‘Dumbest’ Recession Ever: Democrats Prepare To Make GOP Pay For Trump’s Tariffs

WASHINGTON ― Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday harshly criticized President Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, saying they will translate to deep economic pain for millions of families and businesses nationwide.

He also signaled that Democrats are ready to go on offense, casting themselves as the party fighting for everyday Americans as Trump wrecks the stock market and Republicans tee up a budget measure that benefits billionaires. The GOP, for one of the first times in the second Trump era, is on the back foot politically and divided on how to respond.

“Yesterday, the president made one of the dumbest decisions in history, one that will negatively impact every single American family, every single one,” Schumer charged in a press conference, flanked by other Democratic senators. “He’s walking us into the dumbest and most avoidable recession, probably in history.”

Their press event comes a day after Trump announced his across-the-board tariffs on all U.S. trading partners. The president’s actions have sent global markets into a tailspin, and by the start of U.S. trading on Thursday, he’d erased with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to reestablish limits on a president’s ability to impose unilateral tariffs without congressional approval.

“For too long, Congress has delegated its clear authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce to the executive branch,” Grassley said in a statement. “I’m joining Senator Cantwell to introduce the bipartisan Trade Review Act of 2025 to reassert Congress’ constitutional role and ensure Congress has a voice in trade policy.”

Other Republicans also seemed nervous about the tariffs’ impact. Speaking to CBS News, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), a staunch ally of the president, wasn’t willing to directly defend the policy.

“I don’t have the president’s strongly held belief [that] this absolutely has to be done,” Johnson said. “But he’s president, I’m not, he ran on this, and I hope he’s absolutely right.”

In polling conducted before the formal rollout of the tariffs on Wednesday, skepticism of restricting free trade was growing. A March survey conducted by Gallup found a record 81% of Americans thought foreign trade was an opportunity for economic growth for the United States, while a record low of 14% thought it was a threat to the economy.

And a Marquette Law School poll released this week found just 28% of Americans thought tariffs helped the U.S. economy, while 58% thought they hurt the economy. Even among white men who didn’t go to college ― typically Trump’s strongest supporters ― only 44% thought the tariffs would help the economy.

Democrats are particularly hopeful attacking Trump’s tariffs provide a route back to winning working-class voters, a group they have famously struggled with since the 2016 election. A projection from The Budget Lab at Yale University found the average American family would pay $3,000 more a year because of the tariffs, eating up nearly 3% of the yearly disposable income.

And working-class families could suffer more: Trump’s tariffs would eat up 4% of the income of poorer households, while only 1.6% of the income of richer families.

Grassley’s decision to introduce a bill reasserting Congress’ power over tariffs caught the attention of some back in his state. On a Thursday call with reporters organized by Fairness for Iowa, a local grassroots campaign, small business owners shared concerns about how they would be hurt by Trump’s tariffs.

“Even Republicans like Chuck Grassley know how incredibly unpopular these tariffs are,” said Shawn Phetteplace of Main Street Alliance, a network of roughly 30,000 small business owners that support left-of-center policies.

Mike Draper, the founder and owner of RAYGUN, a Des Moines-based T-shirt company, said he’s worried about how his company will be impacted, even as it uses U.S.-made products.

“You take something as simple as a T-shirt,” Draper said. “One of our shirts, you could say, comes from Mexico. And there’s a 6% tariff now on it. So costs might go up 6%. But the fabric for that shirt actually comes from the U.S. It’s made with American cotton. It’s milled here, so it crosses into Mexico. So if Mexico wants to retaliate, they can add a cost. Well, now the cost of the fabric has gone up.”

And that’s not all. Though T-shirts are generally made with cotton and polyester, which is oil-based, he said, if tariffs make the input costs go up for making those two commodities, for things like pesticides or production equipment, that means the costs go up again for RAYGUN.

“Do we pass that on to customers? No,” said Draper. “We fear losing market share above all else. So we will just absorb costs and become less profitable, and pay other people what we need to pay to get products forward.”

He said the constant uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs is what makes it especially hard to prepare for financial pain ahead.

“There’s no long term strategy,” said Draper. “It’s just erratic behavior that we will ride out as if this is another pandemic.”