Trump shifts into election mode and pitches his tariff economy to Georgia voters

Donald Trump made his midterm pitch to Georgia voters on Thursday as he campaigned alongside fellow Republicans and sought to boost their profiles at a rally in Rome.

The president’s fixation on an economic message was one tailored to protecting Republican majorities in the House and Senate and did not shy away from what experts argue is putting some of the greatest pressure on keeping U.S. consumer prices persistently high in the post-Covid economy: Tariffs.

He leaned heavily into the argument the White House has pushed for months, and insisted that his “reciprocal” tariff agenda had forced top trading partners like Canada to pursue U.S. markets and end malignant trade practices.

“Without tariffs, this country would be like your company was two years ago. What a difference it made,” he told the owners of Coosa Steel Corporation after touring the plant.

“It's all because you finally have a president who put America first. That's what it is, but it's also, it's also because I oppose powerful 50 percent tariffs on foreign steel when they were coming in and dumping crap all over our country, I ended every one of the Biden era exemptions, and on August 18, I added new tariffs to cover 400 derivative products, including steel racks, which is what you make,” said Trump. “So I say congratulations.”

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The president’s appearance in the Peach State is the latest in a series of outings touted by the White House as part of a strategy to convince voters that his economic program, which consists largely of tariffs on imports imposed by executive fiat and the wholesale rollback of environmental regulations meant to curb greenhouse gas emissions, is making a dent in the post-Covid pandemic inflation that wreaked havoc on his predecessor’s approval ratings and led voters to return him to power in the 2024 election.

Previous economy-focused events in Pennsylvania, Iowa and Georgia over the last three months have seen Trump return to campaign rally-style speeches that invariably degenerated into grievance-laden rants interspersed with blatantly false assertions about his administration’s economic record.

He continued that trend in Rome, telling Georgia voters that prices were down across the board. In reality, Americans are facing persistently high prices in many sectors of the economy, including food and health care, where millions of Americans just experienced the shock of skyrocketing premium prices for health care plans on the Obamacare exchanges due to Congress's failure to extend federal subsidies. Trump opposed the extension.

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On Thursday, the president campaigned alongside Republicans running in the upcoming midterm elections, including his pick to take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, Rep. Mike Collins. But the spectre of failure loomed large over the president’s shoulder at the event in the form of Herschel Walker, whose doomed Republican bid for Senate was responsible for giving Ossoff a Democratic colleague in Georgia’s Senate delegation in 2022, an embarrassing midterm year for Republicans.

Walker stumbled through remarks praising the president at the event, which veered quickly into attacks on transgender Americans.

“We’ve got to get out and vote and do the same thing [again], because if we do not do that, we will lose this country because men shouldn't be in women's sports, I know what a woman is,” insisted Walker from the microphone.

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In a statement touting the president’s travel to Georgia, the White House said the Peach State is “seeing real recovery, safer communities, and renewed strength under his leadership.”

The White House also acknowledged that “more work remains” to undo “the economic damage of the Biden era” in what appears to be a tacit rhetorical nod to the fact that, thus far, voters aren’t happy with Trump’s work on the economy since he returned to office after promising to tackle inflation and address cost-of-living issues.

Administration officials have hailed modest reductions in the inflation rate as evidence that Trump’s policies are working, but an analysis of price levels earlier this month by nonpartisan economics site EconoFact found that, despite the president’s claims to the contrary, his tariffs have kept inflation plugging along. It is estimated that the August 2024 Consumer Price Index inflation rate of 2.9 percent would have been half a point lower, around 2.2 percent, had Trump left well enough alone and not imposed tariffs on so many goods.

A separate Federal Reserve report found that businesses are starting to pass tariff costs on to consumers, now that their pre-tariff inventory has been cleaned out, while a third analysis by the New York Federal Reserve branch determined that 94 percent of tariff costs were borne by American consumers over the first eight months of last year.

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Since taking office last year, Trump has claimed never-before-used emergency powers to slap tariffs on goods imported from nearly every country in the world as part of what he calls his push for “reciprocal” trade, to induce foreign companies to build production capacity in the U.S. and spur homegrown manufacturing after decades of de-industrialization.

The effect has been an increase in average tariff rates to around 17 percent, the highest level seen since Congress enacted the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff at the height of the Great Depression.

The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to strike down Trump’s use of emergency powers to impose tariffs in a case Trump has repeatedly denounced as the work of “China-centric” litigants. He again trashed the court for taking “many, many months” to decide the case during his rally on Thursday.

Ahead of his remarks, he said it was “a disgrace that we even have to talk about this subject.”

“It's like, you know, the tariff is the greatest thing that's happened to this country. We're making a fortune. But more importantly, all of these factories are booming now, and they were all dead,” he said.