The Scene
It was a straightforward question: What would you, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have done differently than President Donald Trump, who had just hit nearly every other country with 20% tariffs?
“I don’t know how I would have enacted them differently,” Whitmer told interviewer Gretchen Carlson on Wednesday morning, after delivering a speech about how to build more in America. “I haven’t really thought about that. What I have thought about, though, is: Tariffs need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.”
A few hours later, the president paused many of his tariffs, while increasing tariffs on China and imposing a lower across-the-board levy of 10%. Republicans praised him. Democrats declared victory.
“He is reeling, he is retreating, and that is a good thing,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “This is chaos.”
Republicans have found a consistent message on the president’s ever-evolving trade strategy: Trust him.
Democrats have been more scattered. Most are wary of criticizing a tariff power that they believe in, and that presidents of their own party have used to benefit US companies and unions. All of them disagreed with how Trump executed his tariffs. Few — but not none — are interested in being part of an anti-tariff party.
“He is abusing a tool in a really egregious way,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Chris Deluzio, who had drawn some criticism from liberal pundits for a video that endorsed tariffs as a way to reshore jobs while criticizing Trump’s. “There’s some risk that folks will think the tool is terrible on its own.”
And as markets settled Wednesday, Whitmer stopped by the White House for a friendly visit about Michigan’s needs. She stood with GOP state House Speaker Matt Hall as Trump signed executive orders to probe two of his critics, said that the 2020 election was “stolen,” and gave her some praise.
“We’re honored to have Gretchen Whitmer from Michigan, the great state of Michigan — she’s really done an excellent job,” said Trump.
(A spokesman for Whitmer told Semafor that the governor was “surprised” to be brought into the Oval and her presence was “not an endorsement of the actions taken or statements made.”
In this article:
Know More
Other prominent Democrats spent the Liberation Day news cycle on the attack — not just against Trump, but against the tool he’d used.
“The ‘tariff hammer’ winds up hitting your own hand rather than the nail,” Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wrote on X, responding to Whitmer’s morning speech. “Tariffs are bad outright because they lead to higher prices and destroy American manufacturing.”
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker denounced the tariffs as “Trump’s tax on working families.” In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro used appearances at a brewery and before the state’s farm bureau to attack the tariffs.
“He’s threatening economic calamity on not just our farmers, but on the economy in general,” Shapiro said on Tuesday. “He’s upending world markets. He’s harming our seniors and compromising their retirement, and he’s isolating America in the world.”
Whitmer had criticized the tariffs, too. “This is a tax on the American people,” she told Carlson on Wednesday morning. “Unfortunately, it’s unclear how this is going to strategically benefit the American economy or the American consumer.”
But by Wednesday afternoon, when Trump paused some of the tariffs and took credit for a market correction, Democrats were unified on the chaos his tactic had brought — and divided on whether it was worth trying in a smarter way.
David’s view
This was one of those weeks where the grand Republican bargain with Donald Trump made sense. They don’t miss the old days of ideological litmus tests and scorecards from think tanks. (Maybe Rand Paul does.)
It is far easier to stick with Trump, to praise his deal-making acumen, and to brush off questions about whether he’s making the right call by saying that he always has. The harshest non-Paul pushback he got from members of his party came from a few who said he should declare victory, back away from harsher tariffs and negotiate with non-China trading partners who’d been sufficiently spooked.
Sure enough, he declared victory.
Democrats had more stakeholders to consider — especially in the Midwest, and especially in Michigan, where the United Auto Workers supported Trump’s auto tariffs. The party’s rickety coalition includes blue-collar workers represented by UAW president Shawn Fain, who told NPR that “when I hear all the crying about the stock market, this is just Wall Street.”
It also includes white-collar workers who were fretting about their investments and college funds — voters Democrats spoke to at weekend anti-Trump rallies, with the hoary but popular line that Trump was “turning your 401k into a 201k.”
They do have a message. In 2024, the Democratic platform condemned Trump’s tariff plans — the new 10% global tariff and higher rate on China is what they ran against — while praising Joe Biden for “strategically increasing tariffs.” Whitmer nodded at that in her economic speech, giving Biden credit for a combination of strategic investments and careful tariffs.
“The Trump administration says they get this, and I know the Biden administration understood this too,” she said.
Where was the full-bore opposition that Democrats say they want from their leaders? On tariffs, they can oppose how Trump is using them. But they can’t, and won’t, promise to give up the tool when and if they take power next.
Notable
- Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller talked with the chair of the Democrats’ House campaign committee about how they’d run against tariffs, as a “tax on American families” that wasn’t necessary. “It’s important that we continue to talk [about] not only the impact, but what we could be doing instead,” said Washington Rep. Suzan DelBene.
- In Politico, Nicholas Wu and Holly Otterbein reported on how the tariffs had actually unified Democrats before Trump flipped back. “Democrats on Capitol Hill almost universally denounced them, even as many stressed they didn’t categorically oppose tariffs as part of policymaking.”