President Donald Trump said he pushed his so-called “Liberation Day” from yesterday to today to avoid April Fool’s Day—“because then nobody would believe what I said.” Now, instead of falling on a date devoted to pranks, Trump’s announcement about a new wave of reciprocal tariffs comes at a moment when his White House is facing a sobering reality.
Last night, Republicans took a double-digit loss in a closely watched Wisconsin election—a campaign that became a referendum on top Trump adviser Elon Musk—and had to sweat out wins in a pair of deep-red Florida House districts. The first major scandal of Trump’s second term, his team’s use of Signal to discuss sensitive military attack plans, could spawn an independent investigation. Some influential MAGA luminaries and immigration hawks have begun to criticize the administration’s deportation tactics for lacking due process. Consumer prices aren’t falling, but the stock market sure is. And as Trump moves to escalate his trade war, fears of a recession are rising.
For the first time since Trump reclaimed the White House, some of his close allies and aides are privately acknowledging that a president who returned to office after a historic political comeback has been knocked off his stride. They admit that the past two weeks—particularly the Signal scandal, which has led some congressional Republicans to defy Trump and demand a probe—have been the most challenging of his term.
For months now, Trump has tried very hard to make “Liberation Day” a thing. Soon after his January swearing-in, he christened the day as the moment when he would enact reciprocal tariffs on major trading partners, particularly those that contribute the most to the $1.2 trillion U.S. trade deficit. He first eyed holding the day in February but pushed back the implementation of the levies to April 1—the date by which he ordered the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department to complete studies on what the policies might look like in practice—before nudging it one more day.
[Read: Wisconsin’s message for Trump]
At 7:06 eastern time this morning, Trump saluted the occasion on Truth Social: “IT’S LIBERATION DAY IN AMERICA!” But the more telling post had come six hours earlier, at nearly 1 a.m. EST. Trump advisers have long told me that the clearest revelations about the president’s frustrations and insecurities come late at night, when he is alone with his phone. In this case, his anger was directed at four fellow Republicans—Senators Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul—whom he said were being “extremely difficult to deal with and unbelievably disloyal” by opposing tariffs on Canada. “What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS?” Trump wrote.
Trump, used to tightly controlling the GOP during partisan fights, was furious that he was not getting a united Republican front for his prized tariffs, two White House officials and a close outside ally told me, granted anonymity to discuss internal conversations.
While those four Republicans have gone public with their misgivings about the tariffs, many others have quietly expressed concerns to colleagues and reporters, or tried to lobby the White House for carve-outs that would spare their state’s constituents or favored industries. Business leaders who thought Trump was largely bluffing with his trade-war talk (the tariffs in his first term ended up being milder than expected) have also tried to lobby the president or Chief of Staff Susie Wiles to ease up, the White House officials told me.
Trump has vacillated on the size and targets of the tariffs—they were still being settled in the hours before the Rose Garden announcement, one of the White House officials confirmed to me—but never on whether to impose them. Trump assigns outsize weight to the stock market when judging the nation’s economy, but even tumbles on Wall Street have not dissuaded him. Trump possesses few consistent political ideologies but has promoted tariffs since the 1980s as a means to reduce trade deficits and spur U.S. manufacturing, and he has dismissed economists’ warnings that they would drive up prices for Americans and potentially stagnate the nation’s economy.
[Read: The Trump administration accidentally texted me its war plans]
“Republicans are crashing the American economy in real time and driving us to a recession. This is not Liberation Day; it’s Recession Day,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol today.
The pushback to his tariffs has not been the only source of ire for Trump during a sudden eruption of negative headlines. Democrats seized on the results in three off-year elections yesterday, held just 70 days into Trump’s term. Although Republicans won both special elections to fill vacant Florida congressional seats, both winning candidates earned about 20 percent fewer votes than Trump did in those same districts in November. Of note: In the ruby-red Florida panhandle, Escambia County went Democratic for the first time in any national election since 1992—a result, many political observers have said, of the Trump administration’s cuts to Veterans Affairs programs in a region with many military families.
The face of those cuts, of course, is Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has chainsawed its way through the federal bureaucracy on Trump’s orders. And Musk—whose personal poll numbers have been cratering along with Tesla’s stock—received much of the blame for the outcome of yesterday’s Wisconsin state-supreme-court election. The world’s richest man threw himself into the race with his time and fortune, declaring that “humanity’s destiny rests” on the outcome. Despite the lofty stakes, Musk’s preferred candidate lost by 10 points.
Some in Trump’s orbit hope that the loss might represent the beginning of the end of Musk’s influence. For weeks, Republicans in Congress have quietly complained to the White House that Musk’s often indiscriminate cuts are making them the target of voter anger. Cabinet secretaries’ complaints also led Trump to somewhat rein in his billionaire aide. Trump has told advisers in recent days that Musk will begin winding down his time in the White House in the weeks ahead, likely when his 130-day window as a “special government employee” runs out at the end of next month, according to the two White House officials.
“Musk’s ‘sell by date’ is rapidly approaching,” the outside ally wrote to me. “He was a heat shield for a time. Now he’s a heat source.”
[Read: Is DOGE losing steam?]
Trump has at times chafed at Musk’s more politically incendiary comments, such as his declaration that Social Security is “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” But the president, according to the two White House officials, has told advisers that—at least for now—he plans to have Musk remain in his orbit even after he leaves the administration.
Trump has recently taken to phoning allies late at night to complain about a series of negative stories, according to the outside ally and another person who has received such calls. He remains angry at National Security Adviser Mike Waltz for inadvertently adding Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, to a Signal chat about attack plans to strike Houthi rebels in Yemen. He has resisted firing Waltz so as not to be seen as giving in to the media, though he has fumed about Waltz having Goldberg’s number in his phone. Having pledged to bring a quick end to wars in both the Middle East and Ukraine, Trump has watched as a cease-fire in Gaza has been shattered and as Vladimir Putin has refused to agree to American terms to bring a temporary halt to the fighting in Europe. And although Trump has delighted in the showy deportations of alleged gang members to a notorious El Salvador prison, he was annoyed that friendly media voices including Joe Rogan questioned a lack of due process, and that the right-wing pundit Ann Coulter openly balked at the arrest of a Columbia University graduate student who led pro-Palestine protests.
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment for this article. But the administration is clearly hoping that Liberation Day will reset the political narrative.
Trump has “spent a lot of political capital in his first 100 days, but Republicans will see it as a good investment if he can ultimately deliver on tax cuts and deficit reductions,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and on then-Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told me. “But recessions and inflation are politically devastating for any president. Trump is risking both with his trade wars, so it’s understandably making his allies extremely nervous.”
In a tacit acknowledgment of the skepticism the tariffs are generating, the White House pushed back the Rose Garden event from early afternoon until after the markets had closed.