The American people are going to have to cope with hardship as President Donald Trump slaps tariffs on imports, Alabama’s senior senator said Wednesday.

Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach-turned-Republican U.S. senator from Alabama, likened the suffering to the “pain” experienced by his players while they developed under his tutelage.

“No pain, no gain — that’s what we used to tell our football players,” Tuberville said during a Wednesday appearance on Fox Business.

“There’s going to be some pain with tariffs,” Tuberville conceded, “but tariffs got us back as the strongest economy in the world when President Trump was in [office] the first time. He knows what he’s doing.”

Tuberville dismissed criticism from Democrats who blamed the tariffs on the stock market slide and signs the economy has not improved.

“Democrats, get out of the way, shut up. You have no answers, you didn’t do anything right in the last for years with Joe Biden,” the senator said.

Continuing with the sports metaphors, Tuberville said Republicans “have a gameplan, Trump has a gameplan along with [Commerce Secretary] Howard Lutnick … we can turn this thing around…”

Trump’s use of tariffs to extract concessions from other nations points toward a possibly destructive trade war and a stark change in America’s approach to global leadership. It also has destabilized the stock market and stoked anxiety about an economic downturn.

He has separate tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China, with plans to also tax imports from the European Union, Brazil and South Korea by charging “reciprocal” rates starting on April 2.

The European Union announced its own countermeasures on Wednesday. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that as the United States was “applying tariffs worth 28 billion dollars, we are responding with countermeasures worth 26 billion euros,” or about $28 billion. Those measures, which cover not just steel and aluminum products but also textiles, home appliances and agricultural goods, are due to take effect on April 1.

Tuberville claimed Trump’s economic policies are the “last chance” to save the country.

“If we can’t get it done now with tariffs and with pulling regulations and getting people back to work and cutting our debt and cutting the amount of spending, we’re not going to have the country we’ve had before,” Tuberville said. “So people just need to listen, learn from this. Understand it’s short-term pain. We’re gonna get this turned around. President Trump knows exactly what he’s doing and he has a gameplan — something Democrats didn’t know anything about.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.