Some Republicans are getting impatient. “I’d like him to not be focused on his own personal brand and vendettas,” a Republican Senate aide told me. “There’s an opportunity for him to talk more about global economic policy, and it lines up well with what he said on the [2016] campaign. Most people look at China and they don’t like it, because it seems like jobs here are being taken away and everything has moved abroad. China is the poster child of that.”

One Trump ally is rolling out more ambitious plans to stop the economic tailspin. Senator Josh Hawley, a freshman Republican from Missouri, wants to see new federal spending to keep workers employed through the ordeal. His plan also calls for profitable companies to maintain a “financial cushion” that would help them weather such crises in the future. “We seem to be on a roller-coaster that is currently plunging down,” Hawley told Politico. “I personally do not want to ride that roller-coaster and find where the bottom is. And I don’t think American workers should be forced to.”

That a Republican senator would come out with a proposal more far-reaching than anything the White House has put forward underscores both the deep worry inside the Republican caucus and a policy vacuum that Trump has left others to fill. “On substantive plans, there’s been a hole from the White House,” Doug Heye, a former spokesperson for the RNC, told me. “Hawley is thinking big thoughts about these things—not just pushing back on China.”