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In short: Tariffs are not only costly and distortionary. They also tend to be quite sticky.

Economists offer a variety of overlapping explanations for why tariffs, once imposed, have a propensity to outlive the political circumstances that brought them about. Often, that happens because domestic constituencies that benefit from tariffs will fight to keep them around.

President Joe Biden, for example, left most of Trump’s first-term tariffs on Chinese goods in place, despite having said on the campaign trail in 2019 that even a freshman economics student would know they were harming the economy. Removing the tariffs risked angering unions and blue-collar workers that Biden and Democrats hoped to win back from Trump’s coalition.

That has also been true for recent tariffs on steel, aluminum, solar panels and other manufactured goods, explained Ed Gresser, a former assistant U.S. trade representative who is now a vice president at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. “The classic explanation is that relatively small but passionate groups believe they benefit from the tariffs, while larger groups pay an incremental cost (often leading to net national loss) but don’t make removing the tariffs a top priority,” he told me via email.

In theory, the sweeping tariffs Trump has imposed this year should be easier to dislodge. They’re so broad that they create fewer industry-specific beneficiaries to lobby for their continuation, and they could be canceled with an executive order rather than requiring an act of Congress. The fact that the public “is very aware of the new tariffs and so far has taken a pretty strong negative view of them” could give a future Democratic president or congressional majority the necessary push to scrap them, Gresser added.