Trumps tariff vow helped win the White House now it may cost him Congress

In 2016, Donald Trump’s support for tariffs helped propel him to a shocking electoral victory. In 2026, his tariff policy may help tank Republicans in the midterms. This turnabout counts as a surprise of Trump’s second term, and an unwelcome one for the president and his party. During his political ascent in 2015 and 2016, Trump exploited issues that revealed a disconnect between popular and elite opinion, and trade was prominent among them.His protectionism — expressed in pungent and excoriating terms — poached traditional Democratic ideological territory and appealed to the working-class voters, allowing him to crash the traditional Democratic “Blue Wall” states.In sheer political terms, what could go wrong?Well, nothing — until he got his way. It turns out that Liberation Day was the beginning of the end for any appreciable political support for his tariff policy. The assumption has usually been that the politics of tariffs favor protectionism — the benefits are very visible and focused for specific sectors and businesses that are highly committed to maintaining them, while the costs are widely dispersed among people who won’t care so much. In this case, though, the logic has been turned on its head: The costs felt by people with no direct stake in protectionism are tanking support for the tariffs overall. On top of this, there’s the fact that Trump won his second White House term promising to reduce prices — and import duties increase them.The Yale Budget Lab estimates the costs to households at about $1,000 a year. The shambolic and arbitrary rollout of the tariffs, as well as the dubious legal basis for many of them, hasn’t helped, either. According to a poll that the libertarian Cato Institute conducted with Morning Consult, 74% of Americans say the tariffs increased the prices they pay, including 66% of Republicans.About half of those polled, 53%, say the tariffs have weakened the economy, and 49% say they’ve hurt their qua...