Trump's love affair with tariffs will cost you

The president-elect wants to turn back the clock a century to the days when American politics revolved around protecting U.S. industries

The Cordell Hull dam sits on the Cumberland River north of Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The Cordell Hull building in Nashville houses the offices of state legislators.

In 2020, the state museum honored Cordell Hull with an exhibition that included the Nobel Peace Prize medal he received in 1945 for helping to create the United Nations.

Yet none of these memorials quite recognizes the way in which Hull monumentally changed American history starting in the 1930s. During his tenure as the longest-serving secretary of state, Hull achieved his decades-long goal of upending America’s policy on tariffs and trade.

Despite strong opposition, Hull put in place the building blocks for a system of freer trade that still survives, even as former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have toyed with dismantling it.

In October, Donald Trump told the Economic Club of Chicago, “The most beautiful word in the entire dictionary of words is the word tariff…It's gonna make us rich.”Trump is vowing to c…