Former president Donald Trump offered enthusiastic support for vaping on Friday, promising to protect the industry following a private meeting earlier in the day with a leading vaping lobbyist.

Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social media platform, that he “saved Flavored Vaping in 2019” and would “save Vaping again!”

The comments represent a revisionist account of his administration’s approach to vaping, the heating of nicotine to make an inhaled aerosol. They overlook a significant crackdown Trump pursued as president — which antismoking advocates regard as one of the surprising accomplishments of his time in office and part of the reason for a steep decline in youth vaping over the past five years.

Yet Trump’s new posture is consistent with the recent financial support he has received from the tobacco industry. As The Washington Post reported this week, the biggest corporate donor to the primary pro-Trump super PAC is a subsidiary of Reynolds American, the second-largest tobacco company in the country.

Former U.S. officials and industry lobbyists argue that Big Tobacco is betting on Trump’s chaotic approach to public health and pliable views on policy as it confronts the possibility of additional regulation of e-cigarettes as well as a ban on menthol cigarettes, which was proposed but not implemented by the Biden administration. Biden delayed a final decision on the ban earlier this year, as advisers warned him that it could erode his support among Black smokers who studies show favor the products.

Trump’s comments also offer a case study in the way he takes policy positions.

His fulsome praise for vaping came just after a meeting with the head of the Vapor Technology Association, which describes itself as the leading vaping trade association, representing more than 100 members of the industry. The episode is a further illustration of the unexpected salience of tobacco in the bitterly contested 2024 campaign, raising questions about race, financial pressure and government regulation.

In response to an inquiry from The Post, the association’s executive director, Tony Abboud, provided no details about how the meeting came about but said it took place on Friday. “We had a wide-ranging conversation, and we thanked President Trump for taking two bold and decisive actions in 2019: saving flavored vapes for adults and protecting youth by raising the age to 21,” he said.

Abboud said in a text message that neither he nor his organization had made campaign donations to Trump; federal records show the group has not donated this cycle to either candidate or their leading PACs. A Trump spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about the meeting or Trump’s post.

A spokesman for the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, declined to comment.

Vaping offers a substitute for smokers but presents hazards of its own, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Such hazards include exposure to toxic chemicals and metal particles, such as lead, chromium and nickel, as well as some of the same chemicals found in cigarette smoke, which can cause “irreversible lung damage,” the FDA has said.

On its website, the Vapor Technology Association says it’s “fighting for science-based policies that ensure the continued availability of less harmful nicotine products.” Its board includes representatives from companies with titles including “Demand Vape” and “Daddy’s Vapor.”

In his statement, Abboud accused the Biden administration of trying to “shut down small businesses and deprive adults who smoke of their flavored vaping products” and added, “We are pleased that former President Trump is continuing to fight for vapers.”

Trump, who has long expressed distaste for smoking, announced a sweeping ban on flavored vapes in 2019 — only to walk back part of his policy after warnings from campaign advisers who said it would endanger his 2020 reelection bid, frustrating public health experts.

The rapid policy swings followed a Trump-era crackdown on vaping that began in 2018, as officials warned of a spike in youth vaping and blamed flavored e-cigarettes for luring new users to try the products. In September 2019, Trump convened a meeting in the Oval Office, where senior officials announced broad plans to regulate flavored vaping. Alex Azar, the health secretary at the time, said the aim was to “clear the market” of flavored e-cigarettes, allowing the products to be sold only once they gained formal approval from federal regulators.

The industry was incensed, and the Vapor Technology Association spent more than $100,000 on negative advertising against Trump in the aftermath of the announcement, federal records show.

But as health officials readied the plans, Trump’s campaign advisers presented him with data showing that vaping was popular among his supporters. On Nov. 4, 2019, the day before a planned news conference to launch the decisive action, Trump balked and refused to approve a one-page memo advancing the policy.

At the end of the year, he did sign into law a bill raising the age to 21 for e-cigarette sales and other tobacco products. And early in 2020, the Trump administration moved forward with a scaled-back plan to limit flavored e-cigarettes but exempted the popular tobacco and menthol flavors.

