President Donald Trump’s tariffs haven’t only demolished trillions in wealth and raised the chance of a global recession. They’ve also led some prominent Trump supporters to wonder whether they made a huge mistake.
Trump supporters ranging from mega-investor Bill Ackman to anti-vax influencer Alex Berenson have expressed remorse about their decision to support Trump in November. Some have been harsh: Razib Khan, a geneticist and influential science writer on the right, called himself “r*****ed and wrong” for discounting the risk that Trump would actually do the tariffs.
Richard Hanania, a pundit prominent enough to occasionally swap DMs with Elon Musk on X, has gone the furthest. Last week, he published a lengthy Substack essay explaining why he now believes his reasons for voting Trump were mistaken.
“I was expecting something of a repeat of the first administration, with Trump restrained by traditional conservative ideas, personnel, and institutions. As it turned out, the old Reagan coalition was becoming increasingly hollow, replaced by Trump worship, online edgelordism, and late arriving scammers like crypto bros and MAHA,” he concluded.
To liberals, this kind of thing might seem maddening. Trump loudly, explicitly, and repeatedly signaled that he would impose large tariffs on all foreign imports if he returned to power. Many observers, including me, warned that the guardrails that restrained his first presidency had come off — and that universal tariffs were all-but-certain to be enacted this year. Why couldn’t these well-connected, highly-educated Trump supporters see it?
So I decided to ask them.
The story they told, on the whole, was that they backed Trump because they believed he was the best vehicle for winning the culture war. They trusted the people around Trump — Elon Musk and the tech right above all — to make sure that Trump’s wacky non-cultural ideas, like universal tariffs, didn’t cause too much pain.
After last week, they’re starting to think they made a bad bet. They placed too much faith in Musk, who’s proven to be a force for chaos rather than stability, and put so much emphasis on the culture war that they ignored some clear warning signs about Trump’s other commitments. Now they’re worried that their own priorities are at risk.
“Everyone knows this is endangering our cultural mission,” Khan tells me. “[Trump thinks] Americans will accept becoming much poorer. No fucking way. They’ll all become zhe/zhers if they get to keep their McMansions.”
What we are seeing, in short, is a right-wing coalition that is starting to come unglued.
The false gods of the tech right
For some conservatives, the drift away from Trump started almost immediately.
Hanania, for example, recalls laying down a marker during a livestream on election night: that If Donald Trump appoints Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, then his support for Trump might have been mistaken. When that happened about a week after Trump’s victory, Hanania began thinking that he had put his trust in the wrong places.
“I talked to people close to the administration…who said, ‘No way RFK,’ and I believed them,” he tells me. “I underestimated the extent to which Trump could kind of bully people into submission and wouldn’t have to take their considerations into account.”
In general, the people I spoke with had a high degree of faith in one particular faction of Trump’s royal court: the tech right.
People like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen all had demonstrable track records of success in the private sector. The basic thinking was that they would serve as a rough equivalent of the “adults in the room” who shaped Trump’s first term, steering him away from his worst instincts and toward a smarter form of right-wing populism. The expectation was that things would look a lot like they did from 2017–2021, with a sharper-edged cultural politics aimed at vanquishing “wokeness.”
That’s, of course, not what happened. Musk didn’t try some targeted reforms to the federal government; he launched a shockingly broad assault on America’s core infrastructure, including the basic science institutions that underpin much of the country’s tech industry. Instead of restraining Trump, Musk had become perhaps his most dangerous enabler.
Why? Because he and the people around him genuinely believed what they were saying in public. The bizarre claims about government waste, the baroque conspiracy theories, the unshakeable faith in their own ability to reinvent government overnight — Musk and those close to him said much the same things behind closed doors as they do on X.
“Talking to these guys privately, there’s no distinction,” Hanania says. “It really is people radicalized by social media.”
With members of what seemed like the administration’s most intelligent faction acting like “billionaires [who] get high on their own supply” (as Khan puts it), there was nothing stopping Trump from going full Trump. The end result, in their view, is an administration far worse than what they signed on for.
“I’m obviously freaked,” Khan says. “As are many people on the ‘right,’ whatever that is now.”
Culture war über alles?
I want to emphasize how unusual it is that these specific people are voicing doubts about Trump. We are not talking about moderate squishes here, but hardcore culture warriors.
Hanania, for example, began his writing career as an anonymous white nationalist forum poster. Though he has repudiated this past, he still writes frequently about what he describes as “statistical differences between races.” He is best known for his 2023 book, The Origins of Wokeness, that has shaped Trump administration policy on DEI and civil rights law.
Khan was briefly hired to write on the New York Times op-ed page before being dismissed over previous publications in far-right websites. He believes that race is a biological reality, and places this belief at the center of his political identity. “I’m not a lib. Never have been, never will be unless they accept views on race/sex that they’ll never accept,” Khan writes.
The other public dissenters on tariffs are less focused on race. However, they are still part of the Trump coalition in large part because of their concerns over the left’s cultural politics.
Bill Ackman, the Wall Street billionaire, is perhaps the most prominent name to express remorse over Trump last week. A former Democrat, he turned on the party as a result of the campus tumult during the Gaza war. In October, he penned a list of 33 reasons to vote Trump that was heavy on cultural grievances like the Democrats’ promotion of gender fluidity and support for Black Lives Matter protests.
Alex Berenson, who has suggested Trump should be impeached over the tariffs, owes his celebrity to a hard-right tack on the Covid-19 culture wars. Berenson’s downplaying of the pandemic and anti-vax fearmongering — which earned him the moniker of him “the pandemic’s wrongest man” — allowed him to build a lucrative 240,000 subscriber following on Substack as of this writing.
At the elite level, the Trump coalition brought together these very different kinds of people under the banner of opposing “wokeness.” But that doesn’t mean they’re all in on Trumpism — the full right-nationalist package of fanatical hostility to trade, immigration, and the foundations of American democracy.
Many of them disagreed with these elements of Trump’s politics, but believed either that liberals were exaggerating the threat or that Trump’s virtues outweighed their vices. With a collapse of the American economy becoming a serious possibility, many people inside the Trump coalition are starting to rethink their past judgments.
Still, the allure of Trump as lib-owner-in-chief remains powerful, and there are costs to dissenting. Ackman, for example, has begun walking back his anti-Trump skepticism — writing a weaselly tweet on Tuesday suggesting “some have misinterpreted my thoughts on tariffs.”
Niall Ferguson, a Stanford Unversity historian who may be Trump’s most famous academic supporter, described the tariffs as the most catastrophic economic self-sabotage of his lifetime — and warned that they heralded “the end of American empire.” But when I asked him over email whether he regretted his Trump support, he made it clear he did not.
“The available information pre-Nov. 5 was clear: Trump was the better of the two candidates,” Ferguson told me. “This terrible policy error will at some point be reversed, and those of us who advised a quite different approach will be vindicated. Why would I regret that?”
This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.
The post Some elite Trump supporters are having regrets. We asked them why. appeared first on Vox.
