Perhaps no one has been as blunt about this as Trump ally Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) was this weekend: “We’ve just got to accept the pain that comes with standing up to China,” he said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

In other words: Deal with it. That’s a politically difficult point to argue, and it’s a potentially destructive message for his party in particular.

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That’s because farmers in Trump states have already been on the front lines of his trade war, and Republican lawmakers representing them have been warning for a while that they can’t take much more of it.

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There are some murmurs that farmers who have stood by Trump in states he won in 2016 are starting to break. Soybean farmers, pork producers and cherry producers in particular have said they’re struggling with the tariffs already in place. Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) warned as much to Politico: “They can feel it. The farm community up ‘til now has really supported the president without flinching. But eventually you flinch.”

“The retaliatory tariffs will have a significant consequence to Kansans,” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) also told Politico then.

“This is a very serious thing, and these are the president’s people,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told Politico. “They want him to be successful. But there’s a limit to how long they can hang in there."

Senators in pro-Trump, heavy agricultural states such as Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) have been leading the charge, albeit less and less as time goes on, to try to get Trump to stand down with his tariffs.

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“I’m not sure if you talk to him face to face, he hears everything you say,” Grassley told The Washington Post in May, explaining why he planned to write a letter to Trump explaining farmers’ concerns.

But as Trump’s trade war goes on, Republican senators are less and less likely to speak up about it for their constituents. A GOP Senate aide close to trade negotiations told The Fix in June, just a month later, that some senators have come to the conclusion that it’s bad politics to challenge Trump on this anymore.

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“Arguing for a free-trade position is very classic Republican … very Bush,” this aide said. “And this isn’t the party of Bush anymore.”

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That comment underscores what I’ve argued, that no issue underscores how entirely Trump has remade the Republican Party in his image more than trade. Republicans used to be the party of free trade; now Congress is letting Trump reverse that. It’s a given that the hardcore Republican voters support Trump fiercely and are willing to go along with him to a degree.

Playing the long game isn’t necessarily a bad thing when creating policy. It’s ostensibly preferable that our leaders don’t act for short-term gain. But there is obvious political risk in playing this particular long game: Global deals can take years to pay off, and that is really inconvenient for Trump. China isn’t backing down, forcing him to consider putting even more tariffs on Chinese goods soon that could affect all American consumers. This comes right as the global economy is slowing down, and the United States faces the potential of a recession, just in time for the 2020 election.

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There’s also evidence that Trump’s team has some selling to do on this. Forty-five percent of Republicans tell a May CBS News poll that they think the tariffs on China will make the economy better — hardly consensus.

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More recent polling shows Americans’ skepticism of Trump’s trade war is continuing. A majority of Americans, 62 percent, say in an August Pew Research Center survey that the U.S. should build a stronger relationship with China vs. get tougher with China. That survey also found Republicans and people who lean Republican are split about whether the current economic ties between the U.S. and China (meaning, the current trade war) is good or bad, with 48 percent saying bad and 49 percent saying good.