Trump's vision faces little internal dissent. Can a tariff crisis change that?

Washington Post

10-04-2025

As stock markets swung wildly in recent days, spooked by President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs, a few overseas circuit breakers halted frantic trades and initiated a mandatory cool-off period.
But inside the White House, no circuit breakers engaged as Trump surged toward a long-sought tariff plan that he unveiled in the Rose Garden last week.
Only on Wednesday did allies succeed in persuading Trump to pause many of the tariffs, after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, tech billionaire Elon Musk and various titans of Wall Street mounted arguments to roll them back — and as financial markets experienced their greatest crisis since the start of the coronavirus pandemic five years ago.
'People were getting yippy,' Trump told reporters, explaining his sudden reversal. But he defended his decision to pursue a tariff agenda that brought the world to the brink of a global calamity, with economists increasingly predicting a recession. 'No other president would have done what I did,' Trump said.
To current and former Trump officials, the tariff crisis is a harbinger of where the second term could be headed: a president unburdened by reelection, unmoved by outside counsel and with fewer guardrails to rein him in. Some longtime Republicans who served in the first administration and often opposed or slow-walked Trump's policies on trade, immigration and other priorities have been barred entry this time around, replaced by officials whose most salient quality in Trump's eyes appears to be their staunch support for his America First' agenda — and their personal loyalty to him.
Less certain is whether the near-meltdown of the global economy this week will shift that quality of Trump's current term. The financial peril is not nearly over; Trump is standing by a nontrivial tariff of 10 percent for most imports, along with massive levies just for China. Other potentially tumultuous policy initiatives may loom: larger-scale deportations, changes to vaccine approvals, more aggression against allies. Will advisers be emboldened to continue pushing him away from the brink? Or will Trump grow impatient with the intervention that he clearly sought to avoid in his second act?
Just hours before he partially reversed himself, Trump made clear where his heart wants to take him.
'This time, I'm doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs,' he told Republican House members at a black-tie dinner Tuesday.
From the start of the tariff rollout, Trump dictated the terms.
He got the kind of curated event he loves, a Rose Garden announcement with workers in hard hats and Day-Glo vests. He got another favorite feature: days of worldwide media attention as the reaction and economic impact played out.
Supporters see the past week as a victory, saying that the president has been further empowered to enact his agenda, which has long included imposing sweeping tariffs, deporting illegal immigrants and other goals that were sometimes stymied in his first term.
'He campaigned on these themes. He made these promises. … He deserves a team that's not going to countermand those directions,' said Paul Dans, who served in the first Trump administration and as director of the Heritage Foundation's personnel and policy plan known as Project 2025, which provided a road map for the new administration. 'There's plenty of other checks and balances on the president under our constitutional system, as well as the Fourth Estate.'
Others praised Trump for his brinkmanship, saying that his tariff announcement had put pressure on other countries to make economic concessions to the United States.
But eight former officials warned that flanking the president with loyalists less inclined to talk the president out of his worst impulses could backfire, evidenced by the days of financial chaos. Several pointed to the elevation of Peter Navarro, the White House economic aide who went to prison last year rather than testify before Congress about his involvement in Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, as one example. Navarro has been a staunch supporter of Trump's new tariff strategy.
'I think Trump was frustrated that he felt thwarted in the first administration on tariffs,' said Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former vice president Mike Pence — one of the many former Trump 1.0 officials who is persona non grata in the second administration. 'There's part of him that wants to prove all of his naysayers wrong.'
A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy, said the White House's recent tariff deliberations would have unfolded much differently eight years ago — and no internal agreement would have been reached, most likely.
'Unlike the first term,' the official said, 'everyone here is aligned on a singular mission, and that's to provide the president with a wide amount of options so that then he can make his final decision.'
Former officials also noted that some of the ideas Trump floated in his first term, only to be slow-walked by his aides — firing missiles into Mexico, revisiting the safety of childhood vaccines and other musings — could become realities in his second term, or already have taken shape.
'He was a hyperactive generator of ideas, many of them bad,' William P. Barr wrote in 'One Damn Thing After Another,' his memoir of serving as attorney general in the first Trump administration. In the book, Barr wrote that he and other senior officials batted around the 'legally problematic ideas' floated by the president and others, and traded roles on who would attempt to talk Trump down. 'We referred to this as choosing who would 'eat the grenade,' ' Barr wrote. Barr did not respond to a request for comment.
'Sometimes the worst thing for Trump was to 'let Trump be Trump,' ' said one former official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations with the president. 'We had to protect the president from himself.'
Asked about the White House's personnel strategy and past aides' criticism of the president, a spokesman criticized 'anonymous swamp bureaucrats' and said that Trump had received resounding support from voters for his agenda.
'The Trump administration is aligned on delivering on the American people's democratic mandate to change a broken status quo in Washington that oversaw tens of millions of illegal migrants walking into our country, countless Americans dying from drugs being trafficked in by terrorist cartels, and chronic trade deficits hollowing our country's industry,' White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.
