Even the staunchest MAGA Republicans who vehemently argue in favor of President Donald Trump's tariffs could jump ship in the case of a full-blown recession, a new opinion piece in Salon posited.
Columnist Heather Digby Parton wrote in Monday's column that the weekend "performances" of Trump's economic and trade team members who ran the gamut of cable news interviews no doubt pleased the president because they told him "exactly what he wanted to hear."
Parton continued, "Unfortunately for him, these people sounded to the rest of America like they had just flown in on a spaceship and virtually no one but the most die-hard MAGA cultist or a member of the Trump administration is buying any of that."
Surely anyone paying attention "knows that the world economy is in a serious crisis precipitated by Trump and Trump alone," Parton argued.
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And, although Trump's "almost impermeable" bubble of supporters continue to feed into his belief that tariffs are the answer to the nation's economic ills, Parton wrote that "purposefully wrecking the economy may just penetrate into the GOP."
She quoted Nate Cohn of The New York Times, who speculated, "If the economic fallout is bad enough...congressional Republicans’ continued support of (or acquiescence to) Mr. Trump — whether on tariffs or his other excesses — could be in jeopardy."
"In a normal world, there would be no question that tanking the economy would be political suicide," Parton wrote. "But Donald Trump believes he is impervious to the political laws of gravity, and in some ways you can't blame him. He has survived more scandals than any politician in American history."
At some point, she said, "you have to wonder if self-preservation may start to look a little different to the other Republicans if the country is mired in recession and the federal government has been so devastated that it can't respond. If not, they may be in for a very big surprise in 2026."