Republican Sen. Rand Paul left a lunch meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer this week feeling thoroughly unimpressed — not only with the administration’s strategy, but also with his own colleagues.
“Most of it was Republican senators congratulating him, wishing him well as the industrial czar and pleading for exemptions to the tariffs for their people,” Paul told NOTUS afterward.
“It reminded me of a meeting on industrial policy in the Soviet Union, where you have to be nice to the czar because if you’re nice to the czar, they’ll bequeath upon you exceptions to the iron fist,” he said.
Paul is one of only a few congressional Republicans who have openly challenged Trump’s helter-skelter trade policies this year, even though most of them are bracing for resulting pain for consumers in the coming months.
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Since the president’s “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, the specifics have been unstable and seemingly can change at any moment, depending on who has visited the Oval Office most recently. Instead of ushering in a new industrial renaissance like Trump hopes, companies so far are reeling from the uncertainty.
Stock trading has been erratic. Some U.S. manufacturers are considering leaving America because they wouldn’t face high fees to import supply chain components in other countries. In the first quarter of this year, gross domestic product fell in the sharpest decline since the first quarter of 2022, largely because companies were rushing to get ahead of the new tariffs. And many economists are worried that the United States is heading toward shortages of consumer products, supply chain woes and a recession.
Even so, Trump feels a drastic change is necessary to boost the United States as a manufacturing hub. But how successful he can be — as Greer and other officials work to negotiate nearly 200 trade deals — is unclear.
Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican who also attended the lunch meeting, said senators discussed with Greer how it will take time for companies to upend entire supply chains.
“It’s not going to happen, like, next week,” he said of moving most manufacturing to America.
Still, Cramer was optimistic: “It’s going to always be in flux to some degree, but things are moving our way.”
Paul, for one, thinks the project of fully reshoring manufacturing is a sham. “People who have this naive notion that we can make things with only American parts and only American labor and only American machines, once they start looking at the reality of it, realize that a lot of the process comes from other countries,” the Kentucky Republican said. “Even the machines that are going to make something in the United States, the machine itself is from another country.”
That’s why some Republicans aren’t sure about the odds of success.
“Hard to say,” Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has long opposed most tariffs, responded on Tuesday when asked if he feels Trump’s policies are encouraging a future domestic manufacturing boom.
“People are coming to the bargaining table, and that’s good to hear,” he said of talks with other countries.
Those talks could result in lower tariffs for some imports. But lowering the tariffs would offer a completely different incentive for U.S. manufacturers, likely inspiring them to do more trade with those countries as opposed to reshoring manufacturing altogether. Sen. Josh Hawley argued those two goals aren’t contradictory.
“They’re trying to do both,” Hawley, who supports the tariffs, told NOTUS. “They’re trying to zero in on what tariffs need to remain in place long-term, in order to reshore industries and jobs, what tariffs can they negotiate with in order to get reciprocal agreements in other countries that’ll be good for our producers.”
Trump eked out a small victory on the Senate floor Wednesday night, when most Republicans voted down a measure to reverse his tariffs on imports from most countries. Sen. Mitch McConnell was absent; he would have voted alongside Paul, Sen. Susan Collins and Sen. Lisa Murkowski to end the tariffs if he had been present, according to a spokesperson.
“The Senator has been consistent in opposing tariffs and that a trade war is not in the best interest of American households and businesses,” the spokesperson told NOTUS. “He believes that tariffs are a tax increase on everybody.
To be sure, Trump’s goal of boosting domestic manufacturing enjoys bipartisan support — but lawmakers are fiercely divided on whether his approach will work. During a House subcommittee hearing about industrial revitalization on Tuesday, Democrats agreed with Republicans that they would like to see more manufacturing jobs and more robust supply chains within the United States. But they slammed Trump’s tariffs as an incoherent method to bring that about.
“President Trump’s disaster tariff plan, which is estimated to increase costs to American households by $4,900 per year, is not the solution,” Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost said during the hearing.
“Tariffs are an important tool when used carefully and intelligently,” Frost continued, but “‘careful and intelligent’ does not describe this administration.”
The three witnesses brought in by Republicans avoided discussing tariffs in their recommendations for the panel, focusing instead on burdensome regulations and countering Chinese trade policies.
Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna found their silence striking: “I noticed none of the Republican witnesses mentioned tariffs, the beautiful word tariffs,” he said. “The three Republican experts are recommending everything but tariffs.”
Khanna pressed the witnesses to share whether they believe Trump’s tariffs are working to bring back manufacturing jobs, but all three of them demurred, saying they either weren’t experts on tariff policy or hadn’t been following it closely enough.
“This is not what we’re here to talk about,” responded Austin Bishop, the CEO of the New American Industrial Alliance, an organization seeking to boost manufacturing in the United States.
When pressed again, Bishop said the results of the tariffs so far are “a mix” and that he is interested in how the trade negotiations unfold.
“I can’t tell the future,” he said.
The Democrats’ witness — Adam Hersh, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute — had a simple answer to the same question.
“When a tariff is targeted and strategic, it can be an effective tool for supporting industrial development,” he said. “But what we’re seeing under President Trump’s policy is the opposite of that. It’s broad-based, it’s indiscriminate, it’s nonstrategic. It’s going to be a disaster.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.
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