As he checked in with friends in the White House after Republicans’ midterm blowout on Tuesday, Stephen Moore, an outside adviser to the president, heard something new.
The White House might be willing to walk back its tariff agenda.
Since January 2025, Moore and his fellow orthodox conservatives have failed to halt President Donald Trump’s sky-high tariffs. Now, Moore said there may even be momentum to pull the tariffs back.
“They understand this was a mandate from voters — that voters didn’t like them and that they want to bring them down,” Moore told The Washington Sun. “There’s always been the pro-tariff camp and the more free trade people within the administration. But the free traders have a louder voice now.”
Trending
Moore’s prediction — strongly disputed by one top White House official — comes amid a broader debate happening across the Republican Party that will have pivotal ramifications for the American economy. In the biggest increase in protectionism since the 1930s, Trump has imposed roughly $150 billion in tariffs during his second term. These policies have raised the average import duty from 1.5% to 11.8%,, disrupting trade with dozens of countries across the world and leading to retaliatory measures that have hurt American exports.
Trump’s tariff embrace has represented a revolution within the Republican Party. But even when skeptical, GOP lawmakers have begrudgingly gone along with the president for much of the last decade, wary of crossing the most popular figure in their party on one of his top priorities. Other Republicans came to agree with the president that insulating American firms from international competition could help rebuild domestic industry.
Traditional conservatives are now optimistic that the party’s midterm catastrophe will mark the end of that era. A CNBC poll found 64% of voters believed Trump’s tariffs hurt their local economy, whereas just 14% said it helped. A Wall Street Journal analysis of AdImpact data also found Republicans spent $0 this campaign cycle on tariffs, either for or against. Democrats devoted $58.3 million to bashing the Trump policy.
“This will lead a lot of Republicans to say the party took a wrong turn with protectionism,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. “The polling is clear that voters, including large numbers of Republicans and independents, believed the trade war increased prices. There will be an effort within the party to course correct.”
Supporters of the tariffs are adamant that they did not contribute to the Republicans’ midterm defeat. Instead, they have largely pinned the blame on the Iran war, which sent gas prices soaring and reversed improvements to inflation made over the last two years.
White House aide Peter Navarro said in a statement to The Sun that administration officials think the tariffs “have played no role in the inflation and affordability issue” and that the administration will increase tariffs “as long as the world cheats us.” The president has long argued that the U.S. imposes lower tariffs on foreign imports than other countries do on U.S. products.
“The Trump tariffs represent the single most effective policy of this administration and have sparked a robust and profound manufacturing renaissance that will generate jobs and prosperity for decades to come,” Navarro said. “The traditional RINO wing of the Republican Party opposes the tariffs in proportion to the amount of money they receive from the multinational corporations that have historically exported our jobs to the sweatshops of Asia.”
Navarro also called Moore a “hired corporate gun” and said that “no one within the administration regards his analysis [as] credible.”
While many economists blame tariffs for increasing prices that frustrated voters, other policy experts said the president’s trade agenda has contributed to the small uptick in U.S. manufacturing employment. Some domestic sectors, like automobiles, metal products and transportation equipment, appear to have benefited in particular from the import duties. Inflation broadly has continued to fall, with the exception of an oil shock due to the war.
“It was the war in Iran, it was not tariffs, and affordability largely stemmed from housing and fuel which are not tariff-related,” said Charles Benoit, who was previously counsel at the Coalition for a Prosperous America, a trade association that backs the tariffs. “Tariffs just were not the significant drivers of inflation compared to energy. The sectors seeing the price surges are not tariff sectors.”
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally, told The Sun that the tariffs are “a part” of the “level of turmoil that has not been sorted out and has not been explained.” But he also argued the war was primarily to blame: “People want low-cost gasoline because this is a large country and the most popular vehicles are trucks.”
Even with some in the White House recognizing the political downsides of Trump’s tariff regime, the politics of removing them is also complicated.
Unions and other industry groups have come to benefit from the measures now that they are in effect. It is also unclear how much Democrats will prioritize removing them over other agenda items like health care.
One thing does feel clear to those opposed to tariffs, however: Trump’s erratic wielding of the policy tool — in which the White House raised, cut or adjusted some tariff almost every day — is unlikely to be replicated by the next president.
“At his scale and depth and capricious handling with tariffs, whoever is next will not behave that way,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “But I don’t think they’ll all go away easily.”
Still, the free trade faction of the Republican Party is feeling more optimistic than it has in years that it will win the internal argument. Jessica Riedl, an economist at the Brookings Institution who was a staffer for onetime Sen. Rob Portman, said it’s clear that Trump’s approval rating first dipped in April 2025. That was when Trump’s enormous “Liberation Day” tariffs caused a meltdown in the bond market and nearly precipitated a financial crisis before the president backed down.
“When Trump is a lame duck and Republicans no longer have a trifecta, it will be a lot more tempting for Republicans to break with their party and vote with Democrats to repeal tariffs,” Riedl said. Of the idea the war and not tariffs were to blame, Riedl said: “That’s total cope.”
Author
