Trump might want to count that a blessing, McLaughlin said — because despite his fervent belief to the contrary, his tariffs were not popular.
"When we look at issue polling, Trump is underwater on every issue for which RCP tracks a poll average. But the anchors dragging him down are the economy and inflation, on which he is much more unpopular than on immigration or foreign policy," wrote McLaughlin. "The timeline of when the wheels started to come off is consistent with the early and repeated emphasis by Trump and his administration on a major tariff push." All of Trump's major tariffs were enacted between February and April 2025, and "By March 13, 2025, Trump was polling worse on the economy than at any point in his first term."
Meanwhile, he wrote, poll after poll after poll, from Morning Consult to CNN to Pew to New York Times/Siena, have all shown heavy disapproval of how Trump has handled tariffs.
But there's something more fundamental at play here, McLaughlin argued — a "trickle-down" problem that makes tariffs "fail one of the most basic lessons of populist politics."
"For a century, left-leaning critics have sneered that Republican economic policies amounted to 'trickle-down economics,' in which the ordinary voter had to await the indirect action of tax and regulatory benefits to the wealthy and big corporations in order to see that the rich people and the big companies were creating more jobs and better wages for workers and more goods and lower prices for consumers," he wrote. "Right-populists have at times echoed those sneers. And yet, they have marched the party directly into the very box canyon they warned about."
"At least when you pass something like the Reagan or George W. Bush tax cuts, everybody can see their taxes go down, even if they suspect that the rich are getting a much better deal," McLaughlin said. "But with high tariffs, the pain is immediate and visible: The president is trying to raise prices, and when prices seem too high, he’s the obvious guy to blame. Even voters who aren’t specifically angry about tariffs aren’t sold that they are producing great economic benefits to make the interlude of higher prices justifiable."
The bottom line, McLaughlin concluded, is that the "populists" pushing tariffs are blind to the fact they are doing exactly what the old guard did to enrage working people: "Voters aren’t buying what they’re selling, because they don’t like the price tag."
