The MAGAverse raged at former Vice President Mike Pence after he blasted President Donald Trump’s tariffs as the “largest peacetime tax in U.S. history.”
“These tariffs are nearly 10 times the size of those imposed during the Trump-Pence administration and will cost American families over $3,500 per year,” he wrote in a social media post that highlighted research from the Advancing American Freedom Foundation.
That increase will “easily erase three years’ worth of pay raises” for most American families, the document said.
On Wednesday, Trump announced universal tariffs, a type of import tax paid by U.S. companies with the costs typically passed on to consumers. The president said he was imposing a baseline 10 percent tax on imports from all countries, with higher rates of up to 49 percent applied to products from about 60 countries.
But according to a recent Fox News poll, 69 percent of respondents thought tariffs would make the products they buy more expensive. That 69 percent was right, Pence said in separate post.
In response to criticism, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—who over the past few months has reportedly been pushing Trump to impose more and more aggressive tariffs, even as the likelihood of recession grows—accused Pence of being “bitter.”
“These tariffs are the definition of America First, which is a concept he doesn’t understand,” Lutnick wrote in a post on X.
Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that “career politicians” like Pence “were part of the problem” and “did nothing for decades while our industrial sector was gutted.”
The comments on Pence’s post were also full of MAGA diehards saying Pence needed to “re-evaluate his loyalties” and asking when he “became a Democrat.”
“Dude we all rejected you,” MAGA influencer Michael J. Morrison wrote. “You don’t need to keep proving us right.”
Trump has labeled the new duties “reciprocal tariffs” and claimed they were based on the tariffs that other countries charge on U.S. products. Financial journalists have calculated that they’re based on the trade deficits between the U.S. and other countries.
Stocks plunged in after-hours trading as investors recoiled at Trump’s move, which threatened to upend the global economic order and spark broader trade wars.
“This just seems like the president having his own sort of school of economics that’s different from everybody else,” said Steve Liesman, CNBC’s senior economics reporter, after the tariffs were announced.
