Trump just handed Democrats the golden ticket. Tariffs have unified the American electorate.
President Trump’s tariffs are a $6 trillion tax on Americans. That’s the line and should be the only line Democrats use from now until midterms. It is the most unifying message that Democrats will ever have. And it will be devastating to Republicans in both federal and state elections. The only question: Are Democrats going to be disciplined enough to stay on message for the next 18 months.
Every American will go shopping in the next year and a half. We will go to grocery stores, retail stores, log onto Amazon, shop at farmers markets, look at cars, household appliances, and open up our wallets for Christmas time. And every one of us will constantly look at the prices we are paying, whether it’s our weekly grocery bill to gifts for the kids and feel our blood pressure rise.
And when we go to gripe about it online, we should see the same messaging from all Democrats. Trump’s tariffs are a $6 trillion tax on Americans. And for the first time in a long time, we are all about to have the same political anger. It hasn’t been that way for a while.
Let us be honest. Americans can be a selfish electorate. I can tell you that conservatives don’t mind people being hurt by the government as long as they, themselves personally aren’t hurt. We see this in all the federal employees who voted for Trump but were then shocked that they personally were accused of the waste, fraud and abuse they voted to erase.
We see it in business owners and farmers recoiling that the tariffs they voted for are going to adversely affect their business too. And plenty of veterans and retirees are wondering if the benefits they earned will now be taken away after voting to reduce government spending.
Liberals are no better. As a liberal, I can tell you that many fellow liberals chose to cloak themselves in a façade of self-righteousness which assured Trump would regain power. People who screamed that Trump would destroy the country, then voted (or didn’t vote at all) to punish Kamala Harris because she didn’t check 100 percent of the boxes they demand from political candidates.
Leftists who said both sides were equally bad, are now realizing that maybe they were being way too dramatic about how Harris was just like Trump. It seemed as if there was no cure for American selfishness, until now. Trump just handed the Democrats the golden ticket to unite the country.
Look, Democrats have been pretty bad when it comes to political messaging, partly because they are reactionary and partly because they don’t understand the diversity of the electorate. We watched as they sat mum on police reform for years only to see “Defund the Police” be used against them.
They hold on to the term “pro-choice” despite the fact one of the choices was abortion which feeds into a pro-lifer’s argument. Only recently are we seeing the term “anti-women” instead of pro-choice which would have been smarter from the get-go. We can go on, but the point is the same. The rallying calls of the Democrats usually do more to cause division.
Until now. God forbid if unemployment goes up (like it did this month), but people will tell you that if they have a job then they don’t care. They will tell you deportations aren’t a big deal because they aren’t affected. They will celebrate Ivy League schools losing funding because they don’t go to said schools or understand how research institutions help them. Most egregiously, we are seeing people diminish the treatment of veterans by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) because they are far removed from the veteran experience.
But every American shops. We might avoid unemployment until midterms. Many of us aren’t business owners. We don’t all have 401(K)s. But we will all be spending more from now until midterms. Even Trump’s most ardent supporters will concede this.
They may promise an economic utopia in a yet to be determined time in the future where Americans are working factory jobs while spending $1 for a dozen eggs and driving a car that was made entirely in American. But they also say the pain will be in the present and everyone must endure what could have been avoided.
And every Democrat from senators to representatives to local candidates should speak on this only. Republicans will already try to deflect with culture wars. Fox News avoided the stock market decline at the closing bell on Friday by leading with a story about a crime committed by one immigrant. They will try to find more boogeymen to distract from the disaster of tariffs. Democrats cannot fall into that trap of fighting culture wars anymore.
We may be divided on abortion, immigration, race, foreign policy and just about everything else. But we will be unified on the pain that Trump just brought onto our bank accounts. Democrats finally have a way to unify the electorate. But only if they can stay on one simple message. Trump’s tariffs are a $6 trillion tax hike.
Jos Joseph is a master’s candidate at the Harvard Extension School at Harvard University. He is a Marine veteran who served in Iraq and lives in Anaheim, Calif.