Tariff chaos leaves Donald Trump ‘backed into a corner’ and ‘freaking out’ close allies

Donald Trump‘s chaotic tariffs have upended global finance, caused havoc in the business world, and seem set to accelerate the United States into full-blown recession. Pain is coming for American consumers, though Trump has billed the suffering as a “medicine” the country needs to swallow to reach an imaginary sunny uplands where America is “great again”.

Unfortunately for just about everyone but him, this medicine is going to make literally everything more expensive, leave people out of work, and make all of the nation’s long-standing trade allies hate our guts. Even the most ardent MAGA fan may balk at Trump’s decisions directly making their day-to-day life more miserable, leaving his allies nervous that electoral doom is looming.

Reporter Molly Jong-Fast gave an interview on MSNBC over the weekend in which she outlined how she thinks it’s going down behind the scenes. Apparently, post-tariffs, “Trump is in a defensive crouch” and the whirlwind of awful economic forecasts and trillion-dollar losses in the markets are “freaking out even Republican Senators”.

They’re right to be freaked out! We’re already seeing the first tendrils of chaos from the tariffs, but by the 2026 midterms, their impact will be highly visible and difficult to defend. Trump himself admits that it’s going to take two years at minimum for his “medicine” to take effect.

I’m sure he’s confident that by the time his second term ends, every citizen will be singing his praises after the tariffs usher in a new golden age. Republican senators and congressmen and women hoping to be re-elected in 2026 aren’t going to be so lucky, with every candidate set to be staring down the barrel of a furious electorate demanding to know why they should vote for the party that just killed the economy.

Who knows, maybe by that time the Democrats will have pulled their finger out and realized bland centrist corporatism combined with smugly scolding the electorate isn’t a viable political strategy and they’ll have put some more aggressive and progressive voices front and center? Then again, Trump’s tariff being a success is probably more likely to happen than that, so I’m sure we’ll see the same parade of octogenarian Dem warmongers pleading for support, with voters grudgingly voting for them as there’s no other option.

All that said, Trump is driving America straight into a brick wall as fast as he can, so any firm predictions on what’s going to happen over the next four years are foolish. Who knows, maybe by the time the date of the 2026 mid-terms rolls around we’ll be living in an arid, irradiated wasteland, fashioning makeshift armor out of tyres and bits of rebar?