We knew that the Democrats were going to come out against Trump’s tariff banzai charge.
Never mind that Democrats were the champions of tariffs in the 1980s and 1990s. Since Trump’s victory last November, Democrats have been searching for an issue, grasping at straws. Until this week’s tariff shock in the markets, the Democrats had been stuck with unpopular albatrosses like transgender primary education and free government phones for Venezuelan gang members.
Now, with the stock market going to hell, the Democrats may have finally found their issue. And this time, it’s one that reality-attached Americans actually care about: 58 percent of us have some direct exposure to the stock market.
We also knew that libertarian-minded Republicans like Rand Paul would raise the alarm. Tariffs contradict a hundred years of sound economic theory, about which Senator Paul knows a lot. (I don’t want to assume that President Trump hasn’t read the works of Adam Smith or Milton Friedman; but I wouldn’t want to lay money on such a bet, either.)
But now there are real cracks in the MAGA wall. Senator John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican who is possibly to the right of President Trump, yesterday described the president as “the pit bull who caught the car”, where this tariff fight is concerned.
In an earlier interview on CNN, Kennedy had stated that however this shakes out, Donald Trump is responsible for the outcome. When asked, “Do you think this is Donald Trump’s economy now?”, Kennedy replied, “Oh, I think it is. There’s no question.”
The upshot of all this is that President Trump has a short window of time to either accomplish his aims, or to start backpedaling. If he does neither, then he will face a revolt from within his own party.
There are many Republican politicians who have been eager to ride Donald Trump’s coattails to power. Far fewer will be interested in riding his coattails to defeat and ignominy. Not even the most MAGA Republican believes that the party can survive a Trump-induced financial crisis for very long.
-ET