Even those expected to back Trump’s tariff move are responding with unease. Over the weekend, that unease turned to hostility.
For a policy designed to protect the United States, the coalition of defenders is surprisingly small. This weekend, Elon Musk emerged as one of the critics of the policy. He launched a pointed attack on Peter Navarro, senior counselor for trade and manufacturing for U.S. president Donald Trump.
His criticism came after Navarro defended the measures in a CNN interview, insisting the tariffs would ultimately pay off. Posting on X, Musk mocked Navarro’s academic credentials, calling his Harvard Ph.D. “a bad thing, not a good thing,” and dismissed his practical experience: “He ain’t built shit.”
Speaking to an audience at a right-wing League party event in Italy on Saturday, Musk called for zero tariffs between the United States and the European Union. Since Trump’s announcement Tesla’s stock price is down 15 percent.
“Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side that you are crazy.”
Bill Ackman, hedge fund manager and longtime Trump supporter.
Even Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager and longtime supporter of Trump’s broader economic agenda, is offering an unconventional take. “Sometimes the best strategy in a negotiation is convincing the other side that you are crazy,” he wrote on X.
According to Ackman, the market responded favorably. It went up more than one percent when Trump referred to “reciprocal tariffs” in his Rose Garden speech. It was only when he put up a chart showing the tariffs, which Ackman acknowledged was “inaccurate,” that the markets plunged.
The tariff chart had surreal elements. Among its steepest penalties was a 50 percent tariff on Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a tiny French island off Canada’s coast. Even the Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Antarctic outpost populated only by penguins, didn’t escape. It was hit with a 10 percent tariff.
An important characteristic of a great leader, Ackman said, is a “willingness to change course when the facts change or when the initial strategy is not working.” He added, “We have seen Trump do this before. Two days in, however, it is much too early to form a view about his tariff strategy.”
The CNN Fear & Greed Index collapsed to 4, a reading lower than during the worst days of the 2008 financial crisis.
The markets see something else entirely. The S&P 500 plunged 9.1 percent in the week following the announcement. The CNN Fear & Greed Index collapsed to 4, a reading lower than during the worst days of the 2008 financial crisis.
Curtis Yarvin, one of the most controversial American thinkers whose ideas helped shape the Trumpian right, has voiced skepticism. Yarvin acknowledged the emotional appeal of reviving the U.S. manufacturing industry. “Trump always has the right reflexes,” he wrote in his latest essay titled The Problem with Trumpian Mercantilism. “But a reflex is not a plan.”
For Yarvin, the flaw isn’t the instinct to protect American workers. It’s the belief that tariffs, in isolation, can rebuild a complex industrial ecosystem hollowed out decades ago. “You can’t just pour fertilizer into water and get a tree,” he warned.
Trump struck a bullish tone. “Big business is not worried about the Tariffs, because they know they are here to stay… BIG, BEAUTIFUL DEAL,” he wrote on TruthSocial on Friday. Over the weekend he urged Americans to “hang tough.” “It won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic,” he added on Saturday.
Tariffs are not totally insane
While the execution has been erratic, the underlying grievance is being acknowledged. “Not completely and totally insane, but it is extremely disruptive,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University, to The New York Times.
US import tariffs back at 1908 levels
Part of the argument for tariffs is that they are good for U.S. jobs. The employment effect, the administration thinks, is worth the higher prices and economic harm. “But that’s not really how they work,” said economist Steven Durlauf, a professor at the University of Chicago. In fact, tariffs are likely to cause negative employment effects because of how they ripple through the economy.
Adverse impact on employment
In a note published on the University of Chicago’s website, Durlauf pointed to the steel tariffs from Trump’s first term. “These slightly raised employment in the steel industry,” he wrote. “However, they caused an overall decline of manufacturing employment that was an order of magnitude higher than the modest gain in steel jobs.” The logic is simple. More than two million U.S. jobs rely on steel as an input, while fewer than 150,000 Americans work in steel production itself. “These jobs are adversely impacted by rising production costs caused by tariffs on steel,” he explained.
Wheaton supports the targeted use of tariffs. But he criticized the current White House strategy as inconsistent and volatile. The tariffs are “so left field you need binoculars.”
US will lose AI-race
Others in Trump’s orbit have become more cautious. Charles Gasparino, a senior correspondent at Fox Business and author of Go Woke, Go Broke, reported that top financial executives have privately warned the White House that the tariff plan could trigger more than just market volatility.
“It could ignite something known as stagflation,” he wrote in the New York Post. The broader fear, Gasparino added, is that Trump is “playing chicken with the rest of the industrialized world” and risking a disruption of global trade not seen in decades.
Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides Management and a self-described tariff-agnostic, sounded the alarm on America’s competitiveness in artificial intelligence. “These tariffs essentially guarantee that America will lose the AI race,” he said. Critical hardware like servers and storage switches will become significantly more expensive. The tariff exemption for semiconductors, he said, is “irrelevant for AI.”
“I say all of this as someone who was open-minded to tariffs that were thoughtfully constructed, gradually phased in, and accompanied by massive deregulation,” Baker added.
Geopolitically, nothing matters more than winning AI.
These tariffs, as constructed, essentially guarantee that America will lose “AI” by making America the most expensive place on earth to build AI datacenters.
The semiconductor exemption was irrelevant for AI. Datacenter…— Gavin Baker (@GavinSBaker) April 4, 2025
Voter support
Despite the criticism, Trump continues to enjoy strong support from his base. A Wall Street Journal poll conducted from March 27 to April 1, just before the sweeping tariffs were unveiled, found that 93 percent of Trump’s 2024 voters still approved of his performance.
However, the same poll showed that 54 percent of voters opposed the levies, and 75 percent believed they would raise consumer prices. Tariffs once held appeal as a campaign promise. Now their real-world implementation is testing faith in Trump’s economic stewardship.