WASHINGTON — A singular force is undermining President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax overhaul, his efforts to denuclearize North Korea, his dreams of a high-dollar infrastructure plan, his boosts to America’s energy industry and even his desire for a “big, beautiful” border wall.

The president has met this enemy. It is he.

Trump’s sprawling tariffs — another set just went into effect Thursday — are among the stiffest obstacles to his broader policy agenda, outpacing Democratic resistance and rivaling the controversy that surrounds his administration.

The self-defeating reach of Trump’s trade approach reflects the fact that tariffs are taxes, injecting real costs and consternation into the already fraught issues he has put at the forefront.

Texas businesses and consumers often get stuck in the middle of that push and pull, leaving key stakeholders like the state’s oil and gas industry, for instance, to try to make sense of a president who can so readily give with one hand and so wantonly take with the other.

“The tariffs ... directly conflict with his energy dominance agenda,” said Ed Longanecker, president of the Texas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners Association, while praising Trump for giving his sector a “reprieve from the overregulation.”

President Donald Trump's push to impose tariffs on tens of billions of dollars in imports is undermining some of his other major policy initiatives. GOP allies like Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Dallas had warned him of just that possibility. (Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press)

Trump has seemed to acknowledge these countervailing forces, which put him in the company of many other presidents who couldn't get out of their own way. He pledges that the tariffs will benefit U.S. businesses and workers over time, but he admits there will be at least a short-term hit.

Most striking about the friction is that it was all predictable.

The tariffs, a long-studied public policy tool, are operating just as experts said they would. Trump’s GOP congressional allies, particularly among the Texas delegation, had even warned the president of pocketbook pain and other negative consequences.

"For most Americans, they have the best economy of their lifetimes," Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Dallas, said late last month at a breakfast event hosted by CNBC. "It is principally due to one man: President Donald Trump.

“And if we lose all that prosperity, it will be principally due to one person: President Donald Trump.”

Trump's latest trade escalation came just after midnight Thursday.

The U.S. imposed tariffs on $16 billion in Chinese goods, part of Trump’s effort to bring the economic rival to account for unfair trade practices. Beijing responded with levies on an equal amount of American goods.

Texas and its trade-heavy economy features heavily into the equation, with the state's tech, chemical and energy industries all expressing worry.

And this tranche is just one of many moving parts. Trump already slapped tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese goods, while making plans to do so on $200 billion more. He imposed duties globally on metals, washing machines and solar panels. He's threatened levies on auto imports.

Trump has cast his trade policy as a necessity.

America's struggling steel industry had to be saved, he said. America has been ripped off on trade for too long, he said. Tariffs are the only way to force better trading deals, he said, offering the now-bullish renegotiation talks over the North American Free Trade Agreement as proof.

“We have no other choice as a country,” he said last week.

But that bold and contentious policy has caused some of his other signature initiatives to feel the burn. At the top of the list is the massive $1.5 trillion tax overhaul passed last year that broadly cut taxes for both businesses and individuals.

Many of Trump’s Republican allies cautioned that tariffs would offset that boon.

Levies on goods imported to the U.S. increase costs, which get passed along to businesses or consumers. So even though the economy is still humming — which Trump rightly points out — one early warning sign could be that inflation is already eating into real wage growth.

The Tax Foundation has also projected that if all the tariffs announced by the U.S. and other countries are enacted, it would offset a third of the long-term impact of the tax overhaul.

Those headwinds extend to other White House priorities, too.

Trump has pursued an unprecedented diplomatic course in seeking to denuclearize North Korea. But such action likely depends on cooperation from China. And Trump has admitted the U.S. is “probably being hurt a little bit” there by his growing trade dispute with Beijing.

The Trump administration wants to relax future fuel efficiency standards for cars, with its rationale hinging on the idea that it would lower prices. But automakers like Toyota, which has its North American headquarters in Plano, have warned tariffs would have the opposite effect on the sales lot.

Then there is Trump’s lifelong desire to build things.

His ballyhooed proposal to revamp the nation’s crumbling infrastructure has long been dormant. But tariffs on steel and aluminum could only add to the challenge since the increased prices for key input materials would eat away at already scarce dollars for highways and bridges.

That math would extend also to Trump’s marquee border wall.

The president is having a hard time, as it is, getting Congress to fund the contentious project. A “big, beautiful” wall would include lots of steel, especially with Trump’s desire for see-through barriers in Texas and other areas. His tariffs would only add to the price tag.

“The more expensive it gets, with a finite amount of money dedicated for infrastructure projects, the less infrastructure you’re going to get for your dollar,” said Brian Turmail of the Associated General Contractors of America, taking a broad view of the infrastructure landscape.

The energy industry in Texas and beyond is already recording this dynamic, even amid other action by the Trump administration to free the sector from costly regulations.

Oil and gas operators — companies that rely heavily on specialized steel — have been among the most vocal in complaining about Trump’s metal tariffs, peppering the U.S. Commerce Department with thousands of requests for exclusions from the levies.

The squeeze comes as the industry is desperate to build more pipelines out of the Permian Basin, where booming crude oil production is creating a bottleneck.

So while Trump has pledged to spur "American energy dominance," Plains All-American Pipeline in Houston is being forced to choose between taking a $40 million hit on steel it imports from overseas or delaying a key project to look for other suppliers.

“While we greatly appreciate the president’s commitment to supporting domestic energy production in the oil and gas industry, we essentially see this as a tax on U.S.-based producers, large and small,” said Longanecker, the Texas energy booster.

The lasting impact of Trump’s drag on his own policies is not yet clear. Other presidents have found such self-inflicted wounds to matter quite a lot.

Take Franklin D. Roosevelt, who tried in 1937 to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with additional justices friendly to the sweeping initiatives he pushed after the Great Depression. The plan backfired, turning members of his party against him and effectively squashing the New Deal.

“It ended the greatest effort at reform in American history,” said Texas A&M presidential scholar George Edwards.

No one would argue Trump’s trade tactics and the resulting ramifications are on that level. But anything that snags Trump’s agenda at this point adds up, particularly since his window could be shrinking to enact major policy ahead of the contentious midterm elections.

“Anyone who knows about history would understand that,” Edwards said, pointing out that presidents typically lose clout in Congress in the midterm election after they assume office. “But Trump doesn’t.”