Politics

NEW: Four GOP Senators Stab Trump In The Back: ‘Extremely Disloyal’

Published

6 days ago

April 3, 2025

Despite last-minute pressure from President Donald Trump, four Senate Republicans on Wednesday bucked demands to back his plan for sharp new tariffs on Canada, a slap in the face that he has promised not to forget.

A midnight missive by President Trump early Wednesday morning wasn’t enough to prevent the four Republicans from joining with unanimous Democratic support to pass a resolution denouncing President Trump’s tariffs on Canada. Of the four — Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Rand Paul (R-KY), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) — only Collins is up for reelection next year while McConnell has announced his intent to retire.

Trump previously implored the four holdouts to “get on the Republican bandwagon, for a change, and fight the Democrats wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”

In a fiery floor speech on Wednesday, Sen. Paul accused Trump of placing a tax hike on the American people by leveeing his new tariffs.

“This is a tax, plain and simple,” he said of Trump’s Canada tariffs. “Taxes should not be enacted by one person. So I will vote today to end the emergency. I will vote today to try to reclaim the power of taxation, the power of the tariff, to where the Constitution designated it should properly be, and that is in Congress.”

The president and economic advisors believe the new round of global tariffs announced on “Liberation Day” will ultimately pay off for Americans in the form of lower costs of goods and more domestic manufacturing. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has vociferously defended new reciprocal tariffs by pointing to astronomical tariffs placed on U.S. goods in some of the affected countries.

Breaking rank only serves to embolden Democratic opposition to his economic agenda, Trump said in a direct warning to the four Republicans.

“They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels,” Trump wrote. “The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it. Why are they allowing Fentanyl to pour into our Country unchecked, and without penalty. What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS?”

He said the four have been “extremely difficult to deal with” and “unbelievably disloyal” to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD).

Despite intra-party ambivalence, President Trump pushed ahead aggressively on Wednesday, announcing reciprocal tariffs on more than 60 countries worldwide.

“In the face of unrelenting economic warfare, the United States can no longer continue with a policy of unilateral economic surrender. We cannot pay the deficits of Canada, Mexico, and so many other countries. We used to do it. We can’t do it anymore. We take care of countries all over the world,” Trump said, Fox News reported. “But we have to take care of our people, and we’re going to take care of our people first.”

“Today we’re standing up for the American worker, and we are finally putting America first,” he added.