Supreme Court’s tariff decision may have dealt GOP a midterm death blow: report

The Supreme Court’s stunning ruling Friday that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were unlawful may very well have set the Republican Party up for failure in the upcoming midterm elections, a Wall Street Journal report published on Saturday suggested.

Within hours of the court’s ruling, Trump vowed to pursue alternative methods for imposing his so-called reciprocal tariffs on other nations, and less than 24 hours later, hiked global tariffs from 10% to 15%. And, while Trump has yet to provide full details as to what those “alternatives” may look like, the Journal noted that all options available to him would set his trade policy “on a collision course with the midterm campaign season.”

“Some of the new tariffs Trump wants to impose require congressional approval to extend beyond five months. Others require months of investigations before they can be put into place,” wrote Journal trade and economic policy reporter Gavin Bade.

“In both cases, that pushes key tariff decisions into the summer, just months before November’s midterms when many Republicans are likely to be especially sensitive to complaints about inflation and affordability.”

Of the tariff options available to Trump that require Congressional approval, Kevin Brady, a former Republican member of Congress from Texas, told the Journal that lawmakers would be hesitant to support new tariffs just months away from the midterms.

“The potential that they could be asked by the White House to vote to levy higher tariffs on their constituents is not something Congress would look forward to,” Brady told the Journal. “The conventional wisdom is that there isn’t support for that.”

Americans have largely soured on Trump’s tariffs, with a new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll revealing this weekend that 64% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s tariffs. Trump’s tariffs have increased prices across a range of different sectors, and a recent study found that 96% of all tariff-induced cost increases were paid directly by American consumers.