Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) signaled Thursday that President Trump’s threat to levy tariffs on key trading partners of the U.S. is hurting his constituents, saying “when we start losing, you back off.”
“Almost every industry in Kentucky has come to me and said, ‘It will hurt our industry and push up prices of homes, cars,’ and so, I’m gonna continue to argue against tariffs,” Paul said late Thursday in an interview with CNN.
The Kentucky Republican argued that the U.S. has “more leverage” than any other nation, but not “all the leverage.” He urged the Trump administration to be “smart” about levying additional taxes and reciprocal tariffs.
“When we start losing, you back off. There’s such a thing as strategic retreat,” he said, according to a clip highlighted by Mediaite.
His comments come after Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) also criticized the Trump administration’s policies around tariffs, suggesting he is “worried.”
“I think President Trump on economics and otherwise is doing very well, but you remember the old saying: ‘the danger of rising high is that the air gets thin.’ I’m worried about the tariffs,” Kennedy told Fox Business’s Larry Kudlow on Thursday.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” he added later. “I think if the tariffs do start to cause inflation, I think the president will back away from them.”
Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, paired with an additional 10 percent tax on Chinese goods, went into effect Tuesday. The president defended the tariffs by claiming that the nations were failing to sufficiently address the movement of fentanyl entering the U.S.
In response, Canada enacted its own 25 percent tariffs on $30 billion worth of goods.
The president later paused tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports covered by the 2020 U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which includes automobiles. This pause will continue until April 2, after which the taxes, and any reciprocal tariffs, would be imposed, according to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.
“Hopefully, Mexico and Canada will have done a good enough job on fentanyl that this part of the conversation will be off the table, and we’ll move just to the reciprocal tariff conversation,” Lutnick recently told CNBC.
