Yet as the country heads toward midterm elections in November, one wonders whether the self-proclaimed “Tariff Man” is going to get a history lesson he won’t like. Polls show some two-thirds of US voters disapprove of Trump’s import taxes — more than oppose the president’s immigration crackdown or the war on Iran.
It’s not just the rank and file who are turning against Trump’s protectionist project. The Supreme Court struck a big blow in February when it ruled the president’s use of emergency powers to impose duties at will was unconstitutional because Congress never endowed him (or any of his predecessors) with unlimited taxing powers. That rebuke won praise from some Republicans. Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska said he shared the court’s concerns about the constitutionality of the duties. He also added: “Broad-based tariffs are bad economics.”
The decision has continued to irk Trump, who has started to publicly criticise the Supreme Court in the same way he has gone after the Federal Reserve, lamenting the lack of loyalty of justices he appointed. “Our Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponised and unjust Political Organization,” he wrote in a social media post late on March 15.
Tariffs unpopular
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Cracks in the Republican Party’s pro-tariff consensus began emerging even before the Supreme Court decision, when six House Republicans (Bacon included) broke ranks by voting with Democrats to pass a resolution to repeal Trump’s tariffs on Canada on Feb 11.
With surveys showing that affordability remains a top concern for US households aggrieved by the rising costs of electricity, groceries, rent and, now — with the attack on Iran — gasoline, the number of Republicans daring to defy their president is bound to grow if the administration’s policies rekindle inflation.
The broad unpopularity of tariffs is why many in Washington are predicting the Republican-controlled Congress will baulk at extending the temporary duties Trump introduced after the court invalidated his so-called Liberation Day tariffs. The new levies are set to expire about three months before the Nov 3 elections, making them especially radioactive.
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Democratic contenders for the 2028 presidential nomination, such as Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, have moved from avoiding direct criticism of Trump on trade to launching full-frontal attacks on his tariffs, a notable shift given their earlier caution over the party’s union base.
Trump has frequently cited McKinley as one of his inspirations. But it’s worth remembering it was McKinley’s tariffs of almost 50% that ignited the popular backlash that cost Republicans 93 congressional seats in 1890’s midterm elections and helped set the stage for the party’s loss of the presidency and both houses of Congress two years later. McKinley’s views on tariffs flipped after he won the presidency in 1896, and by the end of his life, he was the period’s equivalent of a free trader.
That wasn’t the only instance in which tariffs, and the higher prices they brought with them, proved politically unpalatable. Quincy Adams’ support for the tariff of abominations in 1828 contributed to his loss to Andrew Jackson in that year’s presidential election. It also set off a constitutional crisis that almost resulted in South Carolina leaving the Union decades before the Civil War.
The pattern persisted into the early 20th century until politicians ostensibly learned a lesson after Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariffs into law. Those duties and the retaliation they incited from the country’s trading partners prolonged and deepened the Great Depression. All of which set the stage for Hoover’s 1932 loss to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
What followed were decades in which American presidents were focused on lowering tariffs and inviting other countries to do the same, opening up new markets for US exports. That’s until Trump showed up and argued that the Washington establishment’s obsession with free trade had allowed low-wage countries such as Mexico and China to siphon jobs and investment from the US.
Economist and historian Douglas Irwin, who has written extensively about US trade policy and politics through the centuries, argues that after a decade of Trumpian protectionism (and limited pushback from Democrats), the US is seeing a predictable backlash.
The reason it didn’t come sooner, the Dartmouth College professor says, is that Trump “didn’t push it too far in his first term.” But this time, Trump has been less measured. “With Liberation Day, he went multiple bridges too far,” Irwin says.
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Voter discontent
Trump, of course, has his own version of history and shows no signs of abandoning his long-held belief that import taxes are a magic elixir for the US economy. Just days after the Supreme Court ruling, he criticised the justices gathered for his State of the Union address and declared his tariffs were “one of the primary reasons for our country’s stunning economic turnaround, the biggest in history.”
The economic data tells another story, which could wind up being a problem for Republicans come November. Growth slowed to 2.1% last year, from 2.4% a year earlier. Outside of the spending boom on data centres and other AI-related infrastructure, business investment has been flat — largely as a consequence of the uncertainty created by Trump’s ever-changing tariffs, economists say. Spending on industrial machinery dipped 0.1% in 2025, according to government data, while a private gauge showed manufacturing activity contracting for much of 2025 — not what one would expect in a country supposedly undergoing an industrial renaissance.
Also, contrary to what Trump and his economic advisers assert, countless studies are showing the burden of tariffs falls disproportionately on US businesses and households — rather than foreign exporters. In a February Morning Consult Survey commissioned by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), 42% of respondents said the main impact of the tariffs was higher prices, while just 24% said the duties protected US manufacturing jobs — a clear repudiation of Trump’s message. “Folks understand that tariffs are something that we pay here at home and that their impact is to raise costs,” says Inu Manak, a senior fellow for international trade at CFR.
Even if mounting voter discontent over Trump’s trade policies were to contribute to a seismic political shift in the midterms, history tells us that “tariffs go up quickly and come down too slowly,” Irwin says. It took more than a decade and a world war for the Smoot-Hawley tariffs to be reduced meaningfully despite their unpopularity, he points out. Politicians get addicted to tariff revenue, and businesses that adapt to a new environment rarely want to rip things up again quickly, even if they don’t like the additional cost of duties. “People adjust to tariffs,” Irwin says. “And if people adjust, they don’t want to readjust.”
There are also plenty of people who argue it would be a terrible mistake to return to a pre-2016 world in which policymakers embrace unfettered globalisation while ignoring the harm to domestic industries and communities. Which means no matter how unpopular Trump’s tariffs seem now, Irwin is right that they — like populist politics — most likely aren’t going away in a hurry. (The Biden administration eased some of the duties it inherited from Trump, but not those on Chinese imports.)
In the wake of the Supreme Court decision, a group of former Democratic trade professionals led by Katherine Tai, President Joe Biden’s US trade representative, launched the Coalition for New Trade. In a policy document, they laid out the case for a worker-centred trade agenda, including a defence of import taxes. “Tariffs, used appropriately, are a legitimate tool to counter distortions in the global marketplace,” Tai and one of her former deputies write. If tariffs have a bad name, it’s because “the excessive, wanton, or corrupt use of them serves to compound opposition,” they note.
That debate is for another day and another president. In the meantime, Trump might still learn a lesson from his hero, McKinley. On Sept 5, 1901, the day before he was assassinated by an anarchist (who happened to be an unemployed factory worker), McKinley pronounced himself in favour of freer trade in a speech in Buffalo, New York, arguing that competition from imports would spur innovation and help US companies succeed in the 20th century.
“Without competition we would be clinging to the clumsy, antiquated processes of farming and manufacture and the methods of business of long ago,” Trump’s favourite tariffs evangelist declared, “and the 20th would be no further advanced than the 18th century.” Trade wars were “unprofitable,” he went on. Unprofitable both economically and politically, he might have added. — Bloomberg Businessweek
