When Trump Reloads — 4/14/25
After losing a campaign to become governor of Texas many years ago, a Republican named Clayton Williams reflected on the mistakes he’d made over the course of his race.
“I shot myself in the foot,” said Williams. “Then I reloaded and really blew the sucker off.”
Donald Trump’s approach to tariffs and international trade may yet have the same impact. Last week, we discussed the likely economic effect of Trump’s approach. Now let’s consider the potential political consequences.
After achieving the narrowest election victory in decades, Trump immediately began moving aggressively on a range of topics, from government spending to border policy to taxes to international relations. He was aided greatly by a confused and divided Democratic Party, still smarting from their unexpected defeat in November and uncertain as to how to counter the multi-front offensive that Trump was mounting.
But more recently, as Trump has first teased, then announced, and then partially retreated from his self-proclaimed love affair with tariffs, his post-election political momentum has slowed, then stalled. Even before he proclaimed the largest fees on foreign imports in over a century, Trump was already facing an electorate that was deeply skeptical of such economic isolationism. Americans who had elected Trump to rein in inflation recognized that the costs imposed upon goods shipped here from other countries would be passed on to them. New polling shows that voters have become even more dubious since Trump’s announcement.
As the tariff discussion grew louder, Trump’s level of public support has been faltering. More worrisome for the president’s backers, though, is how Trump has suffered on the more specific question of voter confidence in the way he has handled the nation’s economic challenges. Even when his public approval ratings scraped bottom during his first term on office, Trump always received fairly high marks on his economic skills. But for the first time since declaring his candidacy back in 2015, Trump’s poll numbers on the economy are more negative than positive.
These are the types of mood swings that are already beginning to unsettle Republican members of Congress preparing for next year’s midterm elections. Although Trump has enjoyed considerable success over the years with a message of economic nationalism, this sort of protectionism has created considerable political problems for the GOP in the past. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), an avowed free trader who abhors government intervention in almost all aspects of life, has been circulating data to his colleagues, warning them of the potential fallout of building such formidable trade barriers. Paul cites the two most aggressive examples of economic isolationism since the Civil War—William McKinley’s protectionism at the end of the 19th century and the infamous Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930—and points to the political devastation that Republicans suffered as a result on both occasions.
After the McKinley Tariff was enacted in 1890, Republicans lost 93 seats in the House that November. In the wake of Smoot-Hawley, the GOP lost 52 seats in 1930 and 101 more two years later. It took sixty years for Republicans to hold a House majority again for more than a single election.
Nor is it an accident that it’s necessary to reach so far in history to find anti-trade precedents to consider. It’s because for the better part of a century, both parties’ leaders have remembered these lessons and been understandably insistent on avoiding them. Determined protectionists have always maintained a presence among both Democratic labor allies and Republican isolationists, but their voices have usually been outnumbered within their respective caucuses.
But as white working-class voters have emerged as the key swing vote in the last three presidential elections, economic globalism has lost its allure. (Even Rust Belt Democrats have been careful in their criticism of Trump to make it clear they don’t oppose all tariffs, just the manner in which he has designed them.) And Trump’s step back last week still left these fees at their highest level in over a century.
The president, of course, is not on the ballot in 2026. But plenty of other Republicans are preparing to face the voters next November, including those whose campaigns will determine control of Congress. Trump likes to say that “tariffs is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” It will be up to his GOP colleagues, balancing their allegiance to him with their own re-election prospects, to convince him the feeling is not mutual.