month for construction hiring. And all that tariff income is enabling the government to run a surplus for the first time since the Clinton administration.
Trade rules have changed. Trade agreements have blossomed. Trade policy has stiffened, reducing giant trade imbalances with China and others and remaking the world stage economically. Not for nothing did Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for the Asia-Pacific region with French investment bank Natixis, call China “the biggest winner” from the Supreme Court’s tariff decision.
So why all the criticism?
Earlier this year, Heritage endured some controversy and staff departures, and many who left ended up at Advancing American Freedom, a new think tank started by former Vice President Mike Pence. And they have taken the opportunity to poke a finger in the eye of their former mother ship, especially on tariffs.
Pence had never said anything against tariffs before – he told the Wall Street Journal as recently as last year, “the Trump administration can still get the economy back on track through free trade with free nations, even as the U.S. retains targeted tariffs on adversaries such as China.”
Which makes letting his attack dogs go after Heritage now especially disappointing, considering Heritage boosted his early career with high-profile events and supported his work in Congress and as vice president, giving high marks to Pence’s handling of the COVID crisis.
It’s time for Pence’s organization to get over its personal problems with Heritage and tell the truth about these policies. The other side certainly won’t.
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