“Well, how do you like them apples?” Vice President JD Vance asked on Monday.

It remains to be seen whether this was a short skirmish within a larger trade war, with Trump able to brandish tariffs without actually imposing them. There are also questions about how meaningful Canadian and Mexican concessions really are while Democrats are poised to blame Trump for higher prices should they ever take effect.

What is beyond debate is that Trump’s maneuver was no surprise.

Trump campaigned on imposing tariffs last year, threatening them against even relatively friendly countries. He slapped tariffs on China during his first term, which former President Joe Biden largely left in place, and renegotiated the old North American Free Trade Agreement. He ran against the Republican Party’s decadeslong rhetorical commitment to free trade during the 2016 GOP primaries, and then against the Clintons’ role in NAFTA in the general election.

In interviews dating back to the 1980s, Trump’s most consistently held public policy view was that foreign countries were taking advantage of the United States through unfair trade practices and poorly negotiated trade deals.

After nearly a decade at the forefront of national politics, Trump’s commitment to tariffs has only deepened. He cites William McKinley, a Republican president who declared that under free trade “the trader is the master and the producer the slave.” Trump didn’t exactly conceal the fact that tariffs against Mexico and Canada were slated to be announced on Feb. 1.

That announcement nevertheless sparked a firestorm: Headlines about a trade war with allies, criticism from Republicans on Capitol Hill, denunciations from newspaper editorial boards. Democrats who are normally loath to admit that taxes on business get passed on to consumers now sound like Grover Norquist on tariffs.

When Trump won in November, there was a big spike in web searches for who pays for tariffs. A Quinnipiac poll taken in December found 51% of registered voters opposed the proposed tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China, while 38% supported them. An Ipsos poll at the time found that just 2% wanted tariffs to be a major Trump priority.

Even the labor unions that might be Trump allies on trade policy were less than enthusiastic. “The UAW supports aggressive tariff action to protect American manufacturing jobs as a good first step to undoing decades of anti-worker trade policy,” the United Auto Workers union posted on X. “We do not support using factory workers as pawns in a fight over immigration or drug policy.”

Trump’s ability to unilaterally and immediately impose tariffs flows from national security concerns like border security and drug trafficking. Those were the areas where he was able to extract commitments from Canada and Mexico. Yet his own statements on the issue make plain that he is hoping to use tariffs to address trade deficits as well.

The Trump team has at various points cited tariffs as a way to alleviate U.S. trade imbalances and replace revenue lost through domestic tax cuts, perhaps all the way up to the abolition of the federal income tax.

But many Trump administration officials, frequently including the president himself, view tariffs as a way to secure negotiating leverage over foreign governments reliant on the U.S. market, encouraging greater domestic production, and moving supply chains.

“A tariff that makes no sense from one perspective might be entirely wise and effective from another,” American Compass’s Oren Cass contended on an X thread. “Many otherwise serious economists have criticized Trump’s China tariffs for failing to reshore manufacturing. But they were decoupling tariffs, and they achieved that.”

While decoupling and rebalancing are major priorities of Trump-adjacent intellectuals, and would probably be fairly popular with the voters if achieved at a reasonable cost, the president won in November in large part because of the high cost of living under Biden. The persistence of high prices after inflation came down from a 41-year peak prevented much improvement in how the voters saw the Democrats’ economic stewardship. 

The Biden administration continually pointed to other metrics to paint a more favorable picture of the economy, but high prices remained many voters’ dominant gauge. Biden also erroneously hoped that the spending most widely blamed for igniting inflation would instead win him credit for the pandemic recovery. If tariffs end up getting imposed, will voters make any distinction between that and Biden-era inflation?

Where the Democrats’ initial emphasis on egg prices days into Trump’s presidency only reinforced the lack of seriousness with which they took inflation before Jan. 20, tariff hikes by the current administration would be something tangible to criticize.

“I think Americans who are concerned about increased prices should look at what President Trump did in his first term,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a briefing last week. “He effectively implemented tariffs, and the average inflation rate during the first Trump administration was 1.9%. In fact, when President Trump left office, it was 1.4%.”

In the meantime, Trump can express confidence in tariffs as a tool in his deal-making arsenal.