Trump Pulls Support From House Republican Who Opposed Tariffs

The president yanked his endorsement of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado, imperiling Republicans’ chances of holding onto his seat as they brace for midterm losses.

President Trump on Saturday withdrew his endorsement of Representative Jeff Hurd of Colorado, punishing a Republican who opposed his tariffs in a move that could further imperil his party’s chances of keeping control of the House in November’s midterm elections.

In yanking his support and throwing his backing behind Mr. Hurd’s right-wing primary opponent, Mr. Trump was making good on a threat he issued this month as the House was voting to cancel his tariffs on Canada. The president posted on social media that any Republican who backed lifting the levies would “seriously suffer the consequences come Election time, and that includes Primaries.”

Mr. Hurd was one of only six Republicans to join nearly all House Democrats in doing so, casting a largely symbolic vote that was a rare instance of Congress trying to assert its authority over the Trump administration.

The president’s vengeful maneuver injected an element of uncertainty into what was already expected to be a competitive race in Mr. Hurd’s Republican-leaning Western and Southern Colorado district. It also signaled that Mr. Trump’s tariffs — and his demand that Republicans support them — are likely to continue to be a vexing issue for his party in midterm elections in which they already have an uphill fight to keep control of Congress.

In an angry social media post on Saturday, Mr. Trump branded Mr. Hurd, a first-term congressman who is a member of the center-right Republican Main Street Partnership, a “RINO” — short for Republican in name only — and said he was “one of a small number of Legislators who have let me and our Country down.”

He endorsed the congressman’s primary opponent Hope Scheppelman, a Navy veteran and a former nurse practitioner whom Republicans voted to remove from her post as vice chair of the state party in 2024 after a backlash to anti-gay posts and other extreme positions taken by the party chairman.

Mr. Hurd, a former lawyer, has been outspoken in opposition to the president’s sweeping tariffs, which he has said have directly harmed agricultural and steel producers in his district. He has also been among the few Republicans who have pushed back on Mr. Trump’s unilateral tariffs on constitutional grounds. After the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that Mr. Trump had exceeded his authority when he imposed the tariffs on nearly every U.S. trading partner, Mr. Hurd said in a post on social media that the ruling “underscores the need for Congress to play its proper role in trade policy.”

That position appears to have enraged Mr. Trump, who said in his own post on Saturday Mr. Hurd “is more interested in protecting Foreign Countries that have been ripping us off for decades than he is the United States of America.”

The office of the congressman did not respond to a request for comment.

The vote on the Canada tariffs was the first opportunity for House members to formally register a position on Mr. Trump’s trade policies, after Republican leaders blocked such a vote for nearly a year. But with the president demanding loyalty on the issue, several Republicans facing competitive re-election races, including two other Coloradans, Representatives Jeff Crank and Gabe Evans, voted against canceling the tariffs.

Mr. Hurd in 2024 defeated a Democrat by 5 points in the race for Colorado’s Third Congressional District, previously represented by the hard-right G.O.P. Representative Lauren Boebert, who switched districts to run in a solidly Republican area and preserve her chances of re-election.

Ms. Scheppelman is regarded in the state as a polarizing figure. She was seen as acting in concert with Dave Williams, the chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, when members voted in 2024 to oust both of them in response to posts by Mr. Williams that attacked the L.G.B.T.Q. community and accusations that he had fueled divisions within the party.

Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist in Colorado and a former Republican Party chairman in the state, described Ms. Scheppelman as a “very divisive” figure who was deeply invested in 2020 election conspiracies.

“The fact is,” he said in an interview on Saturday, “if she is the Republican nominee in the Third District, Democrats will win that district.”

Allen Fuller, a Colorado Republican consultant, said in a statement that Ms. Scheppelman was “a limited candidate with a limited base, limited runway, and limited options.”

C.J. Warnke, a spokesman for the House Majority PAC, the political action committee focused on electing Democrats, said the group “was looking forward to flipping Hurd’s seat blue in November, and Trump’s un-endorsement is speeding up that process.”

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