Amy Walter:

The Trump that we're seeing now that we saw on display most recently in that Cabinet meeting with his arms crossed, saying, this is a witch-hunt, is the same Trump that we saw on the campaign trail.

He believed that Hillary Clinton should be investigated. He believed she was the one doing the wrongdoing, and that anything about what he was doing was certainly off-limits and/or there was no collusion, as the president likes to talk about.

But what he talked a lot about on the campaign trail as well was making America great again, right, and that China is taking — making suckers of us, taking jobs from us, the trade is unfair. That has been a consistent them not just during the campaign, but really pretty much his entire time in the public spotlight.

So, the fact that he is actually going out and encouraging tariffs on China should not be surprising. To your question, though, what do people think about this, and, among Republicans, there's not unity on this. A whole bunch of congressional Republicans would rather spend the next few months before the midterms talking about the things that they have done, tax cuts, and they would like to talk about the booming economy.

They worry that tariffs could hurt the booming economy and take the focus off their tax cuts. Theoretically, the folks that could get harmed the most by the tariffs are people that are the strongest Trump supporters, those in red states that are very ag-dependent, agriculture-dependent, but these are also some of the president's strongest supporters.

And I think he has a lot of rope with them. I think they're going to give him a lot of the benefit of the doubt on this. I hear it from people that I talk to in that part to have country, saying, you know what? I'm worried about commodities prices, but, at the same time, I trust that the president is going to do the right thing. He's a negotiator, he's a businessman, he knows what he's doing.