On one of the most politically stressful days of Donald Trump’s presidency, his party sent a more reassuring signal: Most Republicans are ready to back his new tariffs and the next step of his slow-moving Hill agenda.
Even after a high-profile loss in a Wisconsin judicial race raised the specter of future midterm problems, most Republicans lined up Wednesday in defense of Trump’s Canada tariff plans and his forthcoming reciprocal tariffs. Simultaneously, Trump helped Senate Majority Leader John Thune secure the votes needed to advance a bare-bones budget resolution that defers a lot of tough decisions about his agenda.
That’s in part thanks to evaporating skepticism from conservatives like Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., who has raised a lot of questions about the budget as well as Trump’s tariffs.
After meeting with Trump on Wednesday, though, Johnson said he’s “feeling a lot more comfortable” about the budget that tees up future action on tax and spending cuts. Trump is facing a symbolically significant rebellion on the Senate floor against his tariffs on Canada, but Johnson scoffed at the idea of voting with Democrats and a handful of fellow Republicans to rebuke him.
“I’m not going to support their effort to just poke a stick and try and do the president damage,” Johnson said after the meeting.
Trump still faces serious headwinds, the harshest of his presidency so far, as he prepared to unveil broad new tariffs Wednesday. He and his party are recovering from a Wisconsin Supreme Court loss on Tuesday evening that has sparked worries within the GOP about a 2018-style electoral meltdown. But most Republicans are ready to buy into Trump’s promise that tariffs can extract more favorable trade deals with other countries.
That’s thanks in large part to active behind-the-scenes work to shore up support in the party. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was dispatched to the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Wednesday, where he urged unity on tariffs and taxes.
“He’s a numbers guy and then some, and he’s just going through the numbers. He believes in the plan, as I do,” Rep. Dan Meuser, R-Pa., told Semafor of Bessent afterward. “Are we breaking a few eggs to make an omelette? Yeah. Maybe that’s why the price of eggs is so high.”
At least one moment Wednesday is still likely to go awry for the White House: A public rebuke of Trump’s tariffs on Canada authored by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., looks set to pass the Senate with at least four GOP votes. Even so, other key Republicans said they’d oppose the condemnation after Trump publicly urged his party to vote it down.
Perhaps most urgently, Trump is successfully getting his agenda moving in Congress after weeks of circular debate among Republicans congealed into a decision to punt big choices about reducing spending until far later in the year. When pressed directly on spending cuts on Wednesday, Trump told Senate Republicans he’d work with them on slashing federal dollars.
That vow completed a successful courtship of conservatives who had threatened to bring down the budget. Republicans are now confident they can get 50 of their senators to vote for a budget that essentially makes no ironclad commitments to cut spending — which had been a key ask from the right just a few days ago.
“All of us budget hawks – I’m one of them – heard the president say, ‘I recognize this is a rare and wonderful opportunity to right-size the budget and I’ll support your effort to achieve that,’” recounted Sen. John Kennedy, R-La. “I think it was important for a couple of my colleagues to hear him say that.”