Steve Hilton: Trump proves that tariffs work. Here are the lessons we should learn

Last week we saw proof that tariffs work. President Trump threatened tariffs on Mexico. Their leaders came to negoitiate, and we got concrete results.
Even the Wall Street Journal, whose generally indispensable and brilliant editorial pages regularly rail against tariffs, recognized the president's achievement, writing the following:
"In the course of a week, Mr. Trump managed to get Mexico to agree to two things that months ago would have seemed unlikely: Militarizing Mexico’s crackdown on migrants by deploying National Guard troops and expanding the ‘remain in Mexico’ plan for asylum seekers."
The anatomy of this latest tariff dispute tells us a lot about policy, our politics and government. We should learn the lessons. Everyone agrees we have a crisis at the southern border. Two weeks ago, 1,000 illegal immigrants literally just walked into the country, in El Paso, Texas. Our immigration system is not just broken; for all practical purposes, it doesn't exist.
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But there is one person, it seems, who is actually trying to fix it: President Trump. That's why he resorted to his tariff threat. It was a new approach, so of course, the establishment lost their minds. And the Republican establishment hated it, too.
The response was knee-jerk, ideological … dogmatic. So here's the first lesson: The establishment politicians and media should be more open-minded. Give new ideas and new approaches a chance.
Instead, the way they were talking, tariffs on Mexico would be the end of our economy. They let ideology get in the way of the facts. Even though Mexico is our biggest trading partner, it's still a tiny part of our economy. Imports from Mexico make up just 1.8 percent of our economy. And exports to Mexico are only 1.4 percent.
It's like the critics didn't even look at it as a practical policy question. For them it was an article of faith -- tariffs are bad. It was the same thing with all the nodding dogs on TV, spouting the same line about American consumers. “Tariffs are a tax.” “It will overwhelm the consumer.”
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But hang on a second. President Trump has been introducing tariffs for over two years now, going back to April 2017 when tariffs on lumber imports from Canada went up to 24 percent. We've had tariffs on China and Canada on products, ranging from steel and aluminum to toothbrushes and washing machines.
And what's happened to prices in that time? We don't have to guess, we have an actual measure. It's called inflation.
The average inflation rate for 2016 was 2.1 percent. 2017 was 2.1 percent; 2018 2.4 percent; and 2019 so far, 1.75 percent. It's actually going down.
Companies don't just sit there and take it when tariffs are imposed, they respond. One person at least seems to get this:
“The people aren't going to have to worry about paying the tax because the companies a