Blame China. It worked for the other guy, maybe it can work for us too.

According to the latest polling from The New York Times, Joe Biden’s trailing Donald Trump in five key battleground states amid widespread disaffection with the economy and growing disillusionment among young voters as well as African Americans and Hispanics.

As Nate Cohn noted, the battleground polling looks a lot like it did six months ago, which suggests Biden hasn’t benefited from a 25% rally on Wall Street, nor from Trump’s legal circus. Instead, Cohn wrote, “the cost of living, immigration, Israel’s war in Gaza and a desire for change continue to be a drag on the president’s standing.”

Slapping Xi Jinping with new tariffs won’t do anything to address those problems, and could conceivably make inflation worse, although the 2024 election will be over by the time the impact of the staggered measures is felt. But with Trump — self-declared “tariff man” — calling for a 60% across-the-board levy on Chinese goods, Biden needs to bolster his “tough on China” credentials ahead of November.

So, the administration will impose new duties or raise existing levies on Chinese EVs, semiconductors, solar cells, batteries, syringes, respirators, face masks, rubber gloves, minerals and port cranes, among other things.

EV tariffs will quadruple (from 27.5% to 102.5%), while levies on semis will double (from 25% to 50%) by 2025. Duties on EV batteries and parts will rise to 25% from 7.5%. And on and on.

“China is simply too big to play by its own rules,” Lael Brainard said, charging Beijing with “grow[ing] at the expense of others by continuing to invest despite excess capacity.”

Data out last week showed China continues to struggle with moribund domestic demand, a situation critics worry will manifest as a deluge of cheap products into foreign markets at the expense of local manufacturers. Brainard said Xi’s “flooding global markets with exports that are underpriced.”

Tuesday’s announcement wraps up a year-long review of the Trump-era tariffs, and although Biden’s measures are billed as “targeted,” they nevertheless underscore the notion that globalization and unfettered free trade is passé. Protectionism’s en vogue, and it has bipartisan support.

Politicians in developed markets were blindsided a decade ago by a groundswell of popular discontent among working class voters living with suppressed anger. The problem can be traced, in part anyway, to the unintended consequences of globalization.

The problem for Biden’s twofold. First, centrist politicians sold out America’s manufacturing base decades ago and irretrievably. Maybe you can make chips at home, but you’re not going to resurrect the Rust Belt, and it’s looking more and more like nobody really wants EVs in the US after all. Suffice to say building out a domestic EV manufacturing base isn’t going to result in a renaissance that secures gainful employment for every descendant of yesteryear’s proud “Big Three” factory workers.

Second, the messenger matters more than the message. Biden making a well-reasoned case for new tariffs in an understated Rose Garden event just doesn’t pack the same punch as Trump thundering about China “taking advantage of our country” at a stadium rally.

Relatedly, the fact that these measures will have no tangible impact for regular people anytime soon means it’s necessary to lie. Or at least if the goal is to politicize trade in an election year, which it clearly is. Instead, Janet Yellen told the truth. “These problems built up over time and will not be solved in a day,” she said this week.

You can’t say that to disaffected blue collar voters if you style yourself a populist. Yellen doesn’t (style herself a populist), but Biden does, and she works for Biden. She needs to traffic in mild demagoguery or else cede the message to Trump.

Trump’s message is always couched in terms of bold, quick fixes, and nowhere is that penchant for bombast more apparent than in his trade tirades. The fact that he’s still a viable candidate is proof positive that results don’t matter much in today’s highly-charged domestic political environment, defined as it is by grievance politics. It’s a blame game, not a results game.

As I wrote in “Devil’s Bargain,” blue-collar disenchantment in the US didn’t begin with China’s economic renaissance, and the existential crisis facing some working-class white males in the country is a complex phenomenon that can’t be blamed on any one factor or external antagonist.

And yet, certain aspects of the US-China trade relationship as it developed over the last two decades undoubtedly exacerbated middle-class angst in the developed world and particularly in the US. Consider the figure below.

In 2020, the Economic Policy Institute estimated that America’s trade deficit with Beijing cost the US 3.7 million jobs from the time China entered the WTO through 2018.

It doesn’t help that Biden and Yellen both served in any number of official capacities during the globalization era and post-China’s WTO accession.

When Yellen says, as she did this week, that “President Biden and I have seen firsthand the impacts of surges of certain artificially cheap Chinese imports on American communities in the past,” some voters undoubtedly think, “Exactly. And you were in charge when it happened!”