Editor's Note: This article was updated to include a reply from the White House.

President Donald Trump's tariff policies have already cost thousands of manufacturing jobs and remain deeply unpopular, with only three in eight Americans expressing support. Despite this, the administration is intensifying its tariff agenda — a move that a conservative economist has characterized as literal "insanity."

Desmond Lachman, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) — a think tank that has long championed free-market and free-trade principles — and former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund's Policy Development and Review Department, made the argument in a Thursday editorial.

"Albert Einstein famously remarked that a sign of insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result," Lachman wrote. "We must wonder what he might have made of the Trump administration's import tariff policy."

Lachman noted that U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently announced plans to impose new tariffs on dozens of countries, including a 50 percent import tariff on many Canadian products — despite the fact that earlier tariffs failed to achieve the administration's stated objectives. The proposed tariffs on Canadian goods would mark a significant escalation against the United States' second-largest trading partner, a relationship governed by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) that Trump renegotiated during his first term.

"A key objective of Trump's tariff policy was to eliminate the country's large trade deficit and to increase manufacturing employment," Lachman said. "Yet eighteen months into his second term, Trump's tariff policy has failed to deliver on those objectives. For 2025, the trade deficit on goods and services remained virtually unchanged from the previous year's level of $900 billion, while in the first half of this year the trade deficit has still been running at an annual rate of $700 billion. Meanwhile, far from increasing, manufacturing employment has declined by around 80,000 jobs."

Lachman argued that Trump missed a critical opportunity to reverse course when the Supreme Court intervened. "In February 2026, the Supreme Court offered Trump an off-ramp from his economically damaging import tariff policy when it invalidated his 'liberation day' tariff hike on grounds that he exceeded his emergency power authority," Lachman wrote. The ruling struck down the sweeping reciprocal tariffs Trump had announced in April 2025 under emergency economic powers, a legal basis that multiple federal courts had questioned. "Unfortunately, Trump has chosen not to take that off-ramp and has found other ways to impose new import tariffs. This policy is likely to add to inflation and to worsen our long run economic growth prospects. If the past is any guide, it will do so without delivering the purported objective of eliminating the trade deficit and increasing manufacturing employment."

Ed Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at the Progressive Policy Institute, largely agreed with Lachman's assessment in exclusive remarks to AlterNet, though he flagged one inaccuracy.

"He's not correct about Albert Einstein," Gresser said. "That's one of those apocryphal quotes, often repeated, but it originated with a novelist, Rita Mae Brown, in the 1980s [from her novel Sudden Death]."

"But otherwise, yeah, he's correct," Gresser continued. "They suppose Greer would say repeatedly doing the same things and expecting a different result is a sign of determination, persistence. But Lachman is right: The trade balance hasn't changed much. Manufacturing's share of GDP has dropped. Manufacturing employment, as he said, is a bit down."

On the fundamental economics, Gresser explained the well-established relationship at the heart of trade balances: "The general economic recommendation for changing trade balances is you have to raise the savings rate relative to the investment rate. And if you're not doing that, then the trade balance won't change very much."

While Trump insists tariffs will boost government revenue, Gresser offered a nuanced view: "You could make an argument that tariffs are a form of tax, and if you have higher tariffs, it does raise revenue. If you do it illegally [as the Supreme Court found in the case Lachman referenced], then you have to pay the money back, though. And in general, tariffs are a poor way of raising revenue. It's taxing poor people more than rich people, and goods-using businesses more than services and real estate and those sorts of things."

Robert Shapiro, who served as Undersecretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under President Bill Clinton, told AlterNet earlier in July that the broader economic damage stems from the uncertainty tariffs create.

"It's about uncertainty," Shapiro said. "Every investment is based on an assessment of the likely future demand for whatever you're investing in, and how much it's going to cost to produce it. So there are assumptions about labor costs, material costs and other input costs — and again, about demand. If you have a set of arrangements that give you some confidence about the price of your inputs coming from Mexico or Canada, or about demand for goods in Canada — and don't forget, we have virtually no trade deficit with Canada; we have enormous trade, and it goes in both directions — so it's certainly right, and it's not just about investments based on these probabilities that the trade agreement can help reduce uncertainty about."

Shapiro added that the uncertainty extends beyond long-term investment decisions to day-to-day production. "It's also about how much you're going to produce today, apart from investment, because you've got thousands of companies selling goods or services into Canada. And so there's uncertainty about whether this will lead to more conflict with Canada, which would hurt Canadian demand for US goods, or whether Canada will impose a new tariff in retaliation for ours that makes my goods less competitive there. Of course it's bad — it's bad for American workers, it's bad for American investment."

In response to this article, White House spokesman Kush Desai said: "Insanity must mean successfully using tariffs to renegotiate over 20 trade deals and secure trillions in new manufacturing investments."