McConnell Shreds Trump’s Tariff Plans: ‘They Raise the Prices For American Consumers’

Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pulled no punches when asked if he supports former President Donald Trump’s calling for massive tariffs on products made overseas, including a 200 percent tariff on farm equipment.

“Former President Trump has proposed a 200% tariff on John Deere tractors if they’re made in Mexico. Are you concerned that some of these tariff proposals by the GOP nominee could drive up costs for consumers or hurt bourbon exporters in Kentucky, for example?” asked an off-camera reporter during a Capitol Hill presser on Tuesday.

McConnell broke sharply with Trump and said, “Yeah, I’m not a fan of tariffs.”

“They raise prices for American consumers. I’m more of a free trade kind of Republican that remembers how many jobs are created by the exports that we engage in. And so I’m not a tariff fan,” McConnell concluded.

Trump on Monday claimed, “They’ve announced a few days ago that they’re going to move a lot of their manufacturing business to Mexico. I’m just notifying John Deere right now: If you do that, we’re putting a 200% tariff on everything that you want to sell into the United States.” Trump’s comments were made at a policy roundtable in Pennsylvania, hosted by the Protecting America Initiative, and immediately drew scorn from economists.

“You’ll find no serious, respected trade economists thinking that this is a good idea,” Ian Sheldon, a professor of Agricultural Marketing, Trade and Policy at The Ohio State University, told Business Insider on Wednesday. Other economists noted the policy would violate the Trump-brokered United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which took the place of NAFTA in 2020.