President Donald Trump is on the brink of levying a sweeping set of new tariffs against an unidentified number of countries. Trump’s actions are rattling financial markets, business leaders and foreign officials.
Now House and Senate Republicans are beginning to feel anxious about what Trump is up to.
“It’s a high-risk move on his part,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said on Monday. “I don’t know what his strategy is, but you look at what the market’s reaction is — I have a similar kind of reaction. I’m concerned.”
Trump and top administration officials have said repeatedly that the American public should be comfortable with short-term economic pain in order to achieve some sort of parity in global trade. That’s despite the fact that Trump ran on a promise to lower costs that he said were being driven up by the Biden administration’s inflationary policies.
Now the stock market is swooning – the first quarter was the worst for the market since 2022. Consumer sentiment is dropping. China, South Korea and Japan – traditional rivals – say they’ll band together to respond to any new American trade barriers. Wall Street is screaming that the U.S. economy could topple into a recession. Dow futures are down again today.
It’s true that Trump, 78 and in his second term, will never have to face voters again. He lives in a bubble, shuttling from the White House to Palm Beach to his summer home in New Jersey, surrounded by aides and friends who mostly tell him what he wants to hear.
Trump was also very clear during the campaign that he was going to dramatically remake U.S. trade policies. GOP lawmakers, desperate to retake the White House, may have underestimated just how serious Trump was.
Yet between the huge controversy caused by tens of thousands of DOGE-related layoffs of federal workers and the new tariffs, the U.S. economy has taken twin hits that have shaken voters. Trump’s support on economic issues has taken a hit in the polls.
A floor test. A test of whether Senate Republicans truly back Trump’s efforts on trade policy will come today. The Senate will vote on Sen. Tim Kaine’s (D-Va.) resolution to terminate the national emergency declaration Trump is using to justify tariffs against Canadian imports. This is largely symbolic since the House won’t take it up under a previous rule it adopted.
But Senate Majority Leader John Thune indicated he’s unsure whether Republicans will be able to defeat Kaine’s resolution — meaning a handful of GOP senators could vote with Democrats to nix the emergency declaration. This would only serve to publicly undercut Trump a day before the new tariffs are set to be unveiled. Thune said he wants to give Trump “latitude” to carry out his short-term goals with the tariffs, like cracking down on fentanyl trafficking.
Yet the discomfort with Trump’s trade policies is obvious everywhere you look among Hill Republicans.
Take Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) for example. The fifth-term senator said tariffs on Canada are a “huge mistake” that would cause “disruption in the economies of both countries — particularly for a state like Maine, whose economy is so integrated with Canada.”
“I’m not surprised that Canada would seek to strike back and that’s going to increase costs even more for consumers,” added Collins, who is up this cycle. Trump earlier carved out a provision lowering tariffs on Canadian energy imports following Collins’ complaint.
Republicans aren’t just frustrated by what they see as a wrongheaded policy. They also say the haphazard process by which the tariffs have been rolled out has created chaos for consumers.
Thune suggested even he doesn’t know what Wednesday’s announcement will look like. He’s been cautioning for weeks about retaliatory tariffs targeting agriculture, a major industry in his home state of South Dakota.
“As you know — and I’m among these — there’s concerns about tariffs on Canada and what the ultimate objective is,” Thune said. “I’m in a very different place when it comes to across-the-board tariffs, and Canada would be one example of that.”
The Trump trade bulls. There are pro-tariff Republicans who back Trump fully. They say the wild gyrations in financial markets are simply bumps on the road and the U.S. economy will benefit in the long run as companies relocate manufacturing operations to this country. The GOP lawmakers remain certain Americans are willing to make sacrifices — in the form of higher prices — to achieve that goal.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said the “American people trust” Trump and are “willing to give the president some leeway here to negotiate.”
Here’s more from Jordan:
“I think things are going to come back fine. And I think there’s a trust of the president to carry out what he said he was going to, what he was elected to do, and what we all believe is going to be, in the long run, good for the country.”
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) went as far to assert that consumers will “change the basket of products” they buy if prices go up. The freshman senator said U.S. car buyers will no longer purchase imported Hyundais but instead buy American-manufactured Hondas, Chevys, Fords or Toyotas.
“[Tariffs don’t] raise prices because you have substitution,” Moreno said.
How about the markets? There was always a theory that Trump is only swayed by the stock market, an easily digestible set of numbers that serve as a real-time barometer of investor confidence.
After a day of seesawing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1% Monday, mostly on hopes that Trump’s tariffs will be softer than the conventional wisdom dictates. But the Dow is off 7% from its post-election high. The tech-heavy NASDAQ is down more than 10% this year and more than 8% in the last month alone.
“I’m sure there’s one person that’s paying the closest attention of all [to market reaction] and it’s the guy at 1600 Pennsylvania,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who is up for re-election next year.
Also … Get C-SPAN ready. Lawmakers will get to question the administration’s top trade official next week. USTR Jamieson Greer is set to testify at the Senate Finance Committee on April 8 and the House Ways and Means Committee on April 9, as we scooped.
