MAGA Rages at Mike Pence for Torching Trump’s Tariffs as ‘Largest Peacetime Tax Hike in History’
‘SHOOTING THE MESSENGER’
Lawmakers, officials, and influencers joined in the pile-on.
The MAGAverse raged at former Vice President Mike Pence after he blasted President Donald Trump’s tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax in U.S. history.”
“These tariffs are nearly 10 times the size of those imposed during the Trump-Pence administration and will cost American families over $3,500 per year,” he wrote in a social media post that highlighted research from the Advancing American Freedom Foundation.
That increase will “easily erase three years’ worth of pay raises” for most American families, the document said.
On Wednesday, Trump announced universal tariffs, a type of import tax paid by U.S. companies with the costs typically passed on to consumers. The president said he was imposing a baseline 10 percent tax on imports from all countries, with higher rates of up to 49 percent applied to products from about 60 countries.
But according to a recent Fox News poll, 69 percent of respondents thought tariffs would make the products they buy more expensive. That 69 percent was right, Pence said in separate post.
In response to criticism, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—who over the past few months has reportedly been pushing Trump to impose more and more aggressive tariffs, even as the likelihood of recession grows—accused Pence of being “bitter.”
“These tariffs are the definition of America First, which is a concept he doesn’t understand,” Lutnick wrote in a post on X.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “career politicians” like Pence “were part of the problem” and “did nothing for decades while our industrial sector was gutted.”
The comments on Pence’s post were also full of MAGA diehards saying Pence needed to “re-evaluate his loyalties” and asking when he “became a Democrat.”
“Dude we all rejected you,” MAGA influencer Michael J. Morrison wrote. “You don’t need to keep proving us right.”
Something maga must of missed is these ANGRY PENGUINS;
Among the locations Donald Trump slapped with tariffs Wednesday are two uninhabited islands near Antarctica in the southern Indian Ocean.
The Heard and McDonald Islands, which sit about halfway between Australia and South Africa and are territories of the former country, now face 10 percent tariffs, which would pose an issue if the seals and penguins that call the small landmass home were exporting anything to the U.S.
“The Heard Island and McDonald penguins have been taking advantage of us for too long - it’s about time we stood up to them!” former New Jersey congressman Tom Malinowski joked on X.
Brendan Duke, senior director for federal fiscal policy at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, reacted similarly: “Taking on America’s real enemies — a bunch of islands you’ve never heard of,” he wrote on X.
Later Wednesday night, MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow chimed in.
“Those volcanoes and the penguins and seals who live there, they will never menace the American economy again as they have in the past by flooding us with their cheap exports of...what?” she grinned. “Fresh air, cool breezes, a waft of eau de penguin?”
Other obscure islands the White House targeted were Norway’s Svalbard, Réunion Island, a French overseas territory in the Indian Ocean, and Australia’s Norfolk Island, home to about 2,000 people.
When Trump announced the tariffs at the White House on Wednesday afternoon, he predicted the markets would soar as a result. They promptly did the opposite.
Eagle-eyed social media users were quick to point out that Russia was not part of about 60 countries the Trump administration deemed the “worst offenders” in trade policy, along with Canada and Mexico.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios that Russia was not listed because U.S. sanctions already “preclude any meaningful trade.” Still, the U.S. trades more with Russia than with some of the other countries on the list, like Mauritius or Brunei.
Mr. Flip Flop;
The Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board hit President Donald Trump on Wednesday over the steep tariffs he enacted across the globe, warning the MAGA leader that "remaking the world economy has large consequences, and they may not all add up to what Mr. Trump advertises as a new 'golden age.'"
The Journal's editorial board called Trump's tariffs "another large step toward a new old era of trade protectionism."
"Assuming the policy sticks—and we hope it doesn’t—the effort amounts to an attempt to remake the U.S. economy and the world trading system," the board wrote, noting the tariffs "look 'reciprocal' in name only."
The board said Trump's decision also "blows up" U.S. trade goals, and exports will "suffer directly" from retaliatory tariffs and indirectly from other countries striking trade deals.
Additionally, the "cost in lost influence will be considerable." In addition to military and economic might, "soft power" matters.
That "includes being able to trust America’s word as a reliable ally and trading partner. Mr. Trump is shattering that trust as he punishes allies and blows up the USMCA that he negotiated in his first term," the board rebuked.
