Ask a Washington insider to nominate the most consequential figure in the Trump administration and you’ll get a mix of responses, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent or even ever-present aide Natalie Harp. But as he wandered through the White House gardens in April, mingling with giddy children and their parents gathered for the annual Easter Egg Roll, President Donald Trump offered his own pick.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have the most powerful man in government with us today, Mr. Jamieson Greer. Have you heard of him?” the president asked the crowd. “Come on over here, Jamieson. How are we doing on trade?”Trump’s US trade representative, who at age 46 with a beard looks more like a suburban dad than a power broker, stepped forward. “We’re doing well, sir,” he answered confidently, citing a historic high in US exports.

Greer was clearly surprised by the compliment from his boss, though in one of two in-depth interviews with this month he played it down. “He says that to all the girls,” joked Greer, noting that Trump often flatters members of his cabinet.

Still, for anyone tracking Trump’s efforts to engineer a new economic order, the message was clear. One year on from his chaotic “Liberation Day” tariff rollout, the president was publicly acknowledging the capable and increasingly influential general directing his trade wars.

Over the course of his 20 months on the job, Greer has racked up victories but also defeats. The average effective US tariff rate now stands at 11.2%, the highest since the 1930s. That’s created leverage with trade partners that the administration has exploited to negotiate 20 or so deals, rolling back some duties in exchange for commercial concessions and investment pledges. (Some remain no more than outlines at this point.) Yet Trump’s initial plans to construct a protectionist wall around the world’s biggest market were set back earlier this year, when the US Supreme Court ruled that a raft of duties the administration introduced at the beginning of his term were illegal.

Now, with elections approaching, Greer, who was confirmed on a largely partisan vote of 56 to 43, is confronting what could quickly become an uncomfortable political environment. If the Democrats win even one congressional chamber, the party may act on bills they’ve drafted to reclaim tariff authority. At the very least, Greer and Trump’s trade policies will be subject to scrutiny at oversight hearings.

There’s a larger question at stake about the longer-term direction of US economic policy. Trump’s tariff experiment is based on the assumption that it’s a political winner, particularly with blue-collar voters. Yet the tariffs increasingly look politically toxic.

Polls show the administration’s import levies are as unpopular among Americans as the Iran war or data centers. A Fox News poll taken Oct. 9-12 found 69% of registered voters disapproved of Trump’s tariffs — worse than the president’s own dismal rating. In a September Ipsos survey, 81% of respondents said they believed the duties led to higher prices, while just 24% said tariffs would yield more US jobs.

That has Republican candidates facing heat over their support for Trump’s trade policies in what, until now, had been reliably red states, such as Iowa and Kansas; and it’s causing some to attempt to distance themselves from the import taxes in battleground ones, including Michigan and Maine.

The discontent helps explain why Greer is making his case directly to US businesses and consumers, with more regular TV appearances and visits to factories, farms and events like the Iowa State Fair. His message, in a nutshell, is that Trump and he are engaged in a vast and ambitious project: securing America’s primacy in a global economy reshaped by China.

“We’re trying to create another American century here,” Greer says. Any “discontent in the populace” is over “micro issues” unrelated to tariffs, he argues. “When people are saying, ‘I’m upset about the cost of living,’ what they’re upset about is housing. They’re upset about healthcare, upset about education. They’re upset about energy. None of that has anything to do with tariffs.”Greer blames corporate interests and economists for the bad reputation tariffs have acquired, singling out reports by the Budget Lab at Yale and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that link the import taxes to resurgent inflation.

He points to an assortment of data that he says shows the administration is making progress toward its twin goals of rebalancing global trade and spurring an industrial renaissance. At an Oct. 1 press conference in Milwaukee, where trade ministers from the Group of 20 gathered, he noted that annual US goods exports are on course to reach their highest level in 250 years, while the economy has added construction and factory jobs this year.

Although it’s true that manufacturing payrolls have increased by 72,000 so far this year, that doesn’t make up for the more than 100,000 jobs lost in 2025. Moreover, such gains are small in an economy employing almost 160 million people, where other sectors, including healthcare, are growing at a much faster clip. “He puts forward a good argument. But it’s a losing argument,” says Christopher Padilla, who served in senior trade roles in George W. Bush’s administration.

Which makes Greer “a skilled messenger for a flawed policy.”Greer is an unusual fit in an administration filled with billionaires, ideologues and hangers-on. A laconic trade lawyer, he served during Trump’s first term as chief of staff to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, a mentor from his days practicing trade law in Washington.

And while Greer made a good enough impression to secure the job for himself in the current administration, it’s taken more than a year for him to solidify his place in the president’s inner circle.

When Trump returned to the Oval Office last year, Greer gave the president a menu of potential mechanisms to impose tariffs. Among the options was the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1970s law often used to impose sanctions on other nations. The USTR cautioned that its use to levy tariffs might be tested in the courts. Trump nonetheless decided to invoke the IEEPA to quickly slap duties on China, Mexico and Canada last February, and a couple of months later he unveiled tariffs ranging from 11% to 50% targeting dozens of countries on what he called “Liberation Day.”

