President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs last April put Democrats in an awkward position, caught between their fervent opposition to the president and their traditional support for protectionist trade policies.
One year later, they appear to have moved past that dilemma.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of Trump’s tariffs with a renewed attack, arguing in a memo that the global levies had undercut Republicans’ promise to lower cost-of-living expenses.
“After running on lowering costs in 2024, House Republicans’ support of Trump’s tariffs has turned their central 2024 promise into their biggest 2026 liability,” reads the memo, obtained by NOTUS.
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The messaging is a signal that Democrats plan to put the president’s tariffs at the forefront of their midterm election campaigns, mentioning it explicitly in TV and digital ads that tie the duties to larger voter concerns about the economy. In interviews, top Democratic officials said any internal party strife over criticizing the tariffs has all but evaporated, replaced by a growing sense that GOP candidates are vulnerable on the issue.
“Remember, when these tariffs were rolled out a year ago, Republicans said tariffs were going to usher in a ‘golden age’ of America and they were going to be short term,” Rep. Suzan DelBene, the DCCC chair, told NOTUS in an interview. “And none of that has been true.”
Trump unilaterally issued a steep set of tariffs last year, marking a new era of global trade by reversing a long-standing move toward free trade between the United States and foreign countries. The president, who dubbed the unveiling of his tariffs as “Liberation Day,” said they were necessary to bring jobs back to the country and to rectify a massive trade imbalance with countries he accused of taking advantage of America.
Democrats countered that the tariffs are a de facto tax increase, raising the cost of everyday goods imported from abroad and making it more expensive to manufacture products domestically.
Trump relented on many of his original tariff rates in weeks and months following “Liberation Day,” striking trade deals with some countries to lower the levies. And in February, the Supreme Court ruled that the president’s enactment of the tariffs, without congressional approval, was illegal. Trump has attempted to re-implement some tariffs though a different executive authority.
Democratic attacks on the tariffs could backfire with some working-class voters, whose support has twice helped elect Trump to the presidency. And it might alienate some unions supportive of the measures, putting them at odds with a Democratic Party that’s tried in recent years to reinvigorate its ties to labor.
But polls show opposition to Trump’s trade policies are widespread. A survey from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday found that 63% of Americans have little or no confidence in the president’s handling of tariffs.
Democratic leaders say the party’s near-uniform opposition to Trump’s tariffs is in part because of the sudden and unilateral way he implemented them, bypassing Congress. But even critics of previous free-trade agreements like NAFTA say they also disagree with the levies because of their impact.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat from Ohio, told NOTUS that the president’s policies had hit farmers in her northwest Ohio district especially hard, making it more challenging for them to export goods like beef and grains to foreign markets. NAFTA was bad policy, she said, but so is Trump’s approach to trade.
“Trump isn’t making it better,” Kaptur said. “He’s making it worse.”
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