Public health officials and experts — including Trump administration alumni — have cheered a retreat in youth vaping that began under Trump. Data released by federal officials in early September found that about 6 percent of middle and high school students reported currently using e-cigarettes this year, a roughly two-third decline since 2019.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Trump and oversaw the 2018 crackdown, wrote on social media earlier this month that the declines in teen vaping represented “a notable public health achievement.”

While he campaigns, Trump has had multiple audiences with advocates for Big Tobacco.

Reynolds executives met with Trump on several occasions in 2023 and 2024, including a lengthy meeting earlier this year in New York, according to a person familiar with the interactions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private dealings.

The company, which has contributed millions of dollars to the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc., did not respond to questions about the meetings.

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.

Tired of playing only defense, a small but vocal number of Senate Democrats are pushing party leaders and political operatives to pour money into trying to knock off GOP incumbents in races most view as long shots for Democrats.

They fear Democrats are leaving potential pickups on the table, particularly in Florida and Texas, where unpopular incumbents, Sens. Rick Scott (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas), have not seen anything resembling the financial onslaught faced by GOP candidates in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Arizona.

“It is not a question of will or strategy or preference. It is a question of money,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said specifically of Florida. “If we have it, we have a very strong chance of winning. And if we don’t, we don’t.”

“I just spent three days in Florida to make that very point. I think we will win Florida if we put in a real effort,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who campaigned with second gentleman Doug Emhoff in a traditionally conservative-leaning area outside Orlando.

Comments like these from prominent Democrats up pressure on the main party entities to shift their long-held strategy from, first and foremost, defending eight Democratic-held seats that are seen as the most competitive. An eight-for-eight performance, difficult to pull off perfectly, would likely leave the Senate deadlocked at 50-50, allowing Democrats to retain the majority if Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential contest.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has held a strategy of “no shiny objects” for its four years under the leadership of Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), fearful of wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in races that are not ultimately winnable, as happened in a few states in 2018 and 2020.

“Well, I don’t have unlimited money, so right now we’re focused on our incumbent states,” Peters said, noting that large TV ad budgets are, for now at least, focused on defense. “So that’s where our priority, where our resources are.”

The total budgets in the Senate races illustrate those priorities.

In the eight races Democrats are defending, their candidates and outside allies have spent or reserved almost $800 million toward commercials since the spring, according to data analyzed as of Friday by AdImpact, an independent group monitoring political spending.

In Florida, Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and a few outside allies have spent or reserved just $5 million, while Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.), Cruz’s opponent, has banked $39 million for his ad budget from his campaign and allies.

Those pushing for an infusion into Florida and Texas are careful to say they don’t want to abandon any of those other Democrats, seven of whom have held steady leads in polling throughout the summer. And they support the continued defense of Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), who has trailed in most polls in what could be a tipping-point race for Republicans to claim the majority.

However, they say, the low-population state of Montana is already saturated with more than $220 million of Senate ads, per AdImpact, leaving little to gain by increasing spending there.

Democrats pushing a stay-the-course strategy argue that, despite close polling margins between the candidates, Florida and Texas are massively expensive states with a likely turnout of nearly 11 million voters each. Moving the electorate by just a couple of percentage points represents up to 250,000 voters, a herculean task compared to Montana and its roughly 600,000 total voters.

But Whitehouse and Schatz, as well as many operatives working in the two states, believe unique opportunities exist and the value of an unexpected Senate seat for six years is worth the treasure.

“Democrats and Republicans have the same problem in those media markets: They’re big and they’re expensive, and you’ve got to get the money in there,” Whitehouse said.

In 2022, the DSCC and its super PAC ally, Senate Majority PAC, faced criticism for not going more heavily into North Carolina and Wisconsin, where their candidates narrowly lost. But ultimately the strategy of sticking to five key states paid off, as every Democratic incumbent won and their party flipped Pennsylvania, adding to their majority despite Biden’s unpopularity.

That was under the leadership of Peters, for whom the no-shiny-objects mantra is personal.

In 2020 he felt abandoned in his reelection bid in notoriously purple Michigan, as national Democrats poured tens of millions into ultimately hopeless places such as South Carolina and Iowa. As those races turned into mirages, Peters barely hung on, winning by less than two percentage points. So when Peters took over the DSCC the following year, he kept his focus on the states that seemed most winnable.

Peters noted that the DSCC considers Texas and Florida important enough to provide funds for staff on the ground and they were included in the recent launch of a $25 million get-out-the-vote push in the 10 key states.

“We’re putting in resources on the ground in both of those states. We have challengers that are in the margin of error,” he said, using the term for a candidate who is trailing but statistically close enough to be considered almost tied.

In 2018, Scott, a former health care executive with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars, eked out a victory of less than 13,000 votes, even smaller than his one-point margins in two successful races for governor.

Florida Democrats have sent up flares to Washington that this time around Scott has not raised the tens of millions from donors needed to run a full-force campaign, nor has he written the types of massive personal checks that he used to win the governor’s mansion.

Indeed, AdImpact shows that Scott’s side has only spent and reserved $12 million for his campaign — a pittance by Florida standards in statewide races.

With very little incoming from Republicans, Mucarsel-Powell has been able to slowly introduce herself to voters, most of whom didn’t know her from her one term in the House in 2019-20. Having raised less than $15 million by the end of July, her first ad launched in early September, and she talked about her family fleeing Ecuador in search of freedom in Miami.

“It’s why I came to America,” she says, “but Rick Scott is trying to take away your freedoms right now.”

Her campaign is also hoping a ballot initiative to reverse the six-week ban on abortion signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) provides a boost. Requiring a 60 percent threshold to become law, the ballot initiative has a well-financed voter turnout operation that could help the Senate candidate.

Democrats have good reason to be pessimistic about Florida. The Sunshine State has trended against them since Barack Obama won it a second time in 2012. Donald Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton by one percentage point there in his 2016 race and then beat Joe Biden by 3.5 percentage points four years ago. Blowout reelections in 2022 for DeSantis, by 20 points, and GOP Sen. Marco Rubio, by 16 points, marked a modern low for Florida Democrats.

Still, Harris’s entry into the presidential race has jolted the environment there, as it has in many states. Emhoff’s appearance in The Villages, a sprawling retirement community that spawned some outlandish scenes of support for Trump, summoned a surprising turnout of energized Democrats.

“Like bears after hibernation, Democrats are coming out of their caves and looking at each other and saying, Hey, actually, there are a lot of us,” Whitehouse said.

Emhoff arrives Monday in Texas for a multiday tour that involves a public event with candidates and some private fundraising, in what some see as a test run for where more resources might head.

The Democratic dream of flipping Texas, along with its now-40 electoral votes, has been the party’s great hope for years now, but seems still out of reach.

In 2018, Cruz won by just 2 percentage points against Beto O’Rourke, whose unconventional $80 million campaign excited liberals in Texas but demonstrated how hard it is to get those final few points for victory.

Yet Texas has slowly grown better for Democrats. Clinton lost by nine percentage points in 2016, Biden by just 5.5 points in 2020.

Allred is raising more money than Mucarsel-Powell and running a more conventional campaign with a heavy advertising component. A former NFL linebacker and civil rights lawyer, the three-term congressman’s biography is a unique asset.

Luke Warford, who launched a political group to focus on the long-term infrastructure to turn Texas blue, believes that national Democrats should also pour money into helping Allred for both the possible short-term boost but also the long-term play of bringing the Lone Star State into their column.

“Whether or not Colin wins, it starts the momentum to get us there,” Warford said. “Texas is the game-over state.”

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) this week said the Trump campaign wants to roll back the Affordable Care Act’s approach to how chronically ill Americans shop for health insurance, with the Republican vice-presidential candidate reopening a health-care debate that Democrats are eager to have — and resurrecting a fight that has repeatedly burned the GOP.

Speaking in North Carolina on Wednesday, Vance floated an idea to group chronically ill patients together in health-insurance pools based on their elevated risks. That would reverse a shift driven by the Affordable Care Act, which largely ended the practice of shunting chronically ill patients into what are known as high-risk pools and provided new protections for patients with preexisting conditions.

