MAGA Turns Against Trump as Tariffs Kick In

Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are expressing dread and alarm as the president’s tariff policy continues to throttle the stock market and hurt their own pockets. 

Last weekend, DOGE slasher in chief, Elon Musk, said that he preferred a “zero-tariff situation”—in other words, the exact opposite of what Trump is doing now. 

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” he said in a video interview on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Barstool founder and manosphere B-teamer David Portnoy also complained he’d lost up to 15 percent of his net worth “in stocks and crypto” due to Trump’s retaliatory tariffs. 

“I’m down seven million bucks, in stocks and crypto. And it’s a tariff city. Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. I’ve been trying to understand ’em, I don’t,” Portnoy said last weekend on his livestream. “And everything’s in the shitter because of it.”

Senator Ted Cruz urged the president to make and take deals to lower tariffs, something the Trump administration has said it absolutely will not do. 

“Take the deal, make deals, and actually work to lower tariffs,” Cruz said. “President Trump has the opportunity for the most extraordinary economic win for the American people right now by making a deal.… And I do wanna give a word of warning: There are voices in the administration that, rather than take a deal, are saying, ‘We want to have tariffs as a permanent feature of the economy.’ I think that’d be a mistake.”

Legendary right-wing shill Ben Shapiro also voiced his disagreement with Trump’s so-called  “Liberation Day” tariffs, noting that the move was “probably” unconstitutional. “Trump’s reciprocal tariffs imposed hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes on Americans. It’ll be the largest tax increase since the Revenue Act of 1968, one of the biggest tax increases on American consumers in the history of America. It’s gonna cost American consumers; it’s gonna cost American producers who use inputs from other countries,” Shapiro said on his podcast. “There are real world implications for this sort of stuff. Trade wars are in fact not good, and not easy to win, particularly if you don’t actually have a plan. It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works.” 

Perhaps the staunchest voice of opposition was billionaire Trump donor Bill Ackman. 

“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” he wrote on X. “If … we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.… We are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.”

Everyone has started to feel the tariff pain.

In a town hall hosted by Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy said that he hopes Donald Trump “takes a deal” in order to reduce the reciprocal tariffs that are dampening business and driving costs around the globe.

Still, the plea came packaged with an effusive review of the White House’s economic agenda that has brought one of the most robust economies in U.S. history to the brink of a recession.

“I think most fair-minded people would agree with this: Other countries have used trade barriers to take advantage of the American people and American businesses,” Kennedy said.

“Number two, President Trump has said enough,” Kennedy continued, noting that dozens of countries around the world are attempting to negotiate with the president in order to lower their respective tariffs. “We would not be in this situation today had he not been a pitbull.”

“He’s like the pitbull, though, who caught the car,” the Louisiana Republican said. “I don’t know what the president’s going to do next.… I hope he takes a deal. I hope he and (Treasury Secretary) Scott Bessent go to every one of those countries and reduce those tariffs and trade barriers down to zero and let American businesses compete with those foreign businesses. Competition makes us better.”

In the week since he announced his sweeping tariff plan, Trump has cost American businesses upward of a trillion dollars. The ensuing reciprocal tariffs from America’s longtime trade partners have further destabilized the stock market.

On Wednesday, China—one of the country’s biggest trading partners—announced that it would raise the reciprocal tariff rate on U.S. goods to 84 percent. The move came as a retaliatory act after Trump hiked import duties on Chinese goods to 104 percent.

President Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs were never anything more than a power trip.

During a speech Tuesday night at the National Republican Congressional Committee Dinner in Washington, Trump bragged about getting to be a dealmaker, amid rising concerns that he’s triggered an economic recession.

“I am telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” Trump ranted.

“They are, they are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir!’” Trump said, imitating a desperate foreign leader.

Foreign leaders from the United Kingdom and Philippines said they had received no reply to their requests to broker deals with the Trump administration, and the White House has not clarified what concessions countries must make to resolve negotiations, according to Politico.

But not everyone’s looking to make a deal. Trump’s outrageous 104 percent tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect Wednesday, and China responded by raising tariffs U.S. products to 84 percent. Beijing also released a statement saying they were ready to “fight to the end.”

It seems that Trump is content to bask a little longer in his newfound power, and is in no rush to make any deals, as the stock market sinks and U.S. Treasury yields climb.

The European Union has responded to Trump’s trade war with tariffs of their own that deliberately target red states.

The European Commission on Wednesday greenlit tariffs of up to 25 percent on cigarettes from Florida, beef from Kansas and Nebraska, chicken from Louisiana, car parts from Michigan, and most importantly, soybeans.

The United States is the second-largest grower and exporter of soybeans in the world, and a whopping 82.5 percent of the soybeans that the EU gets from the U.S. come from Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

“Farmers are frustrated. Tariffs are not something to take lightly and ‘have fun’ with. Not only do they hit our family businesses squarely in the wallet, but they rock a core tenet on which our trading relationships are built, and that is reliability,” said Caleb Ragland, Kentucky soybean farmer and American Soybean Association president. “Soybean farmers still have not fully recovered market volumes from the damaging impacts of the 2018 trade war, and this will further exacerbate economic hardship on our farmers.”

Expect more and more domestic exporters to start sounding like Ragland. China’s, Canada’s, and the EU’s retaliatory tariffs will impact about $90 billion of American exports.

This is the direct human impact of Trump treating the global economy like it’s a video game you can infinitely restart back at the same checkpoint. Now our biggest allies have met spite with spite, and American exporters and consumers will suffer.

China has announced that it will retaliate against Donald Trump’s tariffs by raising its own tariffs on U.S. goods from 34 percent to 84 percent, in response to Trump’s own tariff hike on China.

Beijing’s Commerce Ministry wrote in a policy paper Wednesday morning that the U.S. escalation is counterproductive, saying that the Chinese government “has the firm will and abundant means to take necessary countermeasures and fight to the end.”

“History and facts have proven that the United States’ increase in tariffs will not solve its own problems,” the paper said. “Instead, it will trigger sharp fluctuations in financial markets, push up US inflation pressure, weaken the US industrial base and increase the risk of a US economic recession, which will ultimately only backfire on itself.”

Trump raised U.S. tariffs against China to a staggering 104 percent on Monday following China’s initial import tax, escalating the self-inflicted trade war. China claims, contrary to Trump’s assertions, that the trade relationship between the two countries is “roughly balanced.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called China’s move “unfortunate.”

“I think it’s unfortunate that the Chinese actually don’t want to come and negotiate, because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system,” Bessent told Fox Business Wednesday morning, and said potentially kicking Chinese companies off of the American stock exchanges was on the table.

There is now a full-blown trade war between China and the U.S., and it’s already sending markets reeling around the world, with Dow Futures plunging more than 600 points. It’s an entirely predictable result for a self-made disaster based on terrible math, with no clear end in sight.