Free trade advocates in the Republican Party’s old guard piled on Donald Trump as the stock market tumbled sharply downwards on Thursday in response to the White House’s tariff plan.
Wednesday’s announcement of across-the-board tariffs on nearly all countries that export goods to the US sent markets spiraling in after-hours trading, which solidified into a steep drop Thursday morning. Reuters reported that the first US job losses from import tariff hikes were taking place in Michigan and Indiana, where automaker Stellantis announced hundreds of “temporary” layoffs due to idling production facilities in Mexico and Canada.
Signs of the backlash from within conservative circles were already evident Wednesday afternoon, as a handful of GOP senators including former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sided with Democrats to condemn the president’s trade action.
“Make no mistake: goods made in America will be more expensive to manufacture and, ultimately, for consumers to purchase, with higher broad-based tariffs,” McConnell said after his vote.
Center-right media hammered Trump on Thursday while US allies showed no signs of backing down and instead openly plotted their own tariff measures in response. A trade war appears imminent on the road ahead.
“Assuming the policy sticks—and we hope it doesn’t—the effort amounts to an attempt to remake the U.S. economy and the world trading system,” the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote Thursday morning.
“[I]f the response is widespread retaliation, the result could be shrinking world trade and slower growth, recession, or worse,” the Journal continued. “There will certainly be higher costs for American consumers and businesses.”
On The Bulwark, host Jonathan Last sarcastically quipped Thursday: “The woke socialist markets do not seem to appreciate the brilliance of Trump’s beautiful, very strong tariffs.”
The White House fired out its own news release highlighting praise from a handful of industry trade groups, as well as Republican members of Congress. But over Wednesday evening and Thursday morning the media and economic experts spent the hours picking apart apparent inconsistencies and other confusing aspects of the “liberation day” announcement.
A top target of ridicule for the White House’s usual critics were the 10 percent duties levied on the Heard and McDonald Islands, a remote pair of islands controlled by Australia with no human population and “extremely limited” fishing activity, according to Forbes. Virtually zero exports from the penguin-infested rocks reach the US.
“Impressed the crack White House economic team not only found the Heard and McDonald Islands—an uninhabited Australian territory which is a two week sail from the mainland requiring a permit to visit—but that they managed to figure out the optimal retaliatory tariff to impose on penguins,” wrote Justin Wolfers, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
On consumer news channel CNBC, one reporter could not hide his disdain for the formula used to calculate the “reciprocal” tariffs put into place by the White House, which according to a number of economists did not appear to actually factor in tariffs put into place by US trade partners.
“I started calling international trade economic experts,” Steve Liesman said on the network Thursday morning. “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be that the president kind of made this up as he went along. He made it up.”
Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group, added: “This is incredibly stupid.”