“We’re gonna actually implement some regulatory reform in the health-care system that allows people to choose a health-care plan that works for them,” Vance vowed, expanding on remarks he first made Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” The Ohio senator added that the Trump campaign wants to “allow people with similar health situations to be in the same risk pools,” so healthy patients would be able to obtain a different insurance plan than patients who are chronically ill.

Experts said the ideas sketched out by Vance threaten consumer protections enshrined in the 2010 health law, such as rules that guarantee health coverage to the tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions.

“I feel like I’ve been transported back to 2009,” said Adrianna McIntyre, a Harvard University health professor who has studied health insurance markets. “Prior to the Affordable Care Act, a number of states had these high-risk pools, and in general, they were hard for people to access.”

Vance’s comments were quickly amplified by the Harris campaign, which has sought to draw a distinction between Vice President Kamala Harris’s promise to build on the Affordable Care Act and rival Donald Trump’s repeated efforts to overturn the law when he served as president. The new remarks follow Trump’s admission in last week’s presidential debate that he has “concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act — a vague pledge that Democrats have been eager to fill in, with Vance’s help this week.

“There should be no doubt about Donald Trump’s commitment to end the Affordable Care Act,” Harris campaign spokesman Joseph Costello said in a statement. “Now, one of the ‘concepts’ he’s bringing back is his plan to rip away protections for pre-existing conditions, throw millions off their health care, and drive up costs for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions.”

Trump-Vance campaign aides have insisted that the GOP ticket would preserve protections for preexisting conditions, and a Vance spokesman said the candidate was not proposing new ideas in his remarks this week.

“Senator Vance was simply talking about the significant improvements President Trump made to the Affordable Care Act through his deregulatory approach, which aimed to bring down the cost of premiums while ensuring coverage for pre-existing conditions,” spokesman William Martin wrote in a text message.

The Trump campaign said Vance and Trump are aligned on key health-care goals.

“Senator Vance and President Trump share the underlying principles of using more choice in the marketplace and efficiency as tools for better, more affordable health care,” Brian Hughes, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

More voters side with Democrats on questions related to health-care costs and coverage, according to surveys by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research, polling and news organization. A KFF poll released this month found that 48 percent of voters trust Harris to do a better job than Trump on handling health-care costs, compared with 39 percent who favor Trump. The nine-point edge is one of Harris’s strongest advantages compared with Trump, who retains double-digit polling leads on the economy and immigration.

Democrats are keen to focus on the Affordable Care Act after it proved to be politically potent in recent election cycles. Republicans suffered major defeats in the 2018 midterm elections after their failed attempts a year earlier to repeal the law, and Joe Biden repeatedly pledged to protect it in his successful 2020 presidential campaign.

“I’m sure that the Democrats today would be very happy to have this conversation again,” said Mollyann Brodie, a KFF executive vice president who oversees the organization’s polling operation. “What we know from the polling is that Democrats do have an advantage on health care … and there are some political risks for the Republicans to try to take that on.”

The Harris campaign had already scheduled a week of events focused on Trump’s debate comments and past record on health care, with the vice president and her allies repeatedly warning voters that a second Trump administration could put their health care at risk.

As president, Trump repeatedly pushed for repeal of the Affordable Care Act and took other steps to weaken the law, such as curtailing funding spent on outreach and enrollment assistance. Trump said in last week’s debate that he would run the Affordable Care Act “as good it as it can be run” if elected president again.

Protect Our Care, a Democrat-aligned health-care advocacy group, next week plans to launch a nationwide bus tour of battleground states to contrast Trump’s health-care actions with the Biden administration’s efforts to strengthen the Affordable Care Act.

Vance’s comments center on a concept that shaped the U.S. health system for decades: Patients were evaluated on their individual risks, meaning they could be charged different amounts for their health insurance based on whether they had preexisting conditions. As a result, chronically ill patients said they faced staggeringly high health insurance premiums and other barriers that made it difficult to pay their bills or get covered at all.

