Congress Is Freaking Out About Trump's Trade War, But Not Enough to Stop Him

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

A fast-spreading panic hit Capitol Hill on Thursday, as President Donald Trump’s trade war prompted markets to suffer their worst day since the onset of the pandemic in 2020 and analysts were predicting the worst was yet to come.

While most Hill Republicans tried to avoid criticizing their party’s leader, frustrations were being laid bare as their talking points didn’t match those coming out of the White House. Lawmakers were insisting Trump’s new tariffs are a starting point for a negotiation while the White House said they’re actually the end of the discussion. Frantic calls to Cabinet agencies about home-district impacts were yielding platitudes and not promises. Even give-Trump-a-chance Republicans began losing patience as their office phone lines were on fire. 

Trump’s stated goal is to force businesses to make their wares on U.S. soil, in theory sparking a renaissance in domestic manufacturing. Economists are highly skeptical, but even Trump’s apologists worry that the short-term ramp-up is going to be rough. Midterm elections seldom reward the party holding the White House even in the best of times, and Republicans are quickly realizing that Trump’s kitchen-table chaos may end up tanking their hopes for retaining control of Congress next year.

“None of this was thought through,” says one Republican lobbyist who is trying to tell her association’s members not to panic. “The math doesn’t work. The end game doesn’t work. The politics doesn’t work. This is just a mess and it is going to cost Republicans seats.”

Not too long ago, Congress would have had some say in the tariffs levied on other countries. But Trump is calling the trade imbalance between domestic markets and its international partners as a national emergency to avail himself of powers that allow him, without any real check, to impose these tariffs. The result is set to be a minimum 10% tax on most goods coming into the country and climbing to a net 79% charge on some stuff coming in from China. 

Put plainly: this was not the trade rebalancing Hill Republicans would have drafted had they been consulted. Just don’t expect things to move in any meaningful way against Trump’s orders any time soon, no matter how steamed they are.

A handful of Republicans were motioning to curb Trump’s capricious trade war, but not in a way that anyone in Washington expects will go anywhere. As TIME’s Nik Popli reports from the Hill, Sen. Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican whose home-state farmers will pay dearly if the export markets close, is backing a measure that requires Congress to approve tariffs within 60 days of a White House announcement. But there is almost zero chance the bill will get sufficient backing—let alone a vote—in the GOP-led House. Grassley’s move peeved the White House, but is just that: an annoyance. It’s the same fate that awaits a small-scale, symbolic version to undo the penalties against Canada that immediately cleared the Senate on Wednesday.

For now, the Senate map in 2026 still favors Republicans, with retirements of Democrats in toss-up states like New Hampshire, Michigan, and Minnesota giving GOP strategists optimism about adding to their majorities. But the argument for electing Republicans becomes tougher once clothing and grocery bills spike, and housing starts plummet because Canadian lumber is too expensive to frame up a new development.

This tit-for-tat trade retribution is an impulse that has long been part of Trump’s worldview. He thinks the United States is getting ripped off, plain and simple. He sees a deck stacked against American manufacturers, and he has the power to remedy this for what he calls the little guy. It’s all guaranteed to be bad politics for a President who returned to office on promises of curbing inflation, driving down costs, and fixing Washington—and his fellow party members who are fine going along.

Republicans at the Capitol understand this is going to hurt not just Americans, but their own political futures. It’s why, in a low-key fever, they’re freaking out. But here’s the rub: while they know this is bad for just about everyone, don’t expect them to exercise their congressional authority to get Trump to back off. Their prospects may be bad right now, but they view crossing a President who leads a vindictive movement as even worse. This is not a moment where anyone in Washington is expecting political bravery. Far from it. The question many Republicans in the Capitol are asking themselves: which path will yield the least pain for selfish spoils? It’s a pretty weak way to run a superpower. 

Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.