President Donald Trump is getting closer to blowing up the trade agreement he negotiated with two of America’s top trading partners during his first term, telling reporters Monday night that he plans to slap 25% tariffs on products from Canada and Mexico starting in February.
And Republican senators sound willing to stick with him for the ride — no matter how long companies in their states have to contend with higher prices.
Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, for one, told NOTUS he’d support Trump, “whatever he thinks.”
The 25% tariffs, Tuberville added, are “not going to be the end of it. There’s going to be a lot of tariffs thrown out there. We’re going to pay off our debt without raising taxes. We need fair trade.”
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Tuberville acknowledged he’ll soon start hearing from manufacturers in Alabama, whose profit margins will likely be hurt by the move. “It’ll be a problem,” he said.
His message for those companies? “Well, you’ve got to be patient,” Tuberville said.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas also shrugged off the chance of supply chain disruption, saying that “tariffs have their role to play.”
“To my memory, almost every president has used tariffs in some capacity or another,” he added.
During his first term, Trump used national security powers to impose sweeping tariffs on adversaries and allies alike. If his latest proposal comes to fruition, the plan — details of which are still unclear — would discard the trade agreement Trump’s aides painstakingly negotiated in 2019, impose higher costs on American companies using Canadian or Mexican parts for manufacturing their own products, push some grocery prices higher and would likely result in retaliation against U.S.-based exporters.
Trump has connected the threat with demands for Mexican and Canadian officials to crack down on border crossings and the flow of fentanyl into America.
GOP senators might be having flashbacks to the flood of complaints they received from companies in their states the last time Trump wielded tariffs against Canada and Mexico. Still, even those who fought against tariffs during Trump’s first term seemed resigned to the impending trade war.
“I’m concerned,” Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who has tried in the past to reassert congressional authority over trade policy, told NOTUS. “Tariffs are definitely a double-edged sword. But I’ll give the president the benefit of the doubt. He won the election. He talked about this.”
And Sen. James Lankford, who supported the same bill to roll back presidential trade powers, said he didn’t want to hurt Trump’s negotiating leverage.
“There’s a lot of things he does, obviously as you know, that he’s negotiating with,” Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, said. “And everybody knows it.”
Trump’s own trade agreement with Canada and Mexico was designed to address those very concerns. It included requirements for automobiles to contain a certain amount of North American-made parts and imposed stricter labor protections than the original North American Free Trade Agreement. The three economies have been closely linked for decades. The United States imported $475 billion in goods from Mexico and $418 billion from Canada last year, many of them common agricultural products like berries and avocados.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, raised concerns about how the changes would affect companies in his state, many of which rely on cross-border trade.
“It’d be a challenge,” he said, adding that he hopes Canada complies with Trump’s demands. “It’s not something we would want to endure for a long time, but that’s kind of up to Canada now.”
Others, including Sens. Jerry Moran and Chuck Grassley, didn’t want to comment. And Sen. Mike Crapo, who has been in touch with Trump’s allies about their trade plans, sounded surprised to hear of Trump’s comments.
“I have not heard that there is such a plan,” he told NOTUS. “Is that something that just got announced?”
“I’m not going to comment on that because that’s not what I thought,” he added, saying that his understanding was that the details were still up in the air.
“I’ve got to see what the proposal is and understand it specifically before I’m going to comment on it,” Crapo said.
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.
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