President Donald Trump’s tariffs haven’t only demolished trillions in wealth and raised the chance of a global recession. They’ve also led some prominent Trump supporters to wonder whether they made a huge mistake.

Trump supporters ranging from mega-investor Bill Ackman to anti-vax influencer Alex Berenson have expressed remorse about their decision to support Trump in November. Some have been harsh: Razib Khan, a geneticist and influential science writer on the right, called himself “r*****ed and wrong” for discounting the risk that Trump would actually do the tariffs.

Richard Hanania, a pundit prominent enough to occasionally swap DMs with Elon Musk on X, has gone the furthest. Last week, he published a lengthy Substack essay explaining why he now believes his reasons for voting Trump were mistaken.

“I was expecting something of a repeat of the first administration, with Trump restrained by traditional conservative ideas, personnel, and institutions. As it turned out, the old Reagan coalition was becoming increasingly hollow, replaced by Trump worship, online edgelordism, and late arriving scammers like crypto bros and MAHA,” he concluded.

To liberals, this kind of thing might seem maddening. Trump loudly, explicitly, and repeatedly signaled that he would impose large tariffs on all foreign imports if he returned to power. Many observers, including me, warned that the guardrails that restrained his first presidency had come off — and that universal tariffs were all-but-certain to be enacted this year. Why couldn’t these well-connected, highly-educated Trump supporters see it?

So I decided to ask them.

The story they told, on the whole, was that they backed Trump because they believed he was the best vehicle for winning the culture war. They trusted the people around Trump — Elon Musk and the tech right above all — to make sure that Trump’s wacky non-cultural ideas, like universal tariffs, didn’t cause too much pain.

After last week, they’re starting to think they made a bad bet. They placed too much faith in Musk, who’s proven to be a force for chaos rather than stability, and put so much emphasis on the culture war that they ignored some clear warning signs about Trump’s other commitments. Now they’re worried that their own priorities are at risk.

“Everyone knows this........

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