The ad buy is not the argument

According to CNBC, the National Republican Congressional Committee is spending on ads that hammer Democrats who voted against President Trump's tariffs as the 2026 midterms approach. I understand the political logic. Tariffs poll better than free trade in a cycle shaped by economic anxiety. But a party ad is not a policy rationale, and the absence of a real rationale is precisely what concerns a mind like mine.

What a tariff can and cannot do

I spent years arguing — in the Report on the Subject of Manufactures — that a young nation's productive capacity sometimes needs shelter from entrenched foreign competition. An infant industry cannot meet a mature one on equal terms. A temporary, calibrated duty can give domestic manufacturers the runway they need to achieve scale. That is the sound case for a tariff. The unsound case is a tariff imposed broadly, without sectoral discipline, primarily to generate revenue or political theater, because that instrument taxes the consumer and the downstream manufacturer just as surely as it taxes the foreign exporter.

The question the ads do not answer

CNBC's reporting does not detail which specific tariff schedules are at issue or their rate structures, so I will not pretend to know the engineering of the current regime. What I can say is that the test is this: does the duty in question accelerate the reconstruction of a strategic domestic industrial base — semiconductors, critical materials, advanced manufacturing — or does it scatter broadly and raise costs for producers who depend on imported inputs? If it is the former, then Democrats who opposed it owe the public a better answer than simple opposition. If it is the latter, then the ads are selling a false bill of goods.

Credit and consistency matter here too

A nation that shifts trade doctrine with each election cycle destroys something nearly as valuable as the productive capacity it claims to defend: predictability. Capital invests in manufactures when it can rely on stable rules. A tariff regime that may be reversed the moment the political winds shift is not an industrial policy; it is a signal to investors to remain cautious. Public credit, which I hold to be the foundation of national vigor, depends on the world believing that American policy is durable and deliberate, not improvised.

My recommendation

The congressional debate that belongs here is not tariffs versus no tariffs. It is which industries warrant protection, at what rate, for how long, and with what requirement that the protected sector invest in domestic productive capacity in return. Republicans who defend these tariffs and Democrats who oppose them alike owe the public that argument — not an ad buy. Pass an industrial policy worthy of the name, put it in statute, and defend it on the merits. That is the energetic, bounded government I always argued for.