At a little over a hundred days in, the Trump White House’s economic policy decisions are already chaotic enough to give even the casual observer a case of whiplash. Oscillating tariff policies have imposed astronomical rates on imports from the rest of the world, only for the White House to partially walk them back a few days later after triggering a succession of meltdowns on the stock market. The net effect has been a continuous upward ratcheting of tariff rates, with Americans now paying a new “baseline” tax of ten percent on almost all imported goods as well as substantially higher rates on certain products and goods from specifically targeted countries.

Income-tax cuts have suffered from similar whiplash effects in recent weeks, imperilling the renewal of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act before it expires at the end of the year. Trump publicly committed himself to “no new taxes” during his campaign, and his party has the congressional majorities to make the 2017 rates permanent. But a faction in the White House is pressing the president to allow a “millionaire tax” that raises the top bracket from 37 percent to 39.6 percent, or possibly even higher. The resulting fiscal picture is grim. Meaningful efforts to rein in federal spending have all but stalled—Congress is continuing to raise the debt ceiling and the much-touted DOGE initiative has failed to secure permanent spending cuts through legislation.

None of these tax-and-spend policies is set in stone, but they’re sufficient to ring alarm bells. Voters rejected the economic central planning of the Biden-Harris administration and Trump’s tariffs have reached double-digit disapproval levels among voters in recent polling. So, why are we now seeing protectionist trade wars and redistributive income-tax proposals that look like they came straight out of the campaign platforms of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren? The answer is that the Trump administration has a National Conservative economics problem.

National Conservatives, or NatCons for short, are a recently emergent branch of the American political Right. They emphasise conservative social and cultural values but also embrace the tools of big government to manage and manipulate the economy, and to reinforce a nebulous concept of “national identity.” They reject the free-market tenets of the old Reagan Republican coalition, and 20th-century conservatism in general. Instead, NatCons offer an economic platform emphasising goals like high protectionist tariffs, federally funded industrial programs, and even redistributive tax policies that aim to “soak the rich” and thereby finance an expansive agenda of public spending in other areas. Many NatCons favour aggressive regulatory actions by the government in the name of antitrust enforcement. Some have even floated traditionally left-wing ideas like price controls and the nationalisation of strategic industries.

Central to the NatCon narrative is the claim that America’s economy has been “hollowed out” by free trade and free markets, and that this is demonstrated by the decline in industrial manufacturing and factory jobs. But this diagnosis is at odds with several empirical realities. American manufacturing output actually rose dramatically between 1994 and 2008, the same period during which trade was liberalised by NAFTA and the WTO. Yes, total employment numbers in the manufacturing sector declined during this period, but that was mostly due to efficiency improvements in production, not liberal economic policy.

Despite its populist posturing, the NatCon narrative is out of touch with the very same workforce it purports to represent.

And even here, two data points belie the NatCon narrative. First, despite a drop in manufacturing jobs, the US unemployment rate in this same period remained low except for economy-wide shocks such as the 2008–09 financial crisis and the 2020–21 COVID-19 lockdowns. Second, most Americans simply don’t appear to want jobs on a factory assembly line. Unfilled job openings in US manufacturing are higher today than in the early 2000s when tracking of these numbers started. Survey data show that overwhelming majorities of the workforce prefer their current jobs to factory employment. The long-term trend in current workplace satisfaction has also increased during the same period that the alleged “hollowing out” of the manufacturing sector was taking place. Despite its populist posturing, the NatCon narrative is out of touch with the very same workforce it purports to represent.