'Art of the panic attack': Conservative buries Trump defenders' scramble after flip-flop
Supporters of Donald Trump who spent over a week defending the president's sweeping tariff plans only to suffer whiplash after he did a 180 on Wednesday were ridiculed by a conservative columnist on MSNBC on Thursday morning.
During an appearance on "Morning Joe," Matt Lewis, a contributor to The Hill, laughed off attempts to spin the about-face –– a "pause" of ninety days –– as a planned move that demonstrates Trump's brilliance.
Speaking with host Jonathan Lemire, Lewis jumped right into it by explaining, "Look, Congress should be in charge of tariffs. And if they were to regain that power, then this could be done more strategically and less capriciously and that's what we saw."
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"Look what happened yesterday, it's not," he continued before changing direction and joking "The Trump's defenders want to say this part of the art of the deal. It's the art of the panic attack."
"What we are seeing is, if you want stability, this ain't it, right?" he elaborated. "And I think that's part of why we may be seeing that kind of dead cat bounce today where the markets aren't quite returning. Part of it, I think, is that we still are going to have high tariffs. We're still going to have a bigger trade war with China."
"But look, I mean, just a week ago Donald Trump called it 'Liberation Day.' He was, you know, slapping on tariffs like he's throwing around confetti at a New Year's Eve party. And then yesterday he's backpedaling like a unicyclist on black ice. I mean it's whiplash. It's whiplash trying to follow this around," he quipped.
As for Trump's biggest supporters, he added, "So these Republicans are coming up with excuses and I went back, you know, I went back and dug into some of them and they're going to have to sort of reinvent what the excuse is. But last week they were saying how brilliant. That this was because tariffs are manly."
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