Trump Loses a Symbolic Vote

And it is an important symbol, in keeping, once again, with the fact that resistance is far from futile.

Every time something doesn’t go Trump’s way, there’s a tendency to declare that the fever’s broken and the destroyers will shortly be banished.

The argument that follows is not that one. We’re stuck with these folks and while I firmly maintain—it’s a theme of this Substack—that resistance is not at all futile, they will continue to violate norms, the law, and anything resembling governance as their project to accumulate power and enrich themselves proceeds apace.

That said, not only is most of the electorate already sick of them and their chaos, violence, and unwillingness to help them afford their lives, Congress appears to be in the act of standing up to Trump on his signature policy: tariffs, specifically, Canadian tariffs.

The vote was 219-211, meaning a few Rs crossed over to vote with the House Ds to roll back Trump’s tariffs on Canada. The bill goes over the Senate, which narrowly passed a similar bill, again with a few Rs joining Ds (for technical reasons, this vote requires just 51 in the Senate, not 60). Assuming it passes again, Trump will veto and that will be that, so it’s almost certainly symbolic.

But symbolic of what?

First, note that Trump, of course, ran right over to Truth Social where he wrote:

Any Republican, in the House or the Senate, that votes against TARIFFS will seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries! TARIFFS have given us Economic and National Security, and no Republican should be responsible for destroying this privilege.

This is totally predictable, and it is through this threat that he still holds sway over the vast majority of Rs. But that also takes us right to the deep and increasing unpopularity of Trump and his party, which, at least for some Rs in swingier districts, dulls the threat.

This is from the right-leaning, to put it politely, WSJ oped page:

Most voters don’t buy the administration’s claims that things are hunky-dory. They don’t believe Joe Biden still deserves blame for the current situation, and they’re ambivalent about mass deportations. Most troubling for Republican lawmakers who will face voters in November, people may be running out of patience.

In a Fox News poll released late last month, 54% of respondents said the economy is worse than it was when Mr. Biden left office. Moreover, “only one quarter of voters say they are better off financially than they were a year ago, and more than 4 in 10 say the administration’s economic policies have hurt them, about twice the share who say they’ve been helped.” The percentage of people who believe the economy will improve this year has also declined, and the shift was driven in part by growing pessimism among Republican voters.

Nor is it clear that the administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement is compensating for its low marks on other issues. A recent Harvard CAPS/Harris national survey showed that 63% of respondents oppose deporting “an undocumented person who has lived in the U.S. for many years with no serious crimes,” and 68% oppose deporting “an undocumented person who arrived as a child.”

That’s the WSJ citing Fox News!

Now, consider tariffs. Here’s a figure (the yellow bit is mine) from yesterday’s new, CBO budget and econ outlook that I plan to come back to soon, as it is a very rich doc.

This shows the difference between their inflation projections pre- and post- Trump tariffs. That tariff-induced bump ain’t huge, but I never expected it to be—imported goods are just 11% of our GDP, a low-enough share that we shouldn’t expect large price impacts (true, GDP doesn’t count “intermediate” goods—imports that are used in US manufacturing production, which is another source of price pressures). But it ain’t nothing, and it’s pushing in the wrong direction (by just under a percentage point) and doing so on the issue many non-MAGA Trump voters care most about: the cost of living. Even worse, team Trump is in flat out denial about this, endlessly lying about how there’s zero inflation and prices are falling.

It gets even worse for them. As I’ve argued forever, it’s not just that today’s R party isn’t built to address affordability—they’re built solely for tax cuts—it’s that once their efforts to blame everything on some group that’s ripping you off—immigrants, Biden and the Ds, Medicaid recips—stops working, they got nothing.

Just observe Trump’s flailing on this issue. His TrumpRx points you toward a few discounts on prescription drugs, but it’s pretty worthless to the vast majority of Americans who get a better deal through their insurance or through buying generics. Not only does he have nothing on increasing the supply of affordable housing, but he keeps warning, against evidence, as usual, that if we increase the supply of affordable housing, it will lower the housing wealth of existing homeowners. On the cost of health insurance coverage, of course, he and his party are here again pushing hard in the wrong direction.

All this begs the question of whether the opposition has real, workable plans to address these structural challenges. I can assure that such plans exist; I and many others spend most of our working lives on them. But that’s a different discussion.

Today, I’m saying that while the Trumpies aren’t going anywhere and they will undoubtedly continue to erode democracy at great cost to the most vulnerable among us, their grift-instead-of-governance is already getting old, such that even some—a precious few—Rs are growing a spine, though at this point it can only be seen with a powerful microscope.

As I was writing this post, this headline crossed the transom:

Yes, this surge should never have occurred in the first place. Innocent people were executed by state-sanctioned killers who have yet to be held accountable for their murderous acts.

But every time you see a backpedal like this, a vote—even a symbolic one—that goes the wrong way for them and thus the right way for the rest of us, a poll on their unpopularity, a judicial decision that upholds that law against their lawlessness, a policy that clearly fails to meet people where they are, or worse, pushes in the wrong direction, take hope.

This isn’t over. Not by a long shot. I cannot say that justice will prevail, the criminals will be prosecuted, democracy will function and this admin’s agenda will be slowed by the midterms and then struck down by the general election. But neither can I, nor anyone else, rule out that possibility, especially if we continue to fight for it.