The Affordable Care Act imposed restrictions on private health insurers, limiting how much the plans could charge patients based on age and other factors, and barring health plans from turning away patients who had preexisting conditions. Because of those changes, the health insurance market was significantly revamped; young and healthy patients now subsidize the cost of health insurance for older, chronically ill patients, with federal subsidies also underpinning the market’s operations.

Ending the Affordable Care Act’s approach to pooling health insurance risk could lead to cheaper health plans for younger Americans, but more expensive plans for older Americans, experts said.

“High-risk pools arise out of a situation where you don’t have protections for preexisting conditions,” Harvard’s McIntyre said. “Now, hypothetically, you could have incredibly well-funded high-risk pools, but that’s not necessarily going to be less expensive than the system we have now.”

Conservatives have repeatedly pushed for alternatives to the Affordable Care Act’s rules. A proposal released by the House Republican Study Committee this year argued that Maine devised a successful risk-pool system in 2011 that could become a national model.

“Providing all states the freedom to adopt these smart reforms would significantly increase access to private health insurance, reduce costs and reduce federal spending,” the influential House GOP group argued.

Jeanne Lambrew, a Democrat who served as Maine’s health commissioner between 2019 and 2024, said she was skeptical that her state’s high-risk pool could be a national model. Maine ultimately did away with its high-risk pool in 2022, merging its insurance markets.

“While it may have had some value pre-ACA … post-ACA, the marginal value was not just low, but rejected by a unanimous, bipartisan majority in the legislature,” said Lambrew, who helped implement the Affordable Care Act in the Obama White House.

Laura Packard, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer in 2017 and serves as executive director of Health Care Voter, a left-leaning advocacy organization, said she worries about the impact of returning to a pre-Affordable Care Act system for potentially “uninsurable” patients like she once was.

“I am in remission now, but no insurance company if ever given the choice to choose their customers would ever choose to cover me at a price I could afford,” Packard said. “If we go back to the days of high-risk pools, that’s not going to work for anybody that really needs their health care.”

Vance, who was elected to the Senate in 2022, has not served on one of the key health-care committees, and his record on health care is limited. He has been a longtime critic of the Affordable Care Act, writing in a 2010 letter to the editor in the Journal-News newspaper in Ohio that “Obama-Care does nothing to reduce the inflationary trend of medical costs, it is an abject failure of a reform package. That’s why most conservatives opposed it.”

But before assuming office, Vance had criticized GOP efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act as insufficient, noting that the party’s alternative bills were projected to provide health coverage to far fewer people.

Republicans’ attempt to do away with the Affordable Care Act under Trump “was genuinely a moral and political disaster,” Vance said in 2019 remarks, criticizing former House Speaker Paul D. Ryan and colleagues’ legislation. “I’m glad that it never passed.”

While running for Senate in 2022, Vance said Republicans had to offer an alternative to the Affordable Care Act with “some substance to it, or we are going to get creamed electorally and we’re not actually going to do that job that the people sent us to do,” the Chronicle newspaper in Northeast Ohio reported at the time.

Brodie, the KFF pollster, said there’s an opportunity for politicians — including Republicans — to revisit questions about health coverage, if they tread carefully.

“People of all stripes are really frustrated about their health-care costs,” Brodie said. “You could see somebody trying to thread a needle of tapping into that frustration … the challenge is they need some sort of plan, or credible messaging, that their proposal really would help people afford the health care that they want and need.”

But few Americans trust that Trump, who spent nearly a decade pledging to “repeal Obamacare” and continues to discuss overhauling the law, has a concrete plan to do so. Only one-third of self-identified “MAGA” supporters — and 16 percent of all Americans — believed that Trump had a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, according to a KFF poll released in February.

Lambrew, the former Obama health official, said Vance’s recent remarks are “déjà vu” and recall the Affordable Care Act repeal fight.

“JD Vance’s return to these ideas is a signal that we’re talking about the same type of ideas that we saw in 2017,” Lambrew said. “It’s a signal of what may be the future under this president.”

Before former president Donald Trump spoke to the Economic Club of New York this month, he prepped for the crowd of Wall Street power brokers and other traditional business elites who would be in attendance.

