WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump is entering the Republican Party convention with bold promises about the U.S. economy, but he has given remarkably few details about what his plans will look like in practice.
The first day of the convention is expected to continue to focus on the economy, even after the shooting at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday that injured the former president.
If the program goes ahead as planned, we can expect speakers to argue that Trump’s agenda of harsh tariffs and lower taxes will boost the economy.
The former president says he wants tariffs on trading partners and no tip taxes, and that he’d like to slash corporate taxes. The Republican platform also promises to “beat” inflation and “bring all prices down quickly,” in addition to pumping more oil, natural gas and coal.
The platform would tackle illegal immigration in part with the “largest deportation program in American history.” And Trump would also abolish the U.S. presidency. Joe Biden‘s policy to develop the electric vehicle and renewable energy market.
Democrats and several leading economists say the math shows Trump’s ideas would fuel skyrocketing inflation, destroy the middle class and — by extending his soon-to-expire tax cuts — add more than $5 trillion to the national debt.
Trump has released few hard numbers and no actual policy texts or legislative blueprints. Instead, his campaign is betting that voters care more about attitude than policy details.
The Associated Press sent the Trump campaign 20 basic questions in June to clarify his economic views, and the campaign declined to answer a single one. Spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt insisted that Trump speaks best for himself and referred the AP to video clips of him.
Biden, by contrast, has a sweeping 188-page budget proposal laying out his economic vision, while his campaign continued to slide ahead of Saturday’s meeting, raising questions about his age and whether he should remain the nominee after a disappointing June 27 debate.
A recent analysis by the Peterson Institute of International Economics found that deporting 1.3 million workers would shrink the size of the US economy by 2.1%, effectively causing a recession.
Stephen Moore, an informal adviser to Trump and an economist at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said Trump is unique because he has already been president and voters can judge him based on his record while in office.
“If you want to know what he’s going to do in his second term, look at what he did in his first term,” Moore said.
Democrats have argued that Trump would be more extreme in a second term, using his own comments to say he would place independent federal agencies under his direct control and use the federal government to settle scores with his perceived enemies. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint is a template for what a second term would look like, they argue, a claim Trump has disputed.
However, Moore said he is confident Trump will be pragmatic in his time in office and focus on the needs of businesses to boost economic growth.
“There’s a sense that it’s going to be a slash and burn operation. I don’t think it’s going to be a radical agenda,” Moore said.
Some of Trump’s plans have received bipartisan support. Both Nevada senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, are Democrats who would like to ban taxes on tipped workers, even as the Biden White House favors a higher minimum wage for tipped workers.
Businesses like Trump’s ideas to cut regulations and further reduce the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%. The tax rate was 35% when he became president in 2017. Democrats, on the other hand, want a 28% corporate tax rate to fund middle-class programs and deficit reduction.
But Trump has also floated massive tariffs that he says would protect American manufacturing jobs. Biden kept the tariffs on China that Trump imposed and went a step further by banning the export of advanced computer chips to China.
Businesses generally dislike tariffs — which are taxes on imports — because they can increase costs, which are then likely to be borne by consumers. An analysis by economists Kimberly Clausing and Mary Lovely found that Trump’s tariffs would cost the average American household $1,700 a year, effectively a tax increase.
Trump’s tariff plans could worsen inflation as a result, even though the Republican has said in videos that he would lower inflation. It’s unclear how Trump would lower inflation, which peaked at 9.1% in 2022 and has since slowed to 3% a year.
“The issue of tariffs is extremely important — and people aren’t paying enough attention to the magnitude of Trump’s tariff policy and what the consequences would be,” said Clausing, a former Biden Treasury official and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But tariffs may be more of a political winner than an economic strategy, according to a research paper earlier this year by economists David Autor, Anne Beck, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson. The paper found that tariffs did not increase employment during Trump’s first term, but the tariffs did help Trump politically in the 2020 election in industrial areas that were losing jobs to China and other countries.
Clausing noted that Trump is proposing tariffs on more than $3 trillion in imports, a 10-fold increase from what he did in his first term. She noted that the tariffs could make it more expensive to get the raw materials that American factories need, while also raising prices for consumers already struggling with high inflation. She said she wants people to understand the risks Trump’s economic policies could pose before it’s too late.
“I think people are going to notice when everything gets really expensive,” she said. “This is going to be a huge disaster.”
