Tiniest Crack In The Wall: Senate Votes To Dump Trump’s Vindictive Brazil Tariffs

from the a-glimmer dept

For the first time in ten months of near-total congressional capitulation to Trump, five Republican Senators broke ranks on Tuesday, siding with Democrats to block the nonsense tariffs Trump unilaterally declared on Brazil as punishment for their treatment of Trump buddy Jair Bolsonaro.

The US Senate on Tuesday approved a measure that would terminate Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on Brazilian imports, including coffee, beef and other products, in a rare bipartisan show of opposition to the president’s trade war.

The legislation passed in a 52-48 vote, with five Republicans – senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and the former Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – joining all Democrats in favor.

It’s a very small thing. But given how completely Congress—and particularly the Senate—has rolled over for every Trump demand since January, any defection is notable. And this one is particularly telling about where the cracks might finally start to form.

To understand why this matters, you need to understand just how absurd these particular tariffs were—even by Trump tariff standards.

The President doesn’t have the power to issue tariffs. That’s supposed to be a power reserved for Congress under the Constitution. Trump has been skirting around that by claiming that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) allows him to take certain actions in an emergency regarding trade, but the law does not explicitly allow him to impose tariffs under that authority. The Supreme Court is set to hear the case challenging Trump’s interpretation of IEEPA next week.

But even if SCOTUS somehow blesses this IEEPA theory, the Brazil tariffs are uniquely indefensible. Trump’s other tariffs at least gesture at the fiction that trade deficits constitute emergencies. Economically illiterate, sure, but there’s a pretext.

But we have a trade surplus, rather than a deficit, with Brazil. So, instead, Trump just claimed that the “emergency” was stupid actions by Brazil’s Supreme Court to push for censorship on social media. We’re among those who have called out some of those dumb and censorial decisions by Brazil’s Supreme Court. But that doesn’t make any of them an “emergency.” The other reason given: the fact that Brazil actually prosecuted Trump buddy Jair Bolsonaro for… trying to run a coup on the government. That is… not an emergency that lets Trump issue tariffs.

In other words: Trump declared an economic emergency because a foreign country’s courts made decisions he didn’t like about speech online and because they prosecuted his friend for attempting a coup. He may try to call that trade policy, but everyone can easily see that it’s a personal vendetta dressed up in legal language to give his most adoring fans a weak excuse to defend him.

Of course, the House (should Mike Johnson ever bring it back from vacation) is unlikely to move on this bill, and Trump will veto the bill anyway.

But… it’s one of the first real cracks in the MAGA cult red wall of giving Donald Trump anything the special boy wants. In this second Trump administration, it seems like one of the only times the Senate has actually voted against him.

So why now? Why this particular abuse of power?

Perhaps it’s that at least some Republicans can read polls too. This is the least popular president in modern history, and his policies (even the ones we were always told had popular support) are ridiculously unpopular as well. The Economist’s graphic on this is telling. Trump is negative on… basically everything. By a lot.

And, for stupidly unclear reasons, Congress just keeps letting him do whatever the fuck he wants to do.

The polls are brutal. His policies are historically unpopular. He’s tearing down the White House. He’s made the US into a global laughingstock. He’s sending troops into American cities based on myths his advisors are telling him. There are millions protesting in the streets.

And at some point, the political calculus shifts—even for Republicans in gerrymandered districts who’ve spent ten months scared shitless that the MAGA base will turn on them. Eventually, the risk of being primaried by Trump becomes less scary than the risk of being associated with a deeply unpopular president doing deeply unpopular things for transparently personal reasons.

So, no, this isn’t a big shift. But it’s a little one. An important crack in the wall, which hopefully starts to turn into more.

Filed Under: brazil, donald trump, ieepa, jair bolsonaro, lisa murkowski, mitch mcconnell, rand paul, senate, susan collins, tariffs, thom tillis, tim kaine