Trump consulted with Steven M. Mnuchin and David Malpass, his former treasury secretary and his appointee to lead the World Bank, two people familiar with the matter said. But then the Republican presidential nominee surprised his audience, calling in a speech for the creation of a U.S. sovereign wealth fund paid for by new revenue from sweeping tariffs on trade. Neither adviser had suggested that idea, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

The gap between what Trump’s advisers recommended and what he ultimately espoused underscores the awkward position Republican lawmakers and many other conservatives find themselves in over the former president’s increasingly extreme trade proposals.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans who support Trump but oppose his tariffs have downplayed his plans since his first run for president eight years ago, justifying them as necessary to bolster the U.S. position in global trade negotiations. This interpretation has also been popular among the conservative economic advisers close to Trump, who have embraced his tax cuts and pro-business agenda despite his protectionist instincts.

Trump floats tariffs “as a tool to get what we want,” Rep. Dan Meuser (R-Pa.) said in an interview. “It’s messaging. But it’s a promise. And that’s why he’s talking about it — to set the tone.”

But the former president has repeatedly undermined this view of his trade agenda, reiterating in his campaign speeches and proposals that he sees tariffs as a positive force for the U.S. economy rather than as a necessary evil.

Trump recently said tariffs “don’t affect our country,” contradicting mainstream economists, and has implausibly claimed they can solve everything from foreign policy crises to inflation.

“Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented,” he said Tuesday night in Michigan.

After imposing tariffs on roughly $380 billion in imports during his first term, primarily on China, Trump is now calling for import duties of varying levels on all $3 trillion in U.S. imports — while also suggesting the revenue they bring in could be used to pay for some kind of unspecified national child care program and trillions of dollars in new tax cuts.

A handful of Republican senators have expressed their disapproval of Trump’s most aggressive trade proposals, but the party’s lawmakers overall appear to be hearing what they want to from Trump even as his rhetoric sharply escalates.

“The Republican officials I talk to are hoping that this is just Trump’s bluster — that he’s not actually serious about imposing tariffs but is rather using tariff threats to bully other nations into becoming more friendly to the U.S.,” said Brian Riedl, who served as an aide to former senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a free-trade proponent. “But they’re in denial about this.”

Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly said Trump secured “the best trade deals in history” and would again advance an “America First” trade agenda.

“President Trump successfully imposed tariffs and negotiated new trade deals that leveled the playing field for American agriculture and manufacturing — allowing U.S. industries to send more made-in-America goods across the world,” Kelly said.

During his first term, Trump primarily pushed tariffs as necessary to counter Beijing’s trade practices. Trump repeatedly hammered China for stealing the intellectual property of U.S. firms and manipulating the value of its currency — criticisms that paved the way for his 2018 trade war with China.

Trump also picked trade battles with the European Union and imposed tariffs against Mexico and Canada as he renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement. But Republicans in the House and Senate, as well as the numerous free-trade proponents in his Cabinet, tried to keep these impulses in check. GOP Sens. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Ron Johnson (Wis.) and Ted Cruz (Tex.) raised objections to his proposed tariffs on Mexico in 2019, for instance, while Mnuchin and former Trump White House economist Larry Kudlow sometimes worked to limit the scope of his trade plans.

Though controversial at the time, Democrats have since backed much of Trump’s changes to U.S. trade policy, with President Joe Biden keeping most of his predecessor’s tariffs in effect.

Since leaving office, however, Trump has dramatically intensified his trade rhetoric and proposals, fueling fears a second term would lead to a global trade war that Democrats are highly unlikely to ever back.

At the outset of the 2024 presidential race, Trump proposed a 10 percent “automatic” tariff on every U.S. trading partner, targeting all $3 trillion in annual imports. He said on television that he wanted to put a “ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy. In August, Trump suggested that the rate could instead be as high as 20 percent.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated the 10 percent universal tariff could raise $2.5 trillion in new federal revenue. A 20 percent tariff would raise significantly more, but not twice as much. That’s because higher tariff rates lead to fewer imports.

The economic consequences of such a measure could be severe. The median household would see its after-tax income fall by more than $2,600, or about 4.1 percent, according to an analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington-based think tank. That’s not accounting for the erratic ways that global trade flows would probably be affected.