But then came legal challenges, losses in lower courts and this February’s Supreme Court decision, which is forcing the government to refund companies $165 billion in tariff revenue.

Even before the ruling came down, Greer and his staff had prepared what they saw as more durable alternatives. Citing Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the administration announced this summer that it was imposing duties of as high as 12.5% on the 27-member European Union and dozens of other countries, for not having or properly enforcing bans on products made with forced labor. The USTR’s office has invoked the same provision to launch an investigation into whether China, the EU and 14 other nations have policies that encourage excess production in their manufacturing sectors.

The argument is that the low-priced exports those industries produce undercut US competitors. Greer says that probe will “probably” conclude before the end of the year.

The goal for Greer is to survive legal challenges that have already begun piling up. “We know whatever action we take, there’s going to be potentially litigation,” he says. He also insists that the new tariff wall is built to survive those legal assaults.

If the administration suffers another legal defeat on tariffs in the wake of anticipated Republican midterm losses, Greer could find himself on the outs, even though he’s worked hard to avoid the infighting that’s plagued much of Trump’s cabinet. “He’s not going to be someone who is going to be loud or be getting in anybody’s face at all about anything. That’s not his style,” says Jeffrey Gerrish, who worked with Greer in private practice and through Trump’s first administration.

Greer arrived in Washington in 2012, after four years working as a military lawyer in Iraq and Turkey. He landed at one of the Big Five law firms, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he joined a small band of Republican protectionists. Led by Lighthizer, the crew at Skadden was viewed by the rest of the Washington trade bar as rogues on a mission to unwind the bipartisan embrace of globalization they believed was hollowing out American industry.

Stephen Vaughn, a colleague from those days, recalls that Greer was a natural fit. “A lot of people — talented, ambitious people — who come to Washington don’t come here to join the underdogs,” he says.

What drew Greer was a belief that Lighthizer’s work trying to secure tariffs for American industries was “the right answer for the country and something I could feel comfortable doing,” he says. “Now that we’re not the underdog, now that we’re mainstream, I like that a lot better.”His work at Skadden was mostly on behalf of US Steel Corp. and other American companies trying to secure tariffs against imports being sold in the US at improbably cheap prices.

It gave Greer and his colleagues an inside view of the daunting competitive challenge coming from China, Vaughn says. It also built Lighthizer’s reputation as a China hard-liner, which set him up for a role in Trump’s cabinet following the 2016 election. “America was totally open to Chinese investment, labor, goods and services for decades. And the outcome was not one that was good for America,” says Greer, in a statement that sums up the president’s stance.

Greer spent three years in government at Lighthizer’s side, pursuing a grand bargain that Trump was then seeking with China. A bid to get Beijing to scale back its industrial subsidies and crack open sectors such as finance that were closed to foreign investment culminated in what was billed as a “Phase One” deal in January 2020. The agreement was heavy on purchase commitments but light on substantive changes. Greer says the experience taught him that pushing Beijing to enact reforms was futile because the Chinese Communist Party wants to continue exercising a large degree of control over the economy and also companies.

In the end, China didn’t live up to many of its commitments in that partial deal — partly because the Covid-19 pandemic intruded — and there was never a Phase Two.

Trump’s ultimate goal is a rebalancing of the US-China economic relationship, not a full decoupling. “It was never about cutting off trade with China,” Greer says. “It wasn’t then. It isn’t now.”Instead, the administration has been looking for ways to reduce the US economy’s dependence on Chinese imports, be it critical minerals, solar panels or ingredients for pharmaceuticals, while prodding Beijing to buy more shipments of American soybeans and other agricultural goods.

The reality now is that dealing with China requires rolling short-term agreements rather than the comprehensive grand bargains Washington once pursued, Greer argues. As an example, he points to the trade truce the two countries negotiated last year: The latest extension, agreed to during President Xi Jinping’s state visit last month, is just two months long because Beijing failed to fully live up to earlier commitments on removing restrictions on exports of rare-earth magnets. “If the Chinese want to have something more permanent or longer, then the idea would be: Be more open. Be more reliable in delivering rare earths. Be more market-based,” Greer says.

He acknowledges that trade policy under Trump 2 hasn’t always been delivered smoothly. “We’re certainly learning as we do this, and I don’t think we’ve ever claimed to have everything perfect,” he says. Greer is also mindful of the challenge of selling what can be complicated policy in an election year.

But the Trump administration certainly isn’t done with tariffs, and the payoff will be worth it, he says. “For me it is not a narrow ‘I want to show that tariffs work.’ I’m fighting for Americans to have the kind of economy that they want.”At the core of that is a bigger manufacturing sector, he says, because it’s good for national security reasons “but also because these are good jobs for people who graduated from high school and decided not to go to college, like most of the country.”

To hear Greer tell it, his vision of a new American century sounds a lot like a throwback to an earlier one: “I want Americans to be able to get married and have a family, and I want them to be able to do it in their hometown.”