So I think to settle this debate, we need to be grounded in what’s actually said, and what the actual policies are. And these are busy people, and they have lots of things they say and lots of things they do, but as quantitative social scientists, we have ways to bring them together, and I think you’ll see a different picture.

Mike, do you agree with Casey that the trade war may be good or bad, but maybe it’s not nearly as important as what you make it out to be? Particularly compared to what Casey cited as successes?

Strain: No, I don’t. Let me offer an area of agreement. I agree with Casey on the historical record that Republican presidents have imposed trade protections. There’s no question about that. President Bush did, and President Reagan did as well. But the general direction of US trade policy under both Republicans and Democrats has been toward greater openness, greater globalization, and fewer barriers to trade for decades. That doesn’t mean that there weren’t ever protectionist policies put in place. That doesn’t mean that we had a tariff-free world under President Bush and President Reagan, and then all of a sudden, all the tariffs popped up under Democrats. However, it does mean that dismantling the protectionist global trade system that was in place decades and decades ago has been a bipartisan project.

Now, I think that successive presidents, starting with President Bush and President Obama, were more aggressive toward China and their trade practices. That was wholly justified. And I believe that if Mrs. Clinton had won in 2016, she would have been more aggressive toward China than President Obama was and that she should have been. And if Mitt Romney were president in 2016, he would have been more aggressive toward China than President Obama was.

What makes the president stand out is his hostility toward that entire regime and his hostility toward free trade in general. Instead of rallying an international coalition of trading partners to isolate China and crack down on China’s genuine and legitimate trade abuses, the president imposed tariffs on European allies, imposed tariffs on our Canadian allies, and talked about pulling out of NATO and all these things. And so the president was left without allies. This has made his policies toward China much less effective than they could or should have been.

The president has a basic illiteracy about trade, not understanding what trade deficits are and what they are not. His adherence to a mercantilist view of trade that’s rejected by all economists, or nearly all economists, has, I think, been unique. And these are distinctly populist elements of the president’s approach to trade policy that I don’t think can be accurately characterized as being and keeping with the direction of trade policy under presidents of both parties. And that, I think, does represent an aberration from what we’ve seen previously.

Do you have a response to that, Casey?

Mulligan: I think, when we look at the numbers, I don’t think you’re going to see Trump being an aberration relative to Reagan. As long as you distinguish tariffs from quotas. Okay? If you go out and measure tariffs under Reagan, you’re not going to see a lot. He threatened some, but he didn’t do them. He implemented the quotas instead. But I don’t know an economist who’s like, “Oh, the quotas is much better than the tariffs, let’s give the money to the foreign companies.”

That’s why he didn’t get a trade war, by the way. Reagan was giving money to the Japanese companies while he was protecting our domestic companies. So of course the Japanese didn’t fight back. In fact, folks from the Reagan administration have told me that the Japanese companies came into the White House and asked for quotas, and Reagan gave it to them. And I applaud Trump for it. I don’t like protectionism. But if you’re going to do protectionism, at least do it in a way that brings revenue to the United States instead of the foreign companies.

Casey, what do you think about Trump’s immigration policies? Have they been good ideas, and would you like to see them continued in future administrations or even extended?

Mulligan: I don’t know if anybody was aware of what Trump’s immigration plan was when he announced it. His plan is essentially the Canadian and Australian plans, which is immigration should be legal rather than illegal, and based on the economic contribution of the immigrants. That was his plan. The president opened this Rose Garden ceremony by saying, “Citizenship is the most precious thing America has to offer.” Privately he said that too. He went to the next step, which really amazed and impressed me, saying, “We ought to be selling citizenship,” which, of course, was what Gary Becker called for in his radical proposal for immigration reform: a fee for immigration.

Now the president is a good politician, and he knows he’s not going to go out and try to sell that to Congress. Congress isn’t going to do anything that the president wants on immigration. So maybe you’d say this is not that meaningful. But this is his plan, and this would be his chance to do demonstrative acts rather than substantive acts. And his plan was the Canadian and the Australian plan, which is an approximation to the Gary Becker plan. So I was quite impressed with what the president does on immigration, in terms of policy. The rhetoric, that’s not my area. I’m a policy analyst. I’m not a speechwriter. But I look at the substance, and I’m pretty impressed.

Mike, are you impressed by the president’s immigration proposals or direction?

Strain: Well, I think in terms of the substance of that specific proposal, I think there were a lot of questions about the details of that proposal. But the basic idea that we should move a little closer toward a skills-based immigration system, and a little bit away from a family-based immigration system, I think, is completely sound.

My own view is, why not do both? Why not just have a significantly larger number of green cards for the highly skilled immigrants and just add that on top of what we’re already doing? But that is a reasonable policy goal. Again, I think the details of the proposal needed some work. But the overall architecture and philosophy behind that were reasonable. I agree with Casey about that.

I don’t think we should judge the entirety of the president’s work on immigration based on that one proposal. And again, going back to the question of whether Trumpian populism has succeeded or failed: A big part of the reason why that didn’t get any traction is that the president has no credibility on this issue because of his extreme hostility toward immigrants and toward immigration. The travel ban on people from some Muslim majority nations set the tone early in the administration on this. And that has continued all the way up to the pandemic, when the Trump administration attempted to say to people who are here on student visas that if you can’t attend class in person, you have to go back to your home country, which was just outrageous public policy. The last four years have really been littered with that type of thing. And that has stopped any momentum and any possibility of meaningful legislation on immigration while President Trump is president — even on issues where the 30,000-foot structure the president is advocating is completely reasonable, albeit also still debatable.

And so, has Trumpian populism succeeded on immigration? Has President Trump succeeded on immigration? No, he hasn’t. And a big part of that — or maybe even most of it — is because of the populist elements of his posture toward immigration.

Do you have a response Casey, or would you want to move on?

Mulligan: Yeah, I think we should move on. I mean, these are interesting subjects, but we should treat them proportionally, which is not disproportionately by spending the whole day on that.

Now, another definition of populism is a politics and policy that just doesn’t believe in constraints and trade-offs. Republicans used to be very concerned about budget deficits and entitlements, which has not been a big part of Trumpian populism so far. Will that continue to be a part of Trumpian populism — not worrying about debts and deficits and entitlements? That’s for the other party to worry about, I guess, when they get in power?

Mulligan: With respect to Trumpian populism, I think you’re right. I’ve heard the president say, “Oh, the government revenue machine, we just spin that massive wheel a little bit faster.” He’s not really concerned about the deficit.

Do you view that as a failure? The deficit’s gone up a lot.

Mulligan: Yeah, I view that as a failure. Now, ultimately, the fundamentals here are generational equity. That’s the fundamental thing. I mean, the problem with the big debt is you’re living off the children and the grandchildren. And so I’ve put on my Kotlikoff hat here, I would like to take a more holistic view of the generational policy here. So COVID would factor into that — how are we treating the children versus the older people? And those sorts of trade-offs. I don’t know that he’s that unusual in terms of generational inequity, compared to past presidents on the whole. But certainly, in that specific area of treasury bonds and bills, he would be putting the burden on future generations.