Donald Trump’s policy initiatives for a potential second term are rife with unintended adverse consequences — which, in less charitable terms, could be described as deliberate attempts to delude the electorate.

The first of these initiatives is his proposal to deport roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States.

Illegal immigration “is poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump declared in October 2023. “We will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

The second initiative is to impose a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all products imported into the United States, a tariff that would rise to 60 percent for imports from China.

Take the across-the-board tariff. It would injure American consumers by jacking up prices not only directly but also indirectly by lessening foreign competition and would injure export industries through exchange rate effects that increase the price of American goods to foreign buyers.

to give the White House greater influence over monetary policy. This idea is genuinely frightening, as the political interests of incumbent politicians often diverge from the imperatives of sound monetary policy, especially in election years. Trump is reminiscent of Juan Perón, who converted Argentina from a country richer than France, Germany or England into a poverty-ridden, inflation-crippled middle-income nation, in no small part by forcing his Treasury to print money to pay for his whims.

With that for a starter, let’s take a deeper look at Trump’s plan to raise import duties — i.e., tariffs — and his plan to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent.

Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard and a chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama administration, warned in an email, “If Trump follows through on his campaign commitment to across-the-board tariffs, something he could do unilaterally without congressional approval, the result would be the worst global trade war since the Great Depression.”

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