President Donald Trump’s second-term honeymoon appears to be coming to an end as he faces a worldwide rebuke to his tariffs and the first significant signs of Republican frustration after a sequence of blunders and setbacks for his administration.

Thursday’s tariff-inspired stock market drop comes shortly after a high-profile electoral loss in Wisconsin by a candidate firmly embraced by top Trump aide Elon Musk, the bubbling of opposition to Trump’s economic policy by Senate Republicans and a Signal controversy that upended the notion that his second term was more professional and less prone to leaks.

Trump’s emboldened approach to his second term has made clear he may not yank the reins on his maximalist policies at the first signs of stress. But while he and top aides are suddenly calling for patience and an acceptance of some economic pain in the near term, this is the same politician who, running against former President Joe Biden on the campaign trail just last year, labeled high inflation as a presidency “killer.”

“He ran to lower prices and be a good steward of the economy. After less than three months, people are talking about a recession. People are anxious and many are angry,” said former Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.). “Raising the price of a car by $2,000 or $10,000 — that’s a lot of money to most people and they’re being awfully cavalier about that.”

The culmination of blunders has led to Trump’s lowest approval rating since his return to office – 43 percent in a new Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week. The poll showed Trump’s approval down two points from a March 21-23 survey and four points below his rating just after taking office in January.

Trump’s tariff policy, which has stupefied allies and countless economists, could permanently hobble his presidency and complicate GOP plans to advance a sweeping agenda.

JP Morgan’s initial assessment of Trump’s tariff policy labeled it “the largest tax increase since the Revenue Act of 1968” and concluded that its “impact alone could take the economy perilously close to slipping into recession.”

Despite their awareness of Trump’s willingness to punish dissenting Republicans by backing primary challenges, some GOP lawmakers did little to mask their concern about the economy on Thursday amid the stock market sell-off.

“It’s pretty rough right now,” Sen. Shelley Moore-Capito (R-W.V.) acknowledged. “We need to see where this is going to settle. He says it’s a negotiation, let’s see.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), a long-time critic of tariffs, didn’t mince words in stating that “trade wars with our partners hurt working people most.”

On Thursday, Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) introduced a bill to reestablish limits on the president’s ability to impose unilateral tariffs without congressional approval. That legislation, which would require Congress to approve all new tariffs within 60 days to prevent their expiration, amounted to the first significant attempt by lawmakers to reclaim Trump’s expansive uses of executive authority since reclaiming the Oval Office.

“For too long, Congress has delegated its clear authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce to the executive branch,” Grassley said in a statement explaining his effort to “ensure Congress has a voice in trade policy.”

On Wednesday evening shortly after Trump’s Rose Garden announcement, four Republican senators joined their Democratic colleagues in a vote to overturn the president’s tariffs against Canada, a rare if mostly symbolic moment of pushback.

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has no plans to allow a vote on the measure and continued to defer to Trump on his approach to the economy — even after special elections this week that showed Republicans are likely to face strong headwinds next November when they try to hold onto their razor-thin majority.

But as Republicans couched their responses by suggesting that the tariffs are merely the start of a negotiation, the White House emphatically asserted that Trump has no plans to negotiate.

“I don’t think there’s any plan for President Trump to back off these tariffs,” said Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during an interview on CNN. “This is the reordering of global trade.”

Trump appears to feel the same, likening the tariffs to a permanent medical procedure on Truth Social.

“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING. THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

Sharp tariff criticism comes as the White House has unsuccessfully attempted to squash fallout from the Signal group chat controversy – an issue that’s led to a slow drip of damning follow-up reports. The administration’s refusal to take ownership and course correct sensitive communications going forward has allowed the controversy to linger.

When asked this week about how the Department of Government Efficiency-lead investigation into the Signal leak was going, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt provided no detail and said the “case was closed.”

But the enduring thorn in Trump’s side is far from removed.

The Pentagon’s Inspector General’s office said Thursday it will open a probe into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of the messaging app to share information about military strikes. Hegseth, alongside the White House, has continuously denied that any classified information was shared in the chat.

In his first term, Trump was highly attuned to stock market fluctuations and any public pushback from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, not to mention electoral defeats.

On Tuesday, Republicans lost their campaign for a pivotal seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court even after Musk, the tech billionaire Trump has tasked with slashing the federal government, spent $26 million to try to defeat the Democrat-backed judge.

Turnout in the election was particularly high for a race of its kind and marked by record spending. The Democratic victory points to a strong mobilization of the party in the swing-state that Trump narrowly flipped in 2024.

And although the GOP held onto two Florida seats left vacant by Trump appointees, their margins were far slimmer than expected.

That, of course, was before Trump announced his tariffs, which could create a far bigger electoral backlash next fall.

“Trump won because voters expected more progress from Trump and Republicans on [inflation] than from Biden and [Kamala] Harris. So, to start a trade war and have ‘short term pain’ as a fallback message, well, that’s not much better than the ‘transitory’ inflation message that hurt Biden and the Democrats,” said Kevin Madden, a GOP strategist in Washington and partner at the consulting firm Penta.

And American voters have rarely demonstrated much patience or a high tolerance for economic sacrifice during peacetime. Madden continued: “As Buddha once said: ‘Your problem is you think you have time.’ Congress has to return home to states and districts in just a few months. They may get an earful. Virginia and New Jersey have big statewide elections in the fall, and before you know it we are in a midterm election year.”

Beleaguered Democrats, finally buoyed this week by the Wisconsin election results and New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker’s record-setting 25-hour floor speech, believe Trump’s recklessness with the global economy could weaken what has long been his top political selling point.

“There is a significant group of voters who didn’t like Trump but figured he would be good on the economy. So they will likely be disabused of that notion now,” said Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist in Washington. “The question — and I think the answer is yes — is then whether Dems can provide an alternate theory of governance that doesn’t read this response as a mandate.”