How the Washington establishment is losing out to little-known Trump advisers on trade
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson privately warned senior trade officials on Tuesday that President Trump’s proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum could endanger the U.S. national security relationship with allies, according to five people familiar with the meeting.
The morning meeting came as Republican lawmakers grasped for a strategy to persuade Trump to change his mind, with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), who had loudly criticized the plan on Monday, telling members in a closed-door meeting not to bully Trump on the decision. He said it could backfire and make things even worse.
And then on Tuesday evening, top White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, who had been furiously fighting the tariffs for months, announced his resignation. His exit will remove the most vocal critic of Trump’s new trade agenda from internal debates.
The trio of events showed in stark fashion how establishment figures in Washington — national security leaders, top lawmakers, the former president of Goldman Sachs — had suddenly found themselves in a losing battle with a small posse of Trump advisers who have nurtured the president’s long-running skepticism of foreign trade.
“We are urging caution,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday.
The last-ditch efforts to get Trump to scale back, if not reverse, the tariffs came after a power struggle within the White House where Cohn, Mattis and others routinely tried to dissuade Trump from launching what many fear will be a trade war that could rattle the world’s largest economies.
Yet the success of other officials, including White House aide Peter Navarro and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, speaks to how Trump, in his second year in office, is fighting the constraints that have held him back from pursuing some of his most unorthodox positions.
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