As they gear up to defend their majority next year, some Republican senators expressed hesitance Wednesday over President Donald Trump’s tariffs after he used a joint address before Congress to warn consumers of further economic pain and pleaded with farmers to stick by him.
Behind their collective hesitancy to endorse the 25 percent import fees the Republican president has slapped on many Canadian and Mexican goods, 20 percent tariffs in place on Chinese-made items and his threatened “reciprocal” taxes on imports from other countries was a wait-and-see approach.
“There’ll be a little disturbance, but we’re OK with that,” Trump said in the House chamber Tuesday night. “It won’t be much.”
Senate Republicans are entering the 2026 midterm election cycle defending 22 of their 53 seats. Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales ranks just two of those seats — held by Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis — as Battleground races, but the same kinds of economic forces that won Republicans a governing trifecta in Washington last fall could quickly shift against them.
“If you’re talking about tariffs that are going to be inflationary, causing all kinds of retaliation and disrupting the markets, I’m almost certainly against them,” Tillis told CQ Roll Call on Wednesday.
“However, if you’re talking about tariffs that are used surgically … to be used judiciously and to build the economy, then I’m all for it,” he added. “So in other words, it all comes down to the implementation.”
With Trump signaling his reciprocal import taxes on goods from all other nations are still nearly a month from being applied, Tillis said it was too soon to determine if the president’s approach would further increase prices.
“If this was an act of Congress, yeah, [tariffs] that couldn’t snap back quickly, then I’d have a concern. But this is a president who has the authority to flex and … use it as a device and see if it changes behaviors,” he said.
Asked about the impact of Trump’s tariffs, GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy, who hails from agriculture-heavy Louisiana and faces a primary challenge from former Rep. John Fleming, offered a more kaleidoscopic view.
“You’ve got 100 possibilities. And we know that once you’re three standard deviations out, you’re cognizant of it. And so if you’re asked, ‘Do you have a concern,’ even if it’s three standard deviations out, the simple answer would be, ‘Yes,’” he said. “But it’s three standard deviations out right now. So I find that a difficult question to answer and to give perspective and context.”
Trump, who won a second term vowing to quickly lower costs, spent around an hour altogether Tuesday night touting a list of executive actions he has taken since returning to office, which Senate Democratic leader Charles E. Schumer later dubbed a “long-winded, self-serving diatribe.” It was past 10 p.m. on the East Coast before he arrived at the economic section of his address.
Trump noted the country had “suffered the worst inflation in 48 years, but perhaps even in the history of our country, they’re not sure.”
“As president, I’m fighting every day to reverse this damage and make America affordable again,” he told the rare joint session without laying out specific plans or asking lawmakers for legislation.
Instead, as he did on other occasions Tuesday, the president mostly blamed his predecessor, saying, “Joe Biden especially let the price of eggs get out of control. The egg price is out of control, and we’re working hard to get it back down.”
A Pew Research Center survey from earlier this year found that more Americans expect the food and consumer goods prices to get worse over the course of the year (43 percent) than get better (37 percent). The same poll also found U.S. adults more pessimistic about the current economy — with 45 percent saying conditions were fair, 31 percent that conditions were poor and 24 percent that the economy was in excellent or good shape.
‘Hogs, chickens and turkeys’
After telling campaign rally crowds and friendly interviewers for months last year that his second administration would swiftly pare down prices, Trump essentially acknowledged Tuesday that his import fees would likely add to the Biden-era price increases. And he made a point to warn farmers of coming turbulence.
“The tariffs will go on agricultural products coming into America. And our farmers, starting on April 2, it may be a little bit of an adjustment period. We had that before when I made the deal with China, $50 billion of purchases, and I said, ‘Just bear with me,’ and they did,” Trump said. “Probably have to bear with me again, and this will be even better.”
To that end, Tillis acknowledged Wednesday that North Carolina farms could “be hit.”
“Our protein producers — think mainly hogs, chickens and turkeys — could have some market access issues,” he said. “It’s a $100 billion industry in North Carolina. … It’s a matter of whether or not we can sustain the damage and win the [trade] war.”
Ford O’Connell, a GOP strategist, said one of Trump’s objectives Tuesday evening was to begin chipping away at a sense among many Americans that fair trade actually exists.
“President Trump has to overcome a learning curve of this notion of fair trade, meaning the reality that we’re not getting fair trade,” O’Connell told CQ Roll Call. “So there’s going to be a little push and pull here. The United States has the second-lowest tariff rates in the world. What the president is saying is, ‘If you want me to get prices down and bring jobs back home, you’re going to have to give me a little time.’”
Louisiana GOP Sen. John Kennedy is not up for reelection until 2028, but he does hail from the same agriculture-heavy state as Cassidy, with over 30,000 farms, according to the state’s Economic Development agency.
“I think we’re in uncharted waters. Let me preface this by saying that it’s been a while since we’ve had a president who believes so passionately in tariffs,” Kennedy said. “He implemented tariffs in his first term, and it didn’t lead to inflation, and I’m hoping that’s the case in his second term.”
“But the fact of the matter is that the supply lines are so complex, and the American economy is so sophisticated,” he added, “that we just don’t know yet.”
‘Expectations were high’
O’Connell noted that while lawmakers may be focused on their next elections, tariffs — especially if Trump uses them to convince Canada, Mexico and China to ease their own import fees — would help their constituents over the longer term.
“After he mopped the floor with the Democrats on live television last night, no one is going to really say a peep about these tariffs from the Republican side,” O’Connell said. “Senators that may have concerns need to see the trees from the forest and realize it’s Trump that got them elected.”
But Sen. Christopher S. Murphy, D-Conn., said Wednesday that GOP senators have privately expressed concerns. But they “choose to act like pundits,” he said, because “their party seems to operate like a cult in which you can occasionally express reservations about the leader, but you can’t actually ever challenge his authority.”
Stock markets in recent days have responded poorly as the Canada, Mexico and China import fees went into effect — and as America’s top three trading partners responded with tariffs of their own on U.S.-made items.
There were some signs Wednesday that Trump administration officials were responding to global markets, U.S. executives and some Republican hesitancy to get on board publicly.
Automaking giants Ford, Stellantis and General Motors would receive a one-month exemption from Trump’s tariffs for vehicles entering the country under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, Trump announced in a statement read by his top spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt.
The White House press secretary confirmed that the president had spoken to the heads of all three companies after spending her prepared remarks at the start of a news briefing to lavish praise on her boss.
“Americans love what they heard,” Leavitt said, holding up a printout of a CBS News/YouGov poll of TV viewers that found 76 percent of them approved of Trump’s speech.
“The expectations were high, and President Trump is exceeding them. Everyday Americans love this president because he tells it like it is, and he did that last night,” she said. “President Trump was honest about where we are, while making clear that help is on the way.”
The post Some GOP senators wait it out on tariffs after Trump warns of ‘little disturbance’ appeared first on Roll Call.
