Negotiable or Permanent? Deep Disagreements Emerge in GOP over Strategic Aim of Tariffs

‘This debate is playing out in real time within the White House,’ Ted Cruz told NR.

T he way Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) sees it, President Donald Trump must choose between the “angels” and the “demons” inside the White House on the strategic endgame of his trade policy.

On the one hand, he said, there are those inside the White House who understand the historic opportunity in leveraging tariffs as a negotiating tactic to institute free trade. “If the outcome of these tariffs is that worldwide tariffs plummet to at or near zero, and in turn, American tariffs plummet as well to at or near zero, that will be one of the most extraordinary economic victories any president has ever produced,” Cruz told National Review in the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.

But on the other hand, “there are the devils standing on the president’s shoulders who see tariffs as a wonderful thing and who envision high tariffs in perpetuity for as far as the eye could see, high tariffs from all of our trading partners and high tariffs from America,” he said. “If that is the outcome, the result, I believe, would be disastrous.”

“This debate is playing out in real time within the White House, and I am doing everything I can to urge the president to listen to the voice of the angels and not the devils,” said Cruz, who maintained that he’s in frequent conversations with the president and the “entire administration.”

For several days, the White House has projected conflicting messages about the strategic endgame of the president’s trade policy: Is it making tariffs permanent to fundamentally restructure the American economy, or using them as a negotiating tactic to bring tariffs down toward zero?

The president has offered little clarity on the matter. Pressed on Monday whether the tariffs are permanent or negotiable, he said: “They can both be true.”

The White House insists its messaging is clear: The president has identified trade deficits as a national emergency, and he’s committed to doing anything he can — including erecting tariffs — until our trading partners level the playing field. The president is always willing to take calls and hear offers from foreign leaders, administration officials say. But the administration didn’t roll out such a major trade policy to win minor concessions.

“The goal of these tariffs isn’t to get a marginally better trade deal with our trading partners” that will make things “5 percent better” or incentivize countries to “buy a little bit more of our ag produce,” a White House official said in an interview Tuesday evening. The president wants a meaningful change to the status quo on the trade-deficit front. “We’re ready to negotiate on trade deals insofar as those renegotiated trade deals would actually make headway into reducing the United States’ trade deficits with our trading partners” and eliminating nontariff barriers to trade. The official emphasized that “with certain trading partners, the tariffs can’t really be negotiated away, because structurally we’re not on a level playing field even if those barriers were reduced.”

Despite the White House’s insistence that administration officials are completely unified behind the president’s policy, cracks have emerged on the messaging front. On one side of the spectrum there are the mega-protectionists in the White House — namely Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade and Manufacturing Adviser Peter Navarro — who have said repeatedly that the aim of this policy is to fundamentally restructure the global economy, and that foreign leaders shouldn’t expect immediate tariff relief simply for promising to bring down tariffs on the U.S.

Then there are the administration officials like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who continue to suggest that tariffs are a leveraging tool to bring foreign leaders to the table. And yet even he has sent mixed messages. Pressed by CBS News on Capitol Hill earlier today about whether the tariffs that go into effect on Wednesday are set in stone or a negotiating tactic, Bessent said: “They are negotiable but not a negotiating tactic.”

Hours before tariffs are set to go into effect at 12:01 a.m. on Wednesday, Republicans on Capitol Hill felt flummoxed about the path forward.

During a hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday morning, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer took some heat from GOP senators who are skeptical of the White House’s protectionist impulses. “I hope you and the president are sensitive to companies potentially going bankrupt by these actions,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said. Senator Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) was even more direct in his line of questioning to Greer: “Whose throat do I get to choke if this proves to be wrong?”

Intra-GOP confusion surrounding the endgame of the tariffs permeates the staff level.

Summarizing the dynamic to NR, one Senate GOP aide said that “the White House is blowing up [Republican] offices to go out on offense and defend the tariffs but won’t give clear guidance on what the actual message is and who we’re supposed to side with.” Another Senate GOP aide was even more blunt in expressing doubts about the direction of the administration’s tariff strategy: “I’m pretty sure that a large number of people at the White House don’t have a clear idea of where this train is going, or how and when we’ll get off it — which is why they can’t give us better direction — so we’re all in the same boat.”

The administration’s cost-cutter in chief, Department of Government Efficiency czar Elon Musk, has also been critical of the administration’s tariff policy, reposting on social media a video of Milton Friedman explaining how the process of manufacturing a pencil requires the cooperation of thousands of people around the world. Musk has torn into Navarro for suggesting in a television interview that the Tesla founder is “not a car manufacturer” but rather a “car assembler.” In return, Musk called him a “moron” who is “dumber than a sack of bricks” while taunting him to consult the “fake expert he invented, Ron Vara” — a reference to the fictional trade expert Navarro has cited in many of his own books that translates to an anagram of the trade adviser’s last name.

The White House press secretary’s official reaction to the spat during Tuesday’s briefing? “Boys will be boys.”

The markets have teetered up and down in reaction to trade-related headlines. On Monday, stocks soared when social media accounts misconstrued an interview with National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett to suggest that the administration would soon institute a 90-day pause on tariffs. When the White House clarified that no such plan was on the books, stocks tumbled. Later in the day, investors rallied when Bessent suggested in an interview that as many as 70 countries had come to the negotiating table.

As the clock ticks toward 12:01 a.m., Republicans on Capitol Hill are bracing for what’s next. “Tariffs are bad for the economy, and I’m gonna do everything I can to stop them,” said Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.), who is urging his colleagues to support a bill called the Trade Review Act that would require Congress to vote on executive tariffs within 60 days. The White House has said Trump would veto the bill, and congressional GOP leaders have signaled that the legislation has no chance of becoming law.

Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) predicted in a brief interview on Tuesday that Trump will have widespread support for reciprocal levies that are aimed at changing a country’s behavior, such as tariffs on Mexico and China for allowing fentanyl to flow into the U.S., and “maybe tariffs against people who buy Iranian oil.”

But he also identified another bucket he’s “not so certain about,” which is the utility of economy-wide tariffs or sector tariffs. “If your goal is to reduce nontariff trade barriers and make trading more efficient, this can have a good outcome,” Graham said. “If your goal is just to collect revenue, expecting others not to respond, that’s gonna be a harder sell.”

Other White House allies believe that the tariffs distract from the compelling economic talking point from Republicans that Democrats want expiring provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to lapse in December.

“Every Democrat in the House and Senate is now on record for voting against making the Trump tax cuts permanent and for the largest tax increase in history,” longtime Trump pollster John McLaughlin told National Review. “But because of the media attention to tariffs, no one knows the most important conflict. Democrats are pushing to raise taxes, and Republicans want to cut taxes.”