Trade, Power, and Discursive Instability: Political Rationales in Trump’s Trade Policy

The Trump administration’s trade policy was marked by recurrent tariff threats and abrupt policy reversals, alongside publicly articulated justifications that were frequently inconsistent and internally contradictory. These features have often been interpreted as manifestations of chaotic populism, ineffective protectionism, or institutional failure. This paper argues, however, that the political rationale of Trump’s trade policy does not reside primarily in the material outcomes of tariffs, but rather in the shifting and unstable logics through which those tariffs were justified. In this sense, inconsistency and contradiction should be understood not as accidental by-products of the policy process, but as instruments deliberately mobilized to advance particular political objectives. While protectionist and populist elements played an important role in the formulation and circulation of trade discourse, they should not be read as the straightforward expression of either protectionism or populism. Instead, Trump’s trade policy reflects an opportunistic mode of governance mediated through discursive practices, whose central feature lies in the flexible exploitation of conflictual narratives and institutional tensions in order to maximize policy discretion. This mode of governance reveals the dual character of trade discourse as simultaneously performative and structural. At the performative level, trade discourse operated by actively constructing domestic and international antagonisms, thereby mobilizing political audiences and generating a highly emotionalized and confrontational framework of symbolic political action. At the structural level, these discursive practices functioned to legitimize the expansion of executive authority and, to some extent, to circumvent existing institutional constraints, enabling the sustained implementation of unilateral trade measures over time. This paper identifies five categories of tariff justification in Trump’s trade discourse—industrial reshoring, fiscal revenue generation, foreign policy leverage, the punishment of unfair trading partners, and national security—and analyzes how these rationales were constructed, disseminated, strategically substituted, and rendered internally contradictory. As flexible discursive resources, these justifications provided shifting forms of legitimacy for unilateral executive action. This paper moves beyond a constructivist political economy perspective, which focuses on the ideas that drive policy, because there is no coherent system of ideas or set of policy objectives at the core of Trump’s trade rhetoric. It therefore turns to the discursive practices that constitute and sustain Trump’s policies. Also, we contribute to the literature on contemporary trade politics by reinterpreting populism and protectionism as discursive resources rather than fixed policy logics.