Republican Sen. Rand Paul had a stern history lesson for President Donald Trump, saying that his latest flurry of tariffs could lead to GOP “decimation” in both the House and the Senate.
The Kentucky lawmaker was one of four Republicans whom Trump flamed on Truth Social Wednesday for their dissent regarding his “Liberation Day” levies. Undeterred, Paul repeated his concerns in a double swipe the same day, first speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill then later on in a chat with The Hill’s online show “Rising.”
Trump has previously compared himself to the 25th president, William McKinley, saying he would —like his predecessor—make “our country very rich through tariffs.” Paul recalled this comparison and reminded the president that McKinley’s tariffs “led to political decimation.”
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“When McKinley, most famously, put tariffs on in 1890, they lost 50 percent of their seats in the next election,” he said on Capitol Hill, driving home his point by referencing tariffs imposed by Republicans Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis C. Hawley nearly 100 years ago.
“When Smoot and Hawley put on their tariff in the early 1930s, we lost the House and the Senate for 60 years. So they’re not only bad economically, they’re bad politically,” he said in a clip which aired on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle.
During the interview with “Rising,” he added that it is a “fallacy” to believe that tariffs will help the U.S. economically. “Tariffs are a tax, and if you tax trade or if you tax anything, you’ll get less of it,” he said.
Paul added that the very international trade that Trump’s decision serves to stymie is what actually leads to prosperity. “We know by looking at the history of the last—at least 70 years or so in this country, that as international trade has increased, so has the prosperity of our country,” he said.
Trump’s Truth Social rebuke also included Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. The president accused them of “playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels.”
Trump was responding after Senate Democrats advanced a resolution introduced by Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia that would block the import levies on Canada. The vote Wednesday ended up passing 51-48, buoyed by the Republican support.
While Canada was somewhat sheltered, a whole host of other countries were slapped with tariffs in a bizarre gameshow-style press conference earlier in the day. Among the big winners were the U.K., Chile, Colombia, Turkey, Singapore, Brazil, and Australia, suffering comparatively measly 10 percent levies. Cambodia will be charged a whopping 49 percent, while China was hit with an additional 34 percent on top of the 20 percent levy Trump is already charging Beijing.
