Trump, the (even more) nihilist years
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Three election cycles after the last time a party instituted tariffs on anything like a scale of the Trump taxes, that party (which at the time of their enactment had been a dominant national political force for six decades) was left with 17 seats in the U.S. Senate. While under contemporary polarization the downside isn’t that dire, it’s already clear that the politics of the tariffs are going to be disastrous.
The problem for the GOP (and, at least for the next 3 3/4 years) is that Trump doesn’t care at all about the fate of his party:
Republican senators like Rand Paul (Kentucky) and even the normally Trump-loyal Ted Cruz (Texas) are warning about an electoral catastrophe. “If we go into a recession — particularly a bad recession — 2026 in all likelihood politically would be a bloodbath,” Cruz said Friday on his podcast. History suggests they have a point; most of the GOP’s worst elections since the Civil War came after the party instituted large tariffs.
And one new quote should send shivers down their spines. It comes from an authoritative new Washington Post report about how Trump arrived at his surprisingly large and often-puzzling tariffs.
“He’s at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore,” a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking told The Post. “Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f—. He’s going to do what he’s going to do. He’s going to do what he promised to do on the campaign trail.”
This is an anonymous quote. And the White House certainly has reason to project resoluteness. Trump himself posted Friday, “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” and, “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!”
But we’re also in a very different Trump presidency than the first version. Gone are many of the non-loyalists who might seek to check his impulses, as former Trump commerce secretary Wilbur Ross suggestively noted to The Post’s reporters. (“The people now have been confirmed as true Trumpers,” Ross said.) Trump isn’t eligible to run for another term, so his personal political considerations are lessened. He is also pursuing far bolder and more authoritarian policies, many of which are quite unpopular (as are his tariffs). And he seems to have little regard for how any of it will play politically for the Republicans who will soon be on the ballot.
Republican members of Congress do have a stake in the future of the party, and can theoretically act to constrain Trump, but 1)most of them share his nihilism and 2)those that don’t face a collective action problem they have consistently addressed with “let’s hope someone else does something.” Call me crazy but I personally still think moderate liberalism was the better bet.