‘We’re clearly in uncharted waters,’ says Senator John Kennedy.
O n April 8, a group of Republican senators phoned President Trump to give him a word of advice on the tariff front. The White House should strike as many trade deals as possible and avoid a permanent tariff strategy, the lawmakers said, to skirt retaliatory levies from other nations and to avoid passing increased prices on to American consumers.
“It was a pretty chippy call,” phone call participant and Republican Senator Ted Cruz recalled during an interview with CBS News a few months ago. “When you have a policy disagreement with the president, he swings back at you. . . . At the end of the call, we weren’t sure how it went.”
The next day, they heard the good news: Trump increased tariffs on China but announced a three-month extension on many of his reciprocal tariffs, sending the stock market soaring. “And so, my hope is — 30, 60, 90 days from now — global tariff levels across the world are dramatically lower,” the Texas senator said back in April.
A few months later, it’s a mixed bag. Trump has spent recent weeks striking deals with several countries to bring U.S. tariffs down to zero and to remove nontariff trade barriers in exchange for U.S. tariff rates that are lower than the rates Trump threatened back in April. On Thursday, he gave Mexico 90 more days to negotiate a deal while keeping current levies in place. And on Friday, he said he’s giving dozens of other countries a weeklong extension on his August 1 deadline to negotiate deals with the White House before the reciprocal levies he outlined in early April are set to take effect, on August 7.
As Trump continues to shift his trade strategy in real time, Republican lawmakers are skeptical that he can be talked off the tariff cliff entirely.
“The president is pretty dug in on tariffs, and I don’t think there’s any changing his mind,” Senator John Kennedy (R., La.) told National Review. “What I’ve concentrated my efforts on with the White House is to express to them that I really like their idea of reciprocity. You lower yours, we’ll lower ours. And the ideal form of reciprocity, of course, is zero tariffs on both sides.”
Not everyone in the White House agrees. With a more loyal inner circle this time around, Trump does not feel as much pressure now as he did from his first-term advisers to embrace a more traditional free-trade agenda. And while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has repeatedly emphasized an eagerness to strike deals, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro — long considered a Trump whisperer on economic matters — has made clear his preference for tariff permanence.
A few months into the experiment, tariff-skeptical GOP lawmakers say they’re pleased with many of the foreign-investment and trade deals Trump has struck so far. They welcome the administration’s success in pressuring countries to increase U.S. market share in foreign countries by slashing nontariff barriers to trade, such as stringent ship inspections, import quotas, and local-content requirements. And pressed about the state of the economy, they eagerly tout congressional Republicans’ success in extending the 2017 tax cuts as a major win for U.S. businesses in the short and long term.
But they’re still being inundated with phone calls from small-business owners who are worried about the economic uncertainty surrounding the president’s vacillating trade strategy.
“Every time I hear that a new trade deal has been agreed to, I think it’s a good sign,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) told National Review on Thursday. “I think the greatest threat to our economy at this point, right now, is just the instability, uncertainty.”
“This is a very fluid process,” Senator Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We don’t know yet the full impact of tariffs on the economy. We don’t. I’m not saying they will be good or bad. I’m saying I just don’t know. We’re clearly in uncharted waters.”
For months, White House officials have pointed to low inflation and stronger-than-expected consumer confidence as proof that the president’s trade strategy will not upend the global economy. But stocks fell Friday morning in response to Trump’s new August 7 deadline for reciprocal levies on many nations that haven’t struck deals with the U.S. And Friday’s Bureau of Labor Statistics report revealed that in May and June combined, the economy added 258,000 fewer jobs than the bureau previously reported.
The legal fate of the president’s tariffs also remains uncertain. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals judges voiced skepticism on Thursday during oral arguments on a pair of lawsuits challenging the administration’s decision to invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act — a 1977 law known as IEEPA — to claim sweeping executive authority to impose tariffs without congressional approval.
“It’s just hard for me to see that Congress intended to give the president in IEEPA the wholesale authority to throw out the tariff schedule that Congress has adopted after years of careful work, and revise every one of these tariff rates,” said Clinton-appointed Judge Timothy Dyk.
Except for libertarian-leaning Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who spearheaded an unsuccessful bipartisan effort to reassert congressional tariff authority earlier this year, few GOP lawmakers are eager to publicly excoriate or legislatively challenge the president’s tariff policies. But behind closed doors, many Senate Republicans remain uncertain about the president’s trade war.
On one side are the tariff-skeptical Republicans — the traditional, business-aligned members of the party who are worried about the inflationary effects of Trump’s trade policy and want lower tariffs all around. In the middle are the median Trump-aligned senators who are tepidly supportive of the tariffs but are waiting to see how they affect the economy. And on the other side is the self-described “ascending” wing of the conference — the nationalist populist senators who are gung-ho about Trump’s rebalancing of the global trading system, and some of whom want even more tariffs than the president has already imposed on select goods such as imported steel.
These nationalist populists revere Vice President JD Vance’s conception of politics and are more likely to fall into the restraint-minded foreign policy camp that is more skeptical of U.S. intervention overseas.
“After the end of the Cold War, we never recalibrated, whether it’s on foreign policy or on trade, and that’s exactly what he’s doing,” says Senator Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.). He believes trade and foreign policy are inextricably intertwined. “We’re asking our NATO allies to step up in a much more meaningful way for their own defense and try to lower the trade barriers that existed for far too long. So, I think those two things are happening at the same time, and it’s not a coincidence.”