But Trump has been unbowed, continuing to turn to tariffs as a kind of cure-all.

Asked at the Economic Club of New York about high child care costs, he cited tariff revenue as one potential answer. Trump also incorrectly said tariff revenue from his plans can be used to pay for roughly $7 trillion in new tax cuts. More recently, Trump floated using a “100 percent” tariff to force belligerent countries not to go to war.

“We don’t have to send troops; I can do it with a telephone call,” he said. “You go to war with another country that’s friendly to us, or even not friendly to us, you’re not going to do business in the United States, and we’re going to charge you 100 percent tariffs.”

Sometimes, Trump characterizes this kind of effect as the purpose of the tariff — to bend foreign nations to America’s will. Beyond Trump, many skeptics of U.S. trade policy over the past 20 years have emphasized that other countries have far higher import duties on U.S. exports than the other way around. One iteration of Trump’s trade plans would allow the United States to tariff a country’s imports at the same rate that country tariffs U.S. exports.

“So it’s basically you hurt us, we hurt you,” Trump said last month. “It’s an eye for an eye, and it’s common sense.”

GOP lawmakers have mostly chosen to believe this will form the crux of Trump’s trade policy. There have been some objections: Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and other GOP senators have criticized Trump’s plans for an “automatic” 10 percent tariff. One moderate Republican, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the issue, said that Trump’s tariff proposals would only hurt Americans, particularly poorer citizens, because the prices of goods would immediately go up.

But Rep. Kevin Hern (R-Okla.), who chairs the Republican Study Committee, is one of many in the GOP who say they consider Trump’s positioning on tariffs more of a warning to foreign leaders than a specific policy.

“He’s put a notice out there to people around the world: If you’re going to do harm to our U.S. economy, we’re going to retaliate,” Hern said. “He’s given them forewarning.”

Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) worked with Trump on trade policies when he was in the House. He said Trump’s latest pontifications on tariffs tell him that the former president is arguing for free trade, “but equal access across the board.”

“So his whole thing is, if you’re going to trade with us and you’re not going to give us free access … like we treat your businesses, you treat ours, then we’re going to impose tariffs. So I know where he’s coming from, but we got to work on where those tariffs need to be, and I agree with his plan,” he said. Asked whether he views Trump’s recommendations more as messaging and that a GOP Congress would ultimately piece together tariff recommendations, Mullin said “yes, 100 percent.”

Trump, however, continues to openly discuss tariffs in a different light.

During a speech in Pennsylvania this month, he said tariffs are “a tax on a country that’s ripping us off and stealing our jobs. … It’s a tax that doesn’t affect our country.”

At the Economic Club of New York, Trump said tariffs “will combat inflation.” Economists say that even if tariffs lead to more domestic production, that would be the case only by making imports more expensive — which would mean higher inflation.

During a presidential debate, Trump responded to a question on tariffs’ impact on domestic consumers by implausibly asserting they would instead raise prices for foreign countries.

“They aren’t gonna have higher prices. What’s gonna have and who’s gonna have higher prices is China and all of the countries that have been ripping us off for years,” Trump said. “Other countries are going to finally, after 75 years, pay us back for all that we’ve done for the world.”

While his exact intentions are hard to discern, Trump is leaving little room for interpretation — he clearly plans to use tariffs in a way that most Republicans will ultimately dislike, said Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank.

“Should we be prepared for a Trump administration to levy across-the-board tariffs? Yes. How big will they be? How disruptive will they be? Who knows,” Holtz-Eakin said. “But Trump is not going to be put under control. He’s making that point.”

Even in an era of ugly politics, the past few weeks have stood out.

There are the familiar disparagements between candidates, sure, albeit ones framed more existentially than would have been the case in years past. Those sit alongside unchecked and unrepentant social-media-powered dishonesty: revelations of foreign actors attempting to stoke tension or upend the presidential contest. And, of course, an acceleration of hostility against immigrants to the United States, driven in part by invented claims of bizarre behavior.

