On Tuesday, the United States Senate Committee on Finance met to question Jamieson Greer, Donald Trump’s Trade Representative. The subject – a masterpiece of senatorial understatement and restraint – was ‘The President’s 2025 Trade Policy Agenda‘. What it meant, of course, was the sweeping and stringent tariffs unveiled by the President in the shabbily glitzy game show atmosphere of ‘Liberation Day’ the week before.
The extent of the new tariff regime has unsettled many congressional Republicans. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin noted to Greer: ‘We want fair trade, but I hope you reocgnise tariffs are a double-edged sword, I would argue, a somewhat blunt instrument’. James Lankford of Oklahoma cautioned that many businesses ‘don’t have a lot of options’ to source certain products domestically.
Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admitted he did not understand the strategy behind the new tariff system, telling Greer bluntly: ‘I’m just trying to figure out whose throat I get to choke if it’s wrong’. This confusion was echoed by Johnson to the Washington Post after the hearing, when he said ‘I don’t quite understand the strategy, and I’m not sure anybody else does’.
It is astonishing that senior lawmakers have been so taken by surprise. Trump has hardly hidden his obsession with tariffs (‘the most beautiful word in the dictionary’) and anyone who doubted his determination to use them extensively has simply not been facing reality.
In truth, it is far, far too late for Republican leaders to have cold feet about Donald Trump now. They may regard his tariff policies with anxiety or outright horror, but they are not a bolt from the blue. Over the period of a decade, they have systematically subjugated any principle, any policy, any tradition to the will of Donald Trump. With remarkably few exceptions, they have stood aside while the President has taken control of the Republican party and turned it into a personality cult based primarily on loyalty to him.
One particularly alarming item of faith which has been enshrined in a strange MAGA test act is the assertion that, contrary to all the available evidence and legal proceedings, Trump was the ‘real’ winner of the 2020 presidential election which was ‘stolen’ by the Democrats. This is no harmless conspiracy theory: candidates for senior roles in the current administration, including for national security roles, were reportedly required to give their opinion on the ‘stolen’ election as part of their selection process.
It is difficult to pinpoint a moment when the GOP decided that Trump, whom they associated with winning, was more important than any other consideration. It was extraordinary enough, in hindsight, that the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July 2024 smoothly acclaimed as its candidate the first former president to be a convicted felon. This was the party of law and order, which in 1988 had repeatedly used the case of murderer William Horton to paint its Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, as soft on crime; the party of Richard Nixon, who had won the presidency in 1968 by appealing to voters who ‘obey the law, pay their taxes, go to church, send their children to school, love their country and demand new leadership’.
Perhaps the point of no return was 6 January 2021. However deeply you believe Donald Trump was involved in the riots at the Capitol, the violence aimed to prevent the peaceful transition of power and sustain the lie that he had been the true victor of the 2020 election. The rioters threatened to hang Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence; Trump called those imprisoned ‘hostages’ and ‘political prisoners’, and granted clemency to 1,500 of them this year. If some degree of complicity in an attempt to frustrate the democratic process did not put the President beyond the Pale for the Republican party, nothing would.
As a coherent political party, with enduring policies and principles, the Republicans are dead. Senators may be anxious and fretful about the new tariff system, but they will do nothing to overturn it. They have sold too many passes and made too many compromises. They have gone from the party of free trade and market economics under Ronald Reagan to a jumble of populist impulses. Their champion not merely lies but denies the concept of truth, believes in an unfettered executive and absolute personal loyalty and will threaten democratic allies while flattering foreign dictators.
Trump has brought the Republicans to only their second clean sweep of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives since 2007. But they are supine before the President and he will do as he wishes. They know now that to oppose Trump means vilification, threats and the end of any influence within the party. Will the GOP reach its 200th anniversary in 2054? Perhaps in name; but it is now a complaisant subsidiary of the Trump Organisation.
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