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On one of the most politically stressful days of Donald Trump’s presidency, his party sent a more reassuring signal: Most Republicans are ready to back his new tariffs and the next step of his slow-moving Hill agenda.
Even after a high-profile loss in a Wisconsin judicial race raised the specter of future midterm problems, most Republicans lined up Wednesday in defense of Trump’s Canada tariff plans and forthcoming reciprocal tariffs. Simultaneously, Trump helped Senate Majority Leader John Thune secure the votes needed to advance a bare-bones budget resolution that defers a lot of tough decisions about his agenda.
That’s in part thanks to evaporating skepticism from conservatives like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has raised a lot of questions about the budget as well as Trump’s tariffs.
After meeting with Trump on Wednesday, though, Johnson said he’s “feeling a lot more comfortable” about the budget that tees up future action on tax and spending cuts. Trump is facing a symbolically significant rebellion on the Senate floor against his tariffs on Canada, but Johnson scoffed at the idea of voting with Democrats and a handful of fellow Republicans to rebuke him.
“I’m not going to support their effort to just poke a stick and try and do the president damage,” Johnson said after the meeting.
Trump still faces serious headwinds, the harshest of his presidency so far, as he and his party recover from a Wisconsin Supreme Court loss on Tuesday evening that has sparked worries within the GOP about a 2018-style electoral meltdown. But most Republicans are ready to buy into Trump’s promise that tariffs can extract more favorable trade deals with other countries.
That’s thanks in large part to active behind-the-scenes work to shore up support in the party. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was dispatched to the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday, where he urged unity on tariffs and taxes.
“He’s a numbers guy and then some, and he’s just going through the numbers. He believes in the plan, as I do,” Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., told Semafor of Bessent afterward. “Are we breaking a few eggs to make an omelette? Yeah. Maybe that’s why the price of eggs is so high.”
Trump said Wednesday that he would declare a national emergency that allows him to implement sweeping new tariffs, taxing all imports at 10 percent starting April 5 and imports from select countries at higher rates that Trump described as “half of what they … have been charging us,” starting April 9. That includes a 34 percent tariff on Chinese imports — to be stacked with an existing 20 percent tariff — and a 20 percent tariff on European Union imports.
“Reciprocal: That means they do it to us and we do it to them,” Trump said from the Rose Garden. “Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.”
At least one moment is still likely to go awry for the White House: A public rebuke of Trump’s tariffs on Canada authored by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., looks set to pass the Senate with at least four GOP votes. Even so, other key Republicans said they’d oppose the condemnation after Trump publicly urged his party to vote it down.
Perhaps most urgently, Trump is successfully getting his agenda moving in Congress after weeks of circular debate among Republicans congealed into a decision to punt big choices about reducing spending until far later in the year. When pressed directly on spending cuts on Wednesday, Trump told Senate Republicans he’d work with them on slashing federal dollars.
That vow completed a successful courtship of conservatives who had threatened to bring down the budget. Republicans are now confident they can get 50 of their senators to vote for a budget that essentially makes no ironclad commitments to cut spending — which had been a key ask from the right just a few days ago.
“All of us budget hawks – I’m one of them – heard the president say, ‘I recognize this is a rare and wonderful opportunity to right-size the budget and I’ll support your effort to achieve that,’” recounted Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “I think it was important for a couple of my colleagues to hear him say that.”
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The quartet of Senate Republicans defying him on Canada tariffs – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell – aren’t exactly Trump stalwarts. As Trump posted about those “unbelievably disloyal” senators and urged his party to deny Democrats a “victory,” most Republicans backed him.
“I think President Trump has a plan, and we’ll be able to execute that plan,” Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, told Semafor.
Her Iowa colleague Chuck Grassley agreed: “I see it as nothing but to bring up something to obstruct what Trump’s doing on tariffs.”
Trump and top advisers spent significant time crafting options for Wednesday’s tariffs, coming to a final decision only in the hours before the event. Even before he finalized the plan, the White House worked to defend the tariffs, with top aides and officials appearing genuinely excited about what Trump dubbed “Liberation Day.”
House Republicans said Bessent assured them Tuesday there would be a “cap” on the tariffs and that other countries have already signaled a willingness to scale back their own tariffs in response. Leading up to Wednesday’s Rose Garden announcement, the administration blasted out defenses of tariffs and dispatched advisors and Cabinet secretaries onto TV.
It may not totally convince free-traders to become tariff lovers — but that’s not what Trump needs. He needs most Republicans to join his bet that widespread levies on foreign imports will pay off economically.
“The benefits of free trade are held as a stalwart position of conservatives,” said Rep. John Rose, R-Tenn. But, he added, “most in the Republican Party are willing to give him a pretty long leash in terms of pursuing opening markets.”
As for Trump’s tax cuts, there’s a lot of private handwringing over what Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., called a “messy” process.
A couple of senators said the work isn’t done: Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., said he wants to balance the budget; Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said only that things are moving in the “right direction.” Both also attended Wednesday’s meeting with Trump; the budget resolution was unveiled shortly after that meeting.
It’s still not quite clear how the two chambers will come together on the nuts and bolts of a tax plan as text released Wednesday laid out disparate instructions. The House is planning to cut at least $1.5 trillion to pay for tax cuts, while the Senate is leaving those details for later; the chambers also are still in dispute over whether extensions of expiring tax cuts need to be paid for.
Lawmakers are simultaneously pressing the White House for a rescission package that allows Congress to pare back federal spending with simple majority votes.
“At some point,” Kennedy said, “President Trump is going to have to step in and say let me help you folks and share our ideas in order for us to reach a consensus.”
Burgess, Eleanor and Shelby’s View
To the extent Trump has had to twist arms in Congress in his three months in office, he’s mostly concentrated on the House. Now it’s the Senate’s turn, and his grip remains strong.
If Republicans have a breaking point on Trump’s tariffs, most clearly haven’t hit it. There’s also not much evidence Republicans would be willing to slow down Trump’s tax cut plans, as long as he uses the bully pulpit to promote them and pledges to keep working with conservatives.
Kennedy said Trump didn’t explicitly urge Republicans to support the budget on Wednesday, but it wasn’t really needed. The implication of a meeting with the president about his agenda is that the party needs to come together, stop circular debate and support the president.
Room for Disagreement
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, is an outlier, one of her conference’s two moderates. But as the only Senate Republican representing a state Trump has never won, she’s a good barometer for how Trump’s policies are playing.
Collins doesn’t like the Canada tariffs and said she’s “heard considerable concern” about the broader levies among her colleagues.
“The Canadian tariffs would cause incredible harm to Maine, families and economies of Maine communities. I also think that they’re misguided. Canada is not the source of our fentanyl problem in the United States,” Collins told Semafor.
Notable
- The European Union is weighing restrictions on Big Tech and Wall Street referred to as a “bazooka” — “seen as a last resort option if talks with the Trump administration go south,” the New York Times reports.
- Wall Street is keeping its concerns to itself out of fears that CEOs could lose their seats at Trump’s table: “There is no upside,” billionaire Mark Cuban told the Washington Post.