Few Republicans are truly vouching for Trump’s tariffs, and many hint at a hope that they just go away.
Analysis by Aaron Blake
Politics is often the art of skillfully avoiding directly saying what you really mean. And Republicans are taking that art form to new heights early in the second Trump administration.
They’ll say they believe in Trump the man (read: if not necessarily the policy). They’ll dispassionately describe Trump’s strategy (without necessarily endorsing it). Or they’ll simply say nothing at all (and just hope the whole thing goes away).
But in the case of Trump’s on-again, off-again, dizzying dance on tariffs — especially those on Canada and Mexico — Republicans are largely breaking from the president, if softly. The remarks on tariffs mark a subtle, and largely rhetorical, shift for Republicans, who typically are at extreme pains to appear in sync with the president. And they speak to how unorthodox Trump’s economic policies have been, even as Republican lawmakers decline to take any steps to rein in the president’s authority.
The disconnect comes as tariffs on Canada and Mexico — and Trump’s move to ratchet them up — have rocked the stock market and threatened what even Trump tacitly acknowledged could be a recession. That leaves Republicans in the position of vouching not only for something that is anathema to the free-market principles so central to the GOP’s identity for decades, but for policies that could pose real harm to both the economy and their own political prospects.
A frequent tack is to allude to the idea that the tariffs could be short-lived.
Take Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota), who has offered several such comments over the past week.
“What I’m willing to do is give the president some latitude to try and accomplish the objective he seeks to get done here,” Thune said after Trump’s speech to Congress last week.
“I’m obviously in a different place on [tariffs],” he added Monday. “But I’m hoping that the tariffs, when they achieve their stated objective, will be temporary in nature.”
Thune added Tuesday in comments to Punchbowl News that “I’m not a big fan generally of tariffs, unless there’s a reason,” while wagering that markets were responding to “uncertainty” about how long the tariffs would last.
Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana) has repeatedly cited his worry about the impact of tariffs, even wagering that Trump might ultimately back off.
“I think if the tariffs do start to cause inflation, I think the president will back away from them,” Kennedy predicted last week, adding that “the thing [people] expect the president to fix is high prices.” (Tariffs almost always cause some inflation.)
And they’re hardly the only ones:
- “I am hopeful these tariffs will be a short-term step to encourage negotiations rather than a long-term measure that could lead to retaliatory actions impacting Indiana’s ag sector,” Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) posted on social media.
- “When we start losing, you back off. There’s such a thing as strategic retreat,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina) said. “At the end of the day, I think we have more leverage than any other nation. But we gotta be smart. And we don’t have all the leverage.”
- “Hopefully things will settle down,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said after Trump last week paused many of the tariffs for one month. Cornyn cited other Trump policies that could fuel growth, while adding that “markets prefer stability rather than uncertainty.”
Also telling about the GOP’s commentary is the sheer lack of rhetorical backup Trump is getting. Republicans will often express a willingness to give the president some leeway and a chance to make specific policies work, without endorsing his methods.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) compared Trump to a billiards player breaking up the racked balls as hard as he could.
“It is a shake-up, and he said there’s going to be a shake-up right now. But this is what’s required, in my mind, to start the process of repairing and restoring the American economy,” Johnson said, adding, “And I think you’ve got to give him time.”
But nowhere in those comments is an affirmative case for the tariffs — just an affirmative case for shaking things up.
Indeed, very few Republicans are proactively weighing in for tariffs.
A review of congressional news releases compiled by LegiStorm shows that the vast majority mentioning “tariffs” have been from Democrats. And the few releases from Republicans mostly just note the tariffs without vouching for them.
One rare release praising Trump came from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). But he was actually praising Trump for backing off his tariffs on a specific product that is key to Iowa agriculture: Canadian potash.
“President Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating tool to halt the deadly flow of fentanyl,” Grassley added. “I agree this is a deadly crisis, and it’s why I’m currently leading the HALT Fentanyl Act’s passage through Congress.”
Just to reinforce: Grassley said he agreed with Trump — but only on fentanyl being a deadly crisis, and not necessarily on the strategy being implemented to fight it. It’s very similar to Johnson’s comment: finding the common ground and emphasizing that, rather than the tariffs.
Rep. Byron Donalds (Florida), who is running for governor, is the rare Republican to proactively promote Trump’s tariffs. His office sent out an op-ed last week claiming that cash was “flooding” into the U.S. economy, “turbocharged by tariffs that shield American workers from global abuse.”
There are indeed a handful of Republicans taking firmer positions. Among those promoting the tariffs have been Trump loyalists like Sens. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama). Libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has explicitly opposed them, citing the virtually unanimous verdict of industries in his state.
The whole Republican Party seems to be in wait-and-see mode, its members not wanting to own the tariffs themselves but also not wanting to directly undercut the president. The idea seems to be that Trump can be prevailed upon to back off if the worst does come to pass.
But that is a risky bet, given that Trump has long been a tariff evangelist — it’s one of his oldest and most consistent political views, even as he’s changed course on many others — and that he’s at least talking like someone who’s in it for the long haul.
Of course, there is something these lawmakers can do if they really don’t like the tariffs: They could reclaim the power over such levies that Congress has ceded to the presidency over the years. The Constitution gives Congress the power over tariffs, after all.
If they start talking in earnest about that, you’ll know they’ve lost patience and they’re truly fearful.