We are eight years past this being surprising. Donald Trump’s advent as the 2016 Republican nominee — or, perhaps, his surprising victory that year — demonstrated that the expected costs of running an unusually negative, divisive campaign were overstated. In a world where Trump is the starting point, politics were perhaps inevitably going to become more toxic.

What is surprising is that research suggests that negative campaigning doesn’t really work. This may diverge from your expectations; it did mine when I first read the book “Nasty Politics” by Thomas Zeitzoff, an American University professor. Zeitzoff has receipts from his work in and research of political campaigns in the United States and across the world. And when I contacted him over email to assess this unusually nasty moment, he offered links to back up his point: a 2009 study determining that negative campaigning doesn’t really help candidates and a 2016 study demonstrating that negative ads might reduce support for the sponsoring candidate (which is in part why most candidates used to leave the particularly nasty stuff to others).

And yet Trump’s campaign in particular is unrelentingly negative. You can see that in any of his speeches, certainly, or his interviews, or his social media posts. You can see it, too, in the Wesleyan Media Project’s assessment of advertising in the presidential race since April. Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the vast majority of ads run in support of Trump have been ones attacking her. (Or, as in the case of the image at the top of this article, her running mate.)

So if negative campaigning doesn’t work, I asked Zeitzoff, why is Trump doing it? After all, Trump has an unusual breadth of personal experience in seeing that his efforts to relentlessly attack his opponents don’t result in his earning more votes.

Zeitzoff offered a few possible reasons. One is simply changing the discussion. News reports on comments by Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), disparaging Haitian arrivals in his state focus on immigration and not abortion. The tactic also serves to “coalesce their base around a threat,” he suggested — in this case, those immigrants.

But there’s another obvious reason: These particular attacks reinforce the Trump ticket’s assertions that the nation is in a state of tumult.

Trump and Vance are running on the idea “that ‘America is in carnage/chaos,’” he wrote, “so cynically they benefit when they get a chaotic reaction.”

Zeitzoff also indicated that his research suggests that particularly dirty elections can tamp down turnout, something that is understood to potentially benefit Trump (though Zeitzoff admits that this probably isn’t a central motivation here).

There’s another obvious reason that Trump embraces negative campaigning, of course: He actively rejects traditional modes of campaigning and even the validity of elections themselves. He and his supporters frame this as concerns about “voter fraud.” But given the lack of evidence that such fraud occurs to any significant degree (and given the events of Jan. 6, 2021), it’s easy to understand that argument as a stalking horse for efforts to force election results into the shape he and his allies seek.

Here, I’ll quote Zeitzoff at length:

“Negative rhetoric, or nasty politics as I call it, is both a symptom of, and cause of democratic backsliding,” he explained. The term “democratic backsliding” refers to the erosion of free and fair elections in a country, something that’s been seen increasingly globally (as recent research indicates) and in the United States specifically.

“I found this to be the case in the U.S., Israel and Ukraine,” he continued. “My basic view is that nasty politics tells us how polarized elites are” — meaning those able to influence public policy. “When we see an uptick of nasty politics, it tells us that elites see the other side as a threat.”

“That’s where we can end up a democratic breakdown,” Zeitzoff added, because “fundamentally democracy is about parties being willing to lose elections. And if the other side is so bad and so threatening you can’t let them take power, then we cease to be a democracy.”

Negative rhetoric, he said, reflects and exacerbates such fears.

The most striking graph in Zeitzoff’s book was one tracking nasty political behavior in the United States as measured in New York Times articles. Such stories were common at the time of the Civil War — and in the Donald Trump era.

The challenge with the research that shows the relative ineffectiveness of negative campaigning is that it examines a system in which political power is awarded through campaigns. One in which candidates are attuned to the effects of their messages on voters, rather than the effects of their messages on people who might be called upon to challenge the election results.

Trump’s inability to secure more than about 47 percent of the vote in his two past presidential bids suggests that there’s a ceiling on his support. That he received millions fewer votes in those elections reinforces the idea that only so many people are compelled by his unceasingly negative approach to running for president. As we saw in 2020, though, however unhelpful his negative assessments of American institutions were before Election Day, they came in handy during the weeks that followed.