Anyone following this midterm cycle has grappled with the same puzzling question: Why is the president repeatedly commenting on Jon Husted’s glutes?
Even those who have tuned in only briefly to see what all the fuss is about have probably seen a clip from one of President Donald Trump’s rallies praising the junior senator from Ohio’s physique.
The president’s odd theme has prompted speculation that he’s becoming addled from virtually nonstop campaigning. I don’t think so. His comments seem calculated. His supporters are laughing. Everyone is talking — talking about anything other than the president’s centerpiece policy of the past two years.
Tariffs are dangerous territory for Republicans on the campaign trail for two reasons. Voters correctly identify higher import taxes as a contributor to higher prices. And tariffs have become a sore spot for the administration.
Republican Senate candidates are openly critical of them. In Michigan, Mike Rogers has disowned the president’s tariffs, calling for an end to Trump’s trade war against Canada.
Rogers can read the president’s polling numbers on the issue, and they look abysmal heading into Election Day. Meanwhile, the administration has quietly been forced to admit partial defeat: On Oct. 23, the White House announced a further scaling back of tariffs on Canada, a last-ditch effort to hold the party’s Senate majority.
On Friday, the order took effect removing some of the 50 percent tariffs imposed on Canadian forestry and agricultural goods, including packing boxes and crates, paper products, plywood sheets, and certain machinery and refrigeration equipment. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who is fighting to keep her seat in a tough race against former Democratic state representative Troy Jackson, took credit for the exemptions, promising to “continue working directly with Administration officials to seek additional relief.”
Trade impediments are a common thread in this midterm cycle connecting Senate seats that have become far more competitive over the past 18 months than Trump’s sweeping 2024 win would have predicted. In Maine, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio and even Georgia — where Senate races are on a knife-edge or already lost — Canada is the state’s largest international trading partner.
Sixty-three percent of Michiganders disapprove of the tariffs the president has imposed on Canada, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll in September, while 61.5 percent of respondents told a WDIV/Detroit News poll published in September that the tariffs are specifically bad for Michigan’s economy. Fifty-eight percent of Iowans oppose the 50 percent tariffs on certain Canadian products, according to Emerson College Polling, while 71 percent fear Canada’s retaliatory import taxes. In Maine, where Collins is lauding the exemptions as a success, 7 in 10 residents told CNN they believe tariffs on Canada harm their state.
Understandably so. Trump’s tariff experiment has had debilitating consequences for the American workers he has always claimed to want to help most. By cracking down on free trade to give agricultural and manufacturing workers a leg up, he has instead crippled sectors that rely heavily on goods moving back and forth across the border.
“April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” Trump proclaimed when he announced his sweeping tariffs last year. It turns out higher taxes and higher prices don’t make people feel wealthy. Confidence in his economic vision has collapsed.
First came the markets, which went into such a free fall after the tariffing “Liberation Day” that the president was forced to roll back his initial proposals. Then came the polls. Then came the Supreme Court, decisively knocking down his dreams of unilaterally imposing tariffs on countries whose leaders said something he didn’t like when the justices ruled against the president’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs.
An economic policy that must, once again, be partially rolled back days before an election is probably not one that was ever going to make America “wealthy again.” How could it? Import taxes are, by design, largely paid by American businesses. The policy is one that requires American workers and consumers to be made worse off.
Voters will have a lot to say when they go to the polls on Tuesday. Some of those messages might be surprising, but a rebuke of protectionism is almost certain. Americans have been signaling to the president since his tariff wars began that they don’t like his dictating from on high what they can buy and how much they must pay.
Trump’s campaign trail riffs about anatomy might be confounding. The rejection of his tariffs isn’t puzzling at all.
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