Who's Winning Trump's Trade War? No One So Far

Meanwhile, the bailouts aren't nullifying all the pain from Chinese retaliation. U.S. farm bankruptcies have been rising

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The trade war's purpose, of course, wasn't to help farmers, but to aid domestic manufacturers. But Chinese retaliation has hurt manufacturers such as Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc. and Deere & Co. And Trump's tariffs on inputs such as steel and aluminum have been of dubious value to companies in those sectors, while hurting U.S. manufacturers of higher-value products by raising their costs.

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Manufacturing output also has risen more slowly than in past expansions, and actually fell in the first quarter of 2019

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One thing the tariffs have done is to raise prices for U.S. consumers. Multiple economic studies have concluded that essentially all of the increased revenue from the tariffs, such as it is, has come out of Americans' pockets.

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Though U.S. consumers have borne the monetary cost of the tariffs, they may have hurt China even more. China's growth, which had already slowed since the early 2010s, shows recent signs of further slowing. Manufacturing investment in that country is down sharply since the trade war started in mid-2018...

In the long term, the trade war's most important impact may be ideological. A psychological dam has broken, and what used to be a comfortable elite consensus in favor of free trade is swinging strongly in the opposite direction. On the left, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren now champions a weaker dollar and expanded government assistance to U.S. exporters, as well as a much cagier attitude toward future trade deals. On the right, intellectuals are warming to the idea of government intervention on behalf of key industries.