Lawmakers Are Growing More Skeptical Trump’s Tariffs Will Spark an Industrial Renaissance in the U.S.

“Even the machines that are going to make something in the United States, the machine itself is from another country,” said Sen. Rand Paul.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer
U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer met with Senate Republicans. Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP

Republican Sen. Rand Paul left a lunch meeting with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer this week feeling thoroughly unimpressed — not only with the administration’s strategy, but also with his own colleagues.

“Most of it was Republican senators congratulating him, wishing him well as the industrial czar and pleading for exemptions to the tariffs for their people,” Paul told NOTUS afterward.

“It reminded me of a meeting on industrial policy in the Soviet Union, where you have to be nice to the czar because if you’re nice to the czar, they’ll bequeath upon you exceptions to the iron fist,” he said.