Ex-GOP Rep Says Trump Tariffs ‘Worse Than COVID’ for Economy
“It is because of his ignorance, but also because of his vanity that he has gotten us into this,” Florida ex-Congressman Dave Jolly told MSNBC on Saturday.
A former Republican congressman ripped the president’s recent tariffs as the worst thing to hit the markets since the coronavirus pandemic.
“In a matter of 75 days, Donald Trump has proven worse than COVID for economic uncertainty,” ex-GOP Rep. Dave Jolly told MSNBC Saturday, adding, “there’s a latency to this where it’s going to get much worse.”
“It’s because of his ignorance, but also because of his vanity that he has gotten us into this,” he added. “I don’t know how he gets us out of it, truly.”
On Tuesday, Trump announced sweeping tariffs at a base rate of 10 percent—and up to 50 percent in some cases—against trading partners to safeguard U.S. jobs.
“In the past, in trade wars, we were the heavyweight where maybe we knew we could win,” Jolly said. “There is a good possibility that Donald Trump just launched a trade war that doesn’t just cool off, doesn’t just return back to baseline, but a trade war that the United States loses.”
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Jolly is not the only MAGA fan to attack the president in recent days, with far-right podcaster Ben Shapiro and pro-Trump social media personality Dave Portnoy both admitting this week they fail to see any sense in the GOP leader’s most recent move.
On Friday, Shapiro called the packages “mistaken,” “pretty crazy,” and “probably unconstitutional.
Portnoy, meanwhile, complained in an X post the same day that his investment portfolio is now “in the sh-tter,” claiming to have suffered losses of up to $7 million as a result of Trump’s tariffs.
“Liberation Day” wiped trillions of dollars from the global stock market in a matter of days, with three major US stock indexes–the S&P, Dow Jones, and Nasdaq–recording their largest drop on Friday since the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020.
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