Longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove that President is arguing Trump is exhausting many Americans with his various moves on tariffs, causing confusion and concern that in Rove’s view could boomerang on Trump.
“We aren’t 100 days into Donald Trump’s second term and many Americans are already exhausted. They’ve had way too much thrown at them,” Rove wrote in an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday.
He said voters were clear in the 2024 election that they wanted lower prices, the economy energized, the southern border closed and the military strengthened with a strong leader in charge of the Oval Office. He said progress has been made on issues like the border and the military, but Americans aren’t pleased with the state of the economy.
“Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to break inflation has been replaced by a fixation on raising tariffs, which nearly three-quarters of Americans expect to hike prices,” Rove said. “We’re also confused: Is the goal getting trading partners to lower their tariffs on U.S. goods and services? Or replacing our income tax with high tariffs on foreign goods?”
Trump has taken a flurry of actions on his signature campaign proposal of implementing tariffs on many countries around the world, on multiple occasions putting them in place or threatening to do so before announcing temporary reprieves and varying exceptions.
Most recently, he has placed a 10-percent baseline tariff on every country but announced a 90-day pause on significantly higher tariffs that he had planned to place on roughly 60 countries he deemed the worst offenders on trade barriers. But polling has shown the tariffs are widely unpopular and a majority expect them to lead to higher prices.
Rove said the issue isn’t only tariffs and prices but the White House every week throwing “its weight behind a new issue that went largely or entirely unmentioned during the campaign,” such as wanting to claim Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada and renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”
He said he expects Trump’s policies will be a mix of deliberately planned ideas and ones “concocted on the fly” and White House aides won’t mind if some headlines are bad for them, but Trump could be undermining himself in not spending time explaining his successes and how they are improving people’s lives.
Rove said Trump is also focusing too much on enacting “retribution” against his opponents.
He said Trump’s declining approval rating won’t matter for his most passionate supporters, but the past eight weeks have been exhausting for the “non-MAGA world,” which includes Republicans and independents.
“They aren’t used to this pace, confusion and incessant combat,” he said. “Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter said her father wanted to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every wedding. So does Donald Trump. It isn’t obvious that America wants that, too. But we know he won’t change.”
