In the video, the congressman from Western Pennsylvania said Trump’s “trade strategy has been chaotic, inconsistent. We should not treat our economic allies, like Canada, the same as trade cheats, like communist China.”

At the same time, Deluzio said targeted tariffs can be a “powerful tool” that, “used strategically,” can produce good results. On the broader question, he basically agreed with the president’s criticism of free trade.

“I think a wrong-for-decades consensus in Washington on ‘free trade’ has been a race to the bottom,” he said.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), an avowed socialist who caucuses with the Democrats and occasionally runs for the party’s presidential nomination, was also critical but conflicted when it came to Trump’s tariffs.

“Targeted tariffs can be a powerful tool to stop corporations from outsourcing American jobs,” he said in an April 9 statement. “They can help level the playing field for American autoworkers or steelworkers to compete fairly against companies who have moved production to countries where they can pay starvation wages.”

“But Trump’s chaotic across-the-board tariffs are not the way to do it,” he added.

Current and former Democratic congressional leadership figures have been more forthright in their rejection of tariffs.

“President Trump’s senseless tariffs will drive prices higher, drain retirement savings, and push us to the brink of recession,” former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) warned in a statement.

Yet in the past, Pelosi has also endorsed tariffs against China, for instance, because of the size of the trade deficit. That is the very reason that Trump cited for levying tariffs on a broad range of countries.

Pelosi’s successor to House Democratic leadership, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), labeled the tariffs “the Trump tax.”

Jeffries said Trump’s tariffs amounted to “the largest tax increase on the American people since 1968,” in an April 7 press conference, several days after Trump announced all kinds of new tariffs on most countries.

Fifty-seven years ago, a Democratic Congress and President Lyndon Johnson enacted an additional 10% income tax surcharge to help pay for the Vietnam War and kept some other taxes that were scheduled to be scrapped.

In Denmark, Jeffries made it clear that he would like Congress to act.

“It’s going to fall on Congress to reassert our constitutional responsibility,” Jeffries said in a press conference later in April, “if we find ourselves continuing to go down this road with an executive that is acting alone and, in our view, respectfully, not in the best interest of the American people, certainly our allies in North America, or our allies here in Europe.”

Jeffries’s objection is both strategic and procedural, yet it stops short of saying that high tariffs are generally unwise, an idea most economists endorse.

“Congress has been given the power, pursuant to the Constitution and under law, to decide the appropriateness of when tariffs should be utilized,” he said in Denmark.

There is a tangled history here that both parties are trying to navigate. Republicans were historically the pro-tariff party until roughly 1980, when President Ronald Reagan endorsed free trade with gusto. Democrats were historically critics of tariffs until labor unions got cold feet about free trade.

True, Democratic President Bill Clinton sold the North American Free Trade Agreement to Congress. But NAFTA had already been championed by Reagan, negotiated and signed by his Republican former vice president and successor, President George H.W. Bush, and needed significant Republican support in Congress to pass.

“At the time of its ratification in Congress, more Republicans than Democrats supported NAFTA,” the Brooklyn Law School Library website reads. “With strong opposition by labor unions, a key ally for President Clinton was then-House Minority Whip (and later House Speaker) Newt Gingrich,” the Georgia Republican who was usually a political sparring partner.

In the intervening years, Democrats were generally more skeptical of free trade while benefiting from it at the same time. That got some traction for them, roughly until Trump came along and stole their issue.

Looking at the rollout of tariffs and the consequent damage to the stock market, the U.S. dollar, and Trump’s approval ratings, some Democrats in Congress are inclined to let Trump have the issue, at least for now.

For her part, Pelosi has decided to use the generally free-trade Reagan as a cudgel to attack Trump.

She pointed out that in 1988, Reagan said that “America’s most recent experiment with protectionism was a disaster for the working men and women of this country,” with the 1930s Smoot-Hawley tariffs contributing to the extended period of economic contraction that was the Great Depression.

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Reagan also warned in one of his final radio addresses that Americans “should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag,” Pelosi pointed out.

“President Reagan’s words were true then, and they’re true today,” the former speaker added. “Hopefully, Trump and our Republican colleagues will heed his wisdom.”

Jeremy Lott is the author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency.