I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but I live near a railroad. Since early 2025, when Trump first announced his tariffs, I’ve taken to observing the railroad traffic with a far keener interest than I used to. I, like many other, expected the tariffs to cause a tradepocolyse. Foreign trade might grind to a halt, America would enter a recession, and I’d get a front row seat to all of that as the trains I had come to expect (and their horns that keep property values down) would stop passing me by.

I was wrong. The tradepocolypse never came, America has continued growing (faster than any other country in the G7), and the train comes right on schedule, loaded with goods that I thought would have been too expensive with the new tariffs.

I’d intended to make a post for *over a year* asking this question: why didn’t Trump’s tariffs harm US trade or even the US economy? But I was lazy and never made the post.

Well my laziness has been rewarded, I’ve been scooped. I had hoped to do a deep dive into this question, but Brookings has answered it better than I ever could. Give them a watch