‘This Is All So Stupid’: Conservatives Exhale, Then Fume About Trump’s ‘Mercurial’ Tariff Pause
AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein
President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he was putting a 90-day pause on his tariffs, plus an additional levy for China, sparking a stock market rally and garnering relieved but annoyed reactions from conservatives who openly challenged the White House’s claims that this was good strategy.
One week ago, Trump held a press conference in the Rose Garden to sign an executive order imposing sweeping new tariffs on virtually all imports, sending the markets reeling. Even a number of Republicans and some of the president’s staunchest defenders on Fox News have spoken out to criticize the tariffs as causing unnecessary economic harm.
Similar to his Truth Social post granting a reprieve to TikTok, Trump used his social media platform to announce there would be “a 90 day PAUSE” for the tariffs on 75 countries that had reached out to the U.S. to negotiate, along with raising the tariff on China to 125% because of the “lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets.”
Numerous conservative commentators had been highly critical of Trump’s tariffs since they were unveiled in the Rose Garden last week. The news of the tariff pause led these critics to express relief that Trump was backing down, but still make it clear this mess was the president’s fault and the United States should have never been in this situation at all. Several others pointed out that the post-pause market rally had not recovered all the decline since the initial tariff announcement, and overall this situation was engendering market-shaking instability.
—