The personnel differences between the first and second Trump administration can be seen across government, where Trump has traded centrists, longtime politicians and executives from his first term for avowed supporters of his Make America Great Again agenda.
Gone are financial officials such as Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, who dissuaded Trump from pushing tariffs last time. Also gone are Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, family members who had walk-in privileges in the Oval Office and served as moderating forces by steering some hires and nudging the president toward the political center, former officials said.
'Trump and his circle believe that these traditional GOP types restrained him and that that was bad,' Avik Roy, founder of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank that promotes free markets, and an adviser to past GOP presidential candidates, wrote in a text message.
Trump's first-term staffing also reflected the compressed deadline he faced to build a government in the wake of a surprise victory against Hillary Clinton. The result: an eclectic bunch of advisers with divergent ideologies — and levels of loyalty to Trump.
'In 2016 we won at the last second,' said Stephen K. Bannon, a top Trump adviser during his first campaign and the start of his presidency. 'We didn't even have a transition team set up before the day after we won.'
In the four years between the president's first and second terms, Project 2025, the America First Policy Institute and other Trump-aligned initiatives sprang up. Trump assembled loyalists to run his campaign, including people who stood by him during months of political exile in 2021. Many are now working in the West Wing.
Top advisers, including Stephen Miller, came highly prepared to act on Trump's long-stated goals, such as sweeping deportations and aggressive tariffs, as well as more recent grievances, such as punishments for law firms that have taken up cases against him.
Anyone not on board with Trump's targets wasn't brought into the White House this time, allies have said.
'This has been years in the making, these executive orders as planned,' Bannon said, praising the White House's pace of issuing orders. 'You talk about urgency. Think of the thinking that went through putting the team together.'
The approach has also meant trading expertise for loyalists, with striking results.
In the first administration, advisers with conventional political or health-care backgrounds talked Trump out of plans to review the safety of decades-old vaccines, publicly praising the president as a measles outbreak spiked in early 2019.
In the second administration, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime anti-vaccine activist who threw his support to Trump last year — has had a relatively free hand to raise vaccine questions, only grudgingly supporting measles vaccines as an outbreak rages, with two children already dead from the vaccine-preventable disease. Former Trump officials worry that the approach will backfire with more preventable deaths and, potentially, future public health crises.
Others note how in the first Trump administration, the president regularly praised FEMA and deferred to its emergency-management leaders. In the second administration, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's former campaign manager and someone with no emergency-management expertise, is helping oversee the dismantling of that agency, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the situation. The effort has worried current and former officials who say it will backfire on Trump by weakening the disaster-response agency before this summer's hurricane season. FEMA referred questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond to a request for comment.
In their memoirs, former senior officials also recount numerous examples of Trump proposing ideas that they describe as ill-conceived, illegal and perilous to the global order — and their efforts to talk the president out of them.
Mark T. Esper, Trump's former secretary of defense, described a conversation where the president mused about firing missiles into Mexican drug labs while publicly denying U.S. responsibility.
'This was not rational thinking. Moreover, it only underscored in my mind later how important it was for me to stay in my post,' Esper writes in 'A Sacred Oath,' describing how he warned Trump that the attack would represent an act of war and strategized to slow-walk the president's idea. 'What if another secretary of defense, my replacement, went along with this? Lord knows there were plenty of people in the mix who thought the president's outlandish ideas made sense.'
Esper did not respond to a request for comment.
Barr describes efforts to talk Trump out of ideas that Barr believed would backfire, such as the president's desired executive order on birthright citizenship. 'Sometimes it seemed the worse the idea, the more fixated on it he became,' Barr wrote in his memoir. This time, Trump signed such an order on his first day in office.
Trump's push for tariffs also winds through multiple officials' memoirs, with aides discussing how they headed off his harshest policies. In his book, 'Breaking History,' Kushner relayed how he and other senior officials encouraged Trump to back off plans to immediately impose tariffs on Mexico in 2019.
'Trump consented to the one-week delay, a small but significant win that bought us a few days to try to broker a deal,' Kushner wrote in his memoir. A spokesperson for Kushner did not respond to a request for comment.
Navarro, who repeatedly backed the president's push for tariffs, has voiced his frustration with the resistance in the first administration.
'I was a one-man China hawk band totally without power or allies in a White House filled with a symphony of Wall Street transactionalists and China dove appeasers,' Navarro wrote in his own memoir, 'In Trump Time.'
Now, Navarro and his allies are ascendant in the West Wing — and their policies have begun to play out.
'It really is a story about first term versus second term,' said the senior White House official, talking about the process of landing on last week's tariff deal. 'It goes to show how the team is constructed in a way that's different from the first term.'