Around the middle of 2022, it became apparent that the Biden administration was going to go all-in on industrial policy. The policies that Biden implemented — the CHIPS Act, and the green energy subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act — had already been in the works for quite a while. But so had a bunch of other Democratic policy ideas that didn’t end up making it into law.1 So it wasn’t until 2022 that we realized that industrial policy was going to be Biden’s Big Thing.

Conservative industrialists, however, are facing a much harder dilemma right now. Biden’s industrial policy was a mixed bag, with more successes than failures. But Trump’s tariff policy is a giant flaming disaster. The dollar is down, as investors flee American bonds, putting the country’s whole financial stability in danger. Forecasts for the real economy are getting more pessimistic by the day. Stocks are down yet again. Here’s a representative headline: