The Ben Shapiro Show - April 07, 2025


WHAT COMES NEXT?! Trump’s Tariff War Continues…


Episode Stats


Length

56 minutes

Words per minute

194.80153

Word count

11,042

Sentence count

874

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

18

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Trump announces a new set of tariffs on China and other countries, and the markets take a dive. What does this mean for the economy and the stock market? Is this a good or bad thing? What are the risks? And what are the benefits?

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Well, folks, the news is breaking hot and heavy because it is always breaking hot and heavy in Trump 2.0.
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00:00:26.000 Well, it was a bit of a fraught weekend.
00:00:28.000 The stock futures dumped all over the place.
00:00:31.000 The market was set to open as of Monday morning down, pretty much across the board.
00:00:37.000 Markets prepared for a bloodbath, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:00:41.000 In the United States, contracts tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 led the declines down more than 5%.
00:00:46.000 In Japan, the Nikkei 225 dropped nearly 8% shortly after open actually hit the circuit breakers, meaning they had to shut down trading for a little while.
00:00:53.000 Bitcoin and oil prices fell sharply as well.
00:00:56.000 Now, remember, Thursday and Friday were terrible days on the stock market.
00:00:59.000 U.S. stocks lost $6.6 trillion in value during that two-day washout after President Trump announced that giant tariff regime that he called Liberation Day.
00:01:07.000 And it appears that many traders are better.
00:01:09.000 The biggest problem here is that the Trump administration has not made it clear what exactly they want to accomplish with these tariffs.
00:01:23.000 This has been my point the entire time.
00:01:24.000 There are times when tariffs can be useful.
00:01:26.000 In fact, out of three times, tariffs could theoretically be useful.
00:01:30.000 Two times could actually be useful.
00:01:33.000 Okay, so, theory number one as to tariffs.
00:01:35.000 One, tariffs are important to protect important industries, like, for example, defense industries, because you need to produce that stuff here at home instead of producing it elsewhere, and so you actually protect and give effectively artificial subsidies to American defense industries.
00:01:48.000 Totally understandable.
00:01:49.000 Two, tariffs are designed in order to leverage other countries.
00:01:54.000 Either because those countries are our enemies and we want to do harm to them, or because we wish to get other countries to lower their own tariffs.
00:02:00.000 And the end goal is a lower tariff regime.
00:02:02.000 And then there's the third possibility.
00:02:04.000 And this is the possibility that is retailed by President Trump and many other members of the administration.
00:02:08.000 And to be perfectly honest, all of these various rationales for the tariffs have been put forward.
00:02:14.000 The third one is the one that's really problematic and the one that the economy is currently reading, that the markets are currently seeing.
00:02:19.000 And that is the idea that tariffs are good.
00:02:21.000 Trade wars are good and easy to win.
00:02:23.000 Tariffs themselves are good and make us rich.
00:02:25.000 That somehow, the simple fact of taxing product as it comes in, which is a tax on consumers, because again, people aren't going to ship us product if nobody's buying it on the other end.
00:02:35.000 They'll just stop shipping us product.
00:02:36.000 So, it is a tax on American consumers.
00:02:38.000 The idea that this is inherently good and makes the American economy strong is wrong-headed.
00:02:42.000 It is untrue.
00:02:43.000 The idea that it is going to result in massive reshoring of manufacturing is also untrue, as we'll talk about In a little while.
00:02:49.000 And this is why Bill Ackman, investor extraordinaire and ally to President Trump, put out a statement over the weekend saying, quote, The country is 100% behind the president on fixing a global system of tariffs that has disadvantaged the country.
00:02:59.000 But business is a confidence game and confidence depends on trust.
00:03:02.000 President Trump has elevated the tariff issue to the most important geopolitical issue in the world and he's gotten everyone's attention so far so good.
00:03:08.000 And yes, other nations have taken advantage of the U.S. by protecting their home industries at the expense of millions of our jobs and economic growth in our country.
00:03:14.000 But by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike, Take a timeout.
00:03:31.000 Figure out what it is that you want to do here.
00:03:33.000 He says, I don't know of one who will do so.
00:04:03.000 Again, this is Bill Ackman, who is a Trump supporter.
00:04:05.000 When markets crash, new investment stops.
00:04:08.000 Consumers stop spending money.
00:04:09.000 Businesses have no choice but to curtail investment and fire workers.
00:04:12.000 It's not just big companies that suffer.
00:04:14.000 Small and medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs will experience much greater pain.
00:04:18.000 Almost no business can pass through an overnight massive increase in costs to their customers.
00:04:22.000 That's true even if they have no debt.
00:04:23.000 And unfortunately, there's a massive amount of leverage in the system.
00:04:26.000 Business is a confidence game.
00:04:27.000 The president is losing the confidence of business leaders around the globe, the consequences for our country, and the millions of our citizens who have supported the president, in particular, low-income consumers who are already under a huge amount of economic stress, are going to be severely negative.
00:04:39.000 This is not what we voted for, says Bill Ackman.
00:04:42.000 The president has an opportunity on Monday to call a timeout and have the time to execute on fixing an unfair tariff system.
00:04:51.000 May cooler heads prevail.
00:04:53.000 Okay, that is a flashing red light that Ackman is aiming at the President of the United States, saying, stop, for the love of God, stop.
00:04:59.000 Or, at the very least, take the off-ramp.
00:05:02.000 And so, today is going to be a very big day for the President, not just because of what the markets do, but because of what he could say.
00:05:08.000 So, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is visiting.
00:05:11.000 The reason this is important is not just because of all these security-related concerns in Gaza and Iran.
00:05:15.000 But more specifically with regard to the tariff war that's dominating the news, Netanyahu has already offered to go to zero.
00:05:21.000 Zero tariff rates with the United States.
00:05:23.000 Now, to be fair, Israel already had zero tariffs on 98% of all product coming into the United States and has had a free trade agreement with the United States for 40 years.
00:05:31.000 This, again, is why it was rather frustrating when the Trump administration put out a ridiculous chart last week, and it was a ridiculous chart, suggesting that, for example, Israel had a 33% tariff and non-tariff rate on the United States.
00:05:41.000 That's not true by any possible measure.
00:05:43.000 That is a measure of trade deficit.
00:05:44.000 It is not a measure of the actual tariff rates.
00:05:47.000 But put that aside.
00:05:48.000 President Trump can take the off ramp here and get to zero with Israel. 0.88
00:05:51.000 He should do the same exact thing with Vietnam. 0.96
00:05:53.000 Vietnam also has a free trade agreement with the United States.
00:05:56.000 That free trade agreement means that the effective tariff rate that Vietnam has on American goods is actually quite low.
00:06:02.000 Even if you were to look at the very elevated version of the Vietnamese tariff rate on American goods, including, for example, their value-added tax, which is like a 10% value-added tax, The reality is Again, that's like a very high-end estimate. 0.77
00:06:18.000 That chart had Vietnam at a 90% tariff rate with the United States, which of course is not true.
00:06:23.000 So I asked our friends at Perplexity, our search partners and sponsors, quote, what is the effect of Vietnamese tariff rate on American goods?
00:06:29.000 Not the tariff rate President Trump listed, including their value-added tax.
00:06:33.000 As long as we're going to put in non-tariff additions, the value-added tax is where essentially they tax their consumers for buying any goods.
00:06:40.000 It's kind of a sales tax.
00:06:41.000 And what is their tariff rate on American goods under our free trade agreement with them?
00:06:45.000 And perplexity says, Vietnam's effective tariff rate on American goods, including the value added tax, is significantly lower than the figures cited by President Trump.
00:06:52.000 According to the 2025 National Trade Estimate Report, Vietnam's average most favored nation applied tariff rate was 9.4% in 2023, with agricultural products facing an average of 17.1% and non-agricultural products 8.1%.
00:07:06.000 Now, realistically, we're not sending all that many agricultural products to Vietnam, I believe.
00:07:09.000 When factoring in VAT, which is typically 10%, the total effective tax burden on American goods averages around 19.4% for agricultural products and 18.1% for non-agricultural products.
00:07:20.000 Under the U.S.-Vietnam bilateral trade agreement and subsequent frameworks, Vietnam has made commitments to reduce tariffs on certain American goods.
00:07:25.000 Recent negotiations suggest Vietnam is willing to lower tariffs to 0% on American imports as part of a potential bilateral agreement with the U.S., although that deal has yet to be finalized.
00:07:35.000 And that's the thing that President Trump should do.
00:07:36.000 Vietnam is saying, let's go to zero.
00:07:38.000 President Trump should say, cool, let's go to zero.
00:07:41.000 That's the off-ramp here.
00:07:42.000 And then President Trump can fairly say that he has leveraged all these countries in bilateral trade agreements to go to zero.
00:07:47.000 More free trade.
00:07:49.000 That's better.
00:07:50.000 However, that would require the president to believe not the sort of tariffs are good for America on their own version of what tariffs are good for, but the other two.
00:07:59.000 The tariffs are there to actually protect industries that are important to America and also to get other countries to lower their own tariffs.
00:08:06.000 And that is, it is absolutely unclear what President Trump is thinking at this point.
00:08:09.000 And herein lies the problem.
00:08:11.000 You have a vast combination of radical uncertainty and
00:08:16.000 policy We are bringing back jobs and businesses like never before already.
00:08:46.000 More than $5 trillion of investment and rising fast.
00:08:48.000 This is an economic revolution and we will win.
00:08:51.000 Hang tough.
00:08:51.000 It won't be easy, but the end result will be historic.
00:08:53.000 We will make America great again.
00:08:55.000 Okay, those words, this is an economic revolution, hang tough, that scares the living daylights out of the entire market.
00:09:00.000 Why? Because hang tough sets up a lengthy period of tariffs. 0.99
00:09:06.000 A lengthy, significant period of tariffs.
00:09:08.000 If that is to happen, we'll get into all the consequences.
00:09:10.000 Basically, it melts down the markets.
00:09:12.000 It melts them down.
00:09:13.000 As Bill Ackman says, nuclear winter.
00:09:15.000 If you're talking about these tariff rates on countries maintained as they currently stand, if they are implemented, as President Trump and team are saying they will be just a few days from now, if that happens, you are talking about an economic catastrophe, like a serious, serious economic problem.
00:09:30.000 And even if on the other end there is a brand new world, we still have not heard what exactly that brand new world looks like.
00:09:37.000 Is that a brand new world where what?
00:09:39.000 We are reshoring manual labor from Vietnam to make t-shirts? 0.92
00:09:43.000 This is the confusion.
00:09:44.000 No one knows what the hell is actually going on.
00:09:47.000 There are people who are hopeful, like Bill Ackman, that what this all is is a sort of 4D chess game in order to leverage other countries to open up their tariffs.
00:09:54.000 Fine. If that's the case, sounds great.
00:09:56.000 Cool. I think the rollout sucked, but that's fine.
00:09:58.000 We can get there.
00:09:59.000 If the final policy is good and I don't like the rollout, you know, I can be wrong.
00:10:03.000 That's cool.
00:10:03.000 That's fine with me.
00:10:04.000 I would much rather have a booming economy and be wrong about the original implementation of the policy than the opposite.
00:10:11.000 Okay, but President Trump keeps saying over and over, there will be pain.
00:10:14.000 So here is President Trump on Sunday night saying this.
00:10:17.000 There will be pain.
00:10:19.000 Is there pain in the market at some point?
00:10:22.000 You're unwilling to tolerate this idea of a Trump put?
00:10:25.000 Is there a threshold?
00:10:26.000 I think your question is so stupid.
00:10:28.000 I don't want anything to go down.
00:10:32.000 But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something.
00:10:36.000 We have such a horrible...
00:10:39.000 We have been treated so badly by other countries because we had stupid leadership that allowed this to happen.
00:10:46.000 They took our businesses, they took our money, they took our jobs, they moved it to Mexico, they moved it to Canada, they moved a lot of it to China, and it's not sustainable.
00:10:57.000 We're not going to do it.
00:10:58.000 Now we have hundreds of millions of dollars that's pouring into our country on a monthly basis.
00:11:04.000 It's already started.
00:11:06.000 Because they put tariffs on.
00:11:08.000 And eventually it's going to straighten out and our country will be solid and strong again.
00:11:12.000 Okay, now that sounds like he wants long-term tariffs.
00:11:14.000 We've got hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our country and it's going to continue pouring into our country and we've been screwed by the Canadians and the Mexicans, which again, we have not. 1.00
00:11:22.000 The President of the United States negotiated the USMCA in his first term.
00:11:26.000 Our tariff rate with the Canadians is extraordinarily low.
00:11:29.000 Except for oil, we have a tariff surplus with the Canadians.
00:11:33.000 And when he says we've been screwed by China, that's true in terms of IP, and I'm very much in favor of the harsh penalties on China. 0.96
00:11:38.000 But the problem is, if you tariff everyone, everyone, including China, you know what all the other countries do, as we'll talk about in a moment? 0.55
00:11:45.000 They actually reorient toward China, because China is perfectly willing to do free trade deals with all these other countries, while the United States is shutting them out.
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00:14:06.000 He says, it's not just that we need to get Europe to open its markets to us.
00:14:09.000 We need them to pay us back.
00:14:10.000 They need to actually pay us some sort of back taxes.
00:14:13.000 And we take their cars, Mercedes, Volkswagen, BMW.
00:14:17.000 You know, we take their millions of cars.
00:14:19.000 They take no cars.
00:14:21.000 They don't take our farm product.
00:14:22.000 They don't take anything.
00:14:24.000 Europe's treated us very badly.
00:14:25.000 We put a big tariff on Europe.
00:14:27.000 They are coming to the table.
00:14:29.000 They want to talk.
00:14:30.000 But there's no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.
00:14:36.000 Number one for present, but also for past.
00:14:39.000 Because they've taken a lot of our wealth away, and we're not going to allow it to happen.
00:14:42.000 Okay, so he wants them to what?
00:14:44.000 Like, just sign us checks?
00:14:45.000 So it's not just he wants the trade barriers going.
00:14:47.000 He wants them to sign a check.
00:14:48.000 By the way, it is not true that they are not importing American cars.
00:14:51.000 Tesla is one of the best-selling cars in Europe.
00:14:52.000 Why? Because they have all sorts of greenhouse gas emission rules in Europe that we don't have in the United States, which means Tesla's a hot seller in Europe.
00:14:59.000 In some countries in Europe, it's actually a hotter seller than it is in the United States.
00:15:03.000 As far as the idea that foreign car companies don't do business with the United States, that's not true.
00:15:08.000 If you look at companies like Honda, a huge percentage of a Honda is made in the United States, in American factories.
00:15:16.000 Okay, so, there's sort of a battle inside the administration over messaging, and this is, again, one of the things that is roiling the markets is, who's standing up for the position that says, let's get to zero?
00:15:25.000 Let's get to zero on the tariffs.
00:15:27.000 Who's doing that?
00:15:27.000 Again, we keep being told there's a 4D chess position.
00:15:30.000 There are basically two 4D chess positions that are being presented.
00:15:32.000 One 4-D chess position is President Trump is using leverage in order to get everybody to go to zero.
00:15:36.000 Okay. If that's the case, people should be making that case.
00:15:39.000 The other 4-D chess position is this is all an engineered recession designed to jam down the yields on the bonds, thus to increase the bond market effectively so we can refinance our debt and take, what, a couple hundred billion dollars off our national deficit?
00:15:55.000 Again, I think the logic there does not stack up.
00:15:57.000 I also don't think that's what President Trump is thinking.
00:15:59.000 So inside the administration, There are a bunch of voices who have now been deployed on behalf of this particular position.
00:16:05.000 The one who is obviously most pro-tariff is Howard Letnick, the Commerce Secretary.
00:16:09.000 Secretary Letnick, a big fan of tariffs.
00:16:11.000 And he is saying the tariffs are coming.
00:16:13.000 And no matter what you want, no matter what you like, the tariffs are indeed coming.
00:16:16.000 There will be no delay.
00:16:17.000 There will be no postponement.
00:16:18.000 They are coming.
00:16:20.000 To be clear, April 9th, the so-called retaliatory tariffs, the reciprocal tariffs, I should say, are those coming or are they open to negotiation?
00:16:33.000 The tariffs are coming.
00:16:35.000 He announced it and he wasn't kidding.
00:16:37.000 The tariffs are coming.
00:16:39.000 Of course they are.
00:16:40.000 The tariffs are coming.
00:16:41.000 No negotiation.
00:16:42.000 The tariffs are coming.
00:16:43.000 To which the markets say, price is right horn.
00:16:46.000 It turns out the markets do not like that because the tariff regime as it currently stands is the single greatest increase in taxes because tariffs are a tax in modern American history and they are the single greatest increase in trade war.
00:17:01.000 Since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1932.
00:17:04.000 I mean, you're going back almost 100 years to get to the kind of tariff rates that you're talking about right now.
00:17:10.000 Again, Lutnik keeps saying this.
00:17:11.000 He keeps saying over and over, there's no postponing.
00:17:13.000 We're not postponing it.
00:17:14.000 It's going forward.
00:17:15.000 Here's Lutnik again saying the same thing.
00:17:18.000 So, the Treasury Secretary said on another network, we're going to hold the course.
00:17:22.000 It's not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.
00:17:26.000 That makes it sound like the tariffs are staying in place at least for days or weeks.
00:17:32.000 Is that correct or is the president considering postponing implementation to negotiate?
00:17:38.000 There is no postponing.
00:17:41.000 They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks.
00:17:44.000 That is sort of obvious.
00:17:46.000 The president needs to reset global trade.
00:17:49.000 Everybody has a trade surplus and we have a trade deficit.
00:17:53.000 We are paying away our future and our lives.
00:17:56.000 The countries of the world are ripping us off and it's got to end.
00:17:59.000 The president has made it crystal, crystal clear.
00:18:02.000 This is the policy we are going to protect.
00:18:05.000 The factories that come build in America, we are going to protect them.
00:18:08.000 They're going to be successful.
00:18:10.000 That's why they're going to build in America the greatest economy in the earth.
00:18:13.000 All the companies are going to come and build there.
00:18:17.000 There's significant problems with this, as we'll explore in a moment, including the fact that when you build a factory, you need to have, wait for it, parts from other parts of the globe.
00:18:25.000 Because what are you going to make?
00:18:27.000 A factory with all the stuff that's made here?
00:18:29.000 The problem is it's not made here right now.
00:18:31.000 So how's that going to work, precisely?
00:18:33.000 There are all sorts of holes in this logic.
00:18:35.000 Again, the very idea that a trade deficit means another country is screwing you,...is wrong on its face.
00:18:40.000 It's not true.
00:18:42.000 If you have a trade deficit with another country, it's possible that country is screwing you.
00:18:45.000 It is certainly not sufficient to say you have a trade deficit, therefore the other country is screwing you.
00:18:50.000 It's not true.
00:18:51.000 In fact, there are several countries, many countries, that have a trade deficit with the United States.
00:18:55.000 Is that because we're screwing them?
00:18:57.000 I again use the case of Ethiopia.
00:18:58.000 A $12 billion trade deficit with the Ethiopians.
00:19:01.000 Is that because they're screwing us, or is it because no place in America really grows good coffee?
00:19:06.000 Hawaiian coffee ain't gonna cut it.
00:19:08.000 Not for the entire country.
00:19:10.000 Meanwhile, Scott Besant, who I believe the Treasury Secretary is significantly less, shall we say, committed to the tariff regime than the Commerce Secretary, but he's the one out retailing it.
00:19:21.000 Here he was trying to walk this back a little bit, at least give President Trump the possibility of an offer.
00:19:26.000 I'm saying it could be permanent, could be a negotiating tactic.
00:19:28.000 Who knows?
00:19:29.000 Mystery meet here on a Monday.
00:19:33.000 Well, I think that's going to be a decision for President Trump, but I can tell you that as only he can do at this moment, he's created maximum leverage for himself.
00:19:43.000 And more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs.
00:19:54.000 Stopping currency manipulation.
00:19:56.000 And they've been bad actors for a long time.
00:19:59.000 And it's not the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.
00:20:05.000 Okay, so there's that quote that Kristen Walker was then citing back to Lutnick.
00:20:08.000 But at least Bessence is providing an off-ramp there.
00:20:12.000 He is saying, okay, well, these are bad actors.
00:20:14.000 We're going to negotiate bilateral deals with them.
00:20:16.000 We'll go down to zero.
00:20:17.000 They'll go down to zero.
00:20:18.000 They'll stop with their currency manipulation.
00:20:19.000 Okay, fine.
00:20:19.000 That's an actual off-ramp.
00:20:20.000 That sounds like maybe a plan.
00:20:22.000 But Letnick seems to be saying, I don't want there to be a plan.
00:20:24.000 No negotiations.
00:20:25.000 Just go all the way to the wall.
00:20:26.000 The entire purpose of this is to basically reshore manufacturing.
00:20:29.000 It's autarky time here in the United States.
00:20:33.000 Now, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besson, was asked how long we're supposed to hang tough.
00:20:37.000 You heard President Trump's tweet that we're going to hang tough.
00:20:39.000 And he's asked, how long are we supposed to hang tough?
00:20:41.000 And Besson is not going to commit to any timeline here.
00:20:44.000 This is an adjustment process.
00:20:47.000 We saw with President Reagan when he brought down the great inflation and we got past the Carter malaise that there was some choppiness at that time.
00:20:58.000 But he held the course and we're going to hold the course.
00:21:03.000 And this has been years in the building, years in the management.
00:21:07.000 Yeah, I mean, there's only one problem.
00:21:09.000 And the difference is that Donald Trump inherited an economy where the inflation was too high.
00:21:15.000 Typically, if the inflation is too high, that means you have to increase the interest rates, which is the actual thing that Paul Volcker did as the head of the Federal Reserve under Ronald Reagan.
00:21:23.000 In order to break inflation, he had to increase the interest rates, which increased the unemployment rates.
00:21:28.000 Then the interest rates went – then the interest – the inflation went down.
00:21:32.000 The interest rates could drop and then inflation.
00:21:33.000 That's the way the Reagan administration works.
00:21:35.000 That is nothing like what we were talking about here.
00:21:37.000 President Trump is actually pushing policies that create more price inflation in the markets and calling on the Federal Reserve.
00:21:45.000 To lower the interest rates so as to inject more money into the economy.
00:21:48.000 So that is an apples to oranges comparison.
00:21:50.000 Meanwhile, Kevin Hassett, who's the head of the National Council of Economic Advisors, he's trying to rebut something that President Trump put out on Truth Social.
00:21:59.000 So President Trump put out on Truth Social a video saying that he was purposely crashing the market.
00:22:03.000 And again, President Trump on Truth Social, he kind of posts stuff, like kind of whatever he's feeling like that day.
00:22:07.000 If you see something that's pro him, he posts it.
00:22:09.000 It's not necessarily an indicator of his actual policy.
00:22:12.000 Kevin Hassett.
00:22:13.000 Says no, no, no.
00:22:14.000 He's not purposefully crashing the market.
00:22:15.000 Again, remember, that was an actual going theory, that he was purposefully crashing the market in order to push everybody from stocks into bonds, thereby lowering the yield rate, increasing the demand for bonds generally, and allowing for the lowering of interest rates on the repayment of our debt, right?
00:22:29.000 That was the kind of sophisticated 4D chess theory.
00:22:32.000 Kevin Haas is like, no, that's not what's happening.
00:22:34.000 Is it his strategy to force the Fed to lower interest rates and that the market crash was part of that strategy?
00:22:39.000 We understand the Fed is an independent agency.
00:22:40.000 We respect the independence of the Fed.
00:22:42.000 But the President's allowed to have an opinion.
00:22:45.000 Absolutely, the President's allowed to have an opinion.
00:22:47.000 But there's not going to be any political coercion over the Fed, for sure.
00:22:50.000 So that is his strategy, tank the market so the Fed lowers interest rates?
00:22:54.000 No, no, no.
00:22:54.000 Well, you just said the President's allowed to have an opinion.
00:22:56.000 Is that his opinion or not?
00:22:57.000 He's not trying to tank the market.
00:22:58.000 He's trying to deliver for American workers.
00:23:00.000 Okay, then Kevin Hassett says, don't worry, none of this is going to have any big effect on consumers.
00:23:05.000 I would like a detailed explanation.
00:23:08.000 Why? You can't just say that.
00:23:11.000 Why? How?
00:23:14.000 Okay, here we go.
00:23:16.000 I got a report from the USTR last night that more than 50 countries have reached out to the president to begin a negotiation.
00:23:23.000 But they're doing that because they understand that they bear a lot of the tariff.
00:23:27.000 And so I don't think that you're going to see a big effect on the consumer in the US because I do think that the reason why we have a persistent long-run trade deficit is these people have very inelastic supply.
00:23:38.000 They've been dumping goods into the country in order to create jobs, say, in China.
00:23:42.000 Oh boy.
00:23:42.000 Okay, and then Hassett says that job numbers will go up.
00:23:45.000 If the tariff regime stays in place, the job numbers will go up.
00:23:49.000 Okay. That's looking back, but looking forward, Salantis did say this week they were laying off workers.
00:23:55.000 The reason that they were starting it in the last two months was they anticipated the tariffs that were announced this week, and they're starting to ramp up in anticipation of that.
00:24:03.000 I would expect that the jobs numbers, and I'll come back and talk to you about it when they come out, are going to go up by even more now that the tariffs are in place.
00:24:10.000 Okay. Okay.
00:24:12.000 Howard Lutnick.
00:24:13.000 And what had to be the funniest moment of the weekend, in what appears to be a rather dismal economic cycle.
00:24:19.000 Howard Lutnick was asked about the herd of McDonald Islands.
00:24:21.000 You'll remember that that chart that President Trump held up contained the herd and McDonald Islands, which are islands that have no people on them.
00:24:28.000 We are apparently putting 10% tariffs on the penguins that live in the herd of McDonald Islands.
00:24:31.000 Lutnick was asked about this.
00:24:33.000 I will say that this particular excuse, I am skeptical.
00:24:39.000 What happens is, if you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us.
00:24:49.000 Any country, like we had tariffs, the president put tariffs on China.
00:24:54.000 Right? In 2018.
00:24:55.000 And then what China started doing is they started going through other countries to America.
00:25:00.000 They just built through other countries through America.
00:25:02.000 And so the president knows that.
00:25:04.000 He's tired of it.
00:25:06.000 And he's going to fix that.
00:25:07.000 So basically he said, look, I can't let any part of the world be a place where China or other countries can ship through them.
00:25:16.000 And then he was asked, so your theory is that China is going to use the penguin land as a cutout.
00:25:24.000 Like the penguin land near Antarctica.
00:25:26.000 That's your theory.
00:25:27.000 We had to tariff the penguin land because otherwise people will escape the tariffs by building factories in penguin land.
00:25:33.000 Again, near Antarctica, in the middle of nowhere.
00:25:37.000 Okay. Well, there is some good news.
00:25:39.000 You know that at least they're not going to outsource, you know, like all the agriculture to Heard and McDonald's Islands.
00:25:44.000 But the reality is that actually a lot of ag is taken from abroad.
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00:27:55.000 Elon happens to be 100% right about this.
00:27:58.000 So, Elon Musk is ripping into trade advisor Peter Navarro.
00:28:01.000 Navarro is a big tariff advocate.
00:28:03.000 He's been a big tariff advocate for years.
00:28:05.000 And the Tesla CEO ripped Peter Navarro as someone who ain't built bleep.
00:28:09.000 And then when asked about his Harvard PhD in economics, he said, that's a bad thing, not a good thing.
00:28:14.000 And then he posted a quote from economist Thomas Sowell that said, in every disaster throughout American history, there always seems to be a man from Harvard in the middle of it.
00:28:23.000 He then suggested that Navarro had an excess of self-confidence, writing, quote, results in the ego brains greater than one problem.
00:28:32.000 Meanwhile, Musk himself suggested that he wants a zero tariff situation, which, again, this is the this is the good explanation for why you would do the tariff game.
00:28:41.000 I urge the president to do precisely what Musk is saying here.
00:28:44.000 Go to zero with all these countries. 0.96
00:28:46.000 Go to zero.
00:28:47.000 That's a win.
00:28:47.000 Take the win.
00:28:48.000 Move on.
00:28:48.000 Like that'd be good for the economy.
00:28:50.000 Good for you.
00:28:50.000 You'd have flexed your muscle.
00:28:52.000 You'd have flexed American muscle.
00:28:53.000 That'd be good.
00:28:53.000 Here's Elon Musk.
00:29:13.000 Navarro, for his part, started fighting back.
00:29:16.000 Here was Peter Navarro on Fox News trying to push back against Musk.
00:29:20.000 I mean, look, Elon, look, Elon, when he's in his doge lane, is great. 0.94
00:29:25.000 But we understand what's going on here.
00:29:27.000 We just have to understand.
00:29:29.000 Elon sells cars.
00:29:31.000 And he's in Texas assembling cars that have big parts of that car from Mexico, China.
00:29:40.000 The batteries come from Japan or China.
00:29:43.000 The electronics come from Taiwan.
00:29:45.000 And he's simply protecting his own interests as any business person would do.
00:29:51.000 Okay, so open battle between Elon and Navarro.
00:29:53.000 Navarro is wrong.
00:29:54.000 Elon is right.
00:29:55.000 It's that simple.
00:29:55.000 The reality is that Navarro's trade prescriptions, which is this giant trade war where he believes the tariffs are in and of themselves good, not to get to zero.
00:30:02.000 They in and of themselves are good.
00:30:04.000 That is a bad economic policy.
00:30:06.000 We'll get to that in a moment.
00:30:07.000 The biggest problem here is who's going to tell President Trump the bad news?
00:30:10.000 Who in that inner circle is going to be the person who delivers that news to President Trump?
00:30:14.000 President Trump has a feedback loop.
00:30:16.000 He's very good at seeing reality.
00:30:22.000 He's able to wipe away the BS of sort of prior assumptions on a variety of issues and cut straight to the heart of the matter.
00:30:28.000 But that's only if someone is providing him the data.
00:30:31.000 It's only if somebody is telling him the truth about what exactly is happening.
00:30:34.000 And right now, because President Trump is such an outsized man on the national and international stage, that's creating a climate of fear right around him, which means that the feedback loop may in fact be closed.
00:30:45.000 As Politico reports, Capitol Hill Republicans, corporate America and White House allies are terrified about what's next in President Trump's escalating trade war.
00:30:52.000 But they fear Trump's wrath even more.
00:30:58.000 Lobbyists who are quietly prodding the same lawmakers to defend their interests don't want to have a target on their back or their clients.
00:31:03.000 Even some Trump world confidants, alarmed about the terrorist impact, are hoping someone else intervenes.
00:31:09.000 An official in the energy industry said, quote, hearing angst and frustration from all quarters, but no one wants to be first out of the box saying anything negative about Trump's decision making.
00:31:17.000 Okay, well, a good leader, and President Trump is a good leader, a good leader...
00:31:21.000 Listen to reality.
00:31:22.000 Recognize the reality of the situation.
00:31:24.000 And then make the best possible informed decision.
00:31:27.000 I trust that President Trump is going to do that.
00:31:29.000 That's literally his job.
00:31:31.000 Because now we get to the reality.
00:31:33.000 Here is the reality.
00:31:34.000 The reason that futures are dumping is because the recession risk is now quite real.
00:31:38.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, the world changed on Wednesday, which Trump dubbed Liberation Day.
00:31:46.000 J.P. Morgan's head of economic research, Bruce Kasman, raised the probability of a global recession from 40% to 60%.
00:31:53.000 The bank now expects U.S. gross domestic product to contract 0.3% in the fourth quarter of 2025 from one year earlier.
00:31:59.000 It previously expected 1.3% growth.
00:32:02.000 That is a delta of 1.6%.
00:32:04.000 Unemployment, says J.P. Morgan, will reach 5.3% next year.
00:32:08.000 Kasman says the size and disruptive impact of U.S. trade policies, if sustained, would be sufficient to tip a still-healthy U.S. in global expansion into recession.
00:32:16.000 The tariff shock will likely be magnified by its effects on sentiment and through potential disruptions to global supply chains.
00:32:23.000 Now again, that is the worry that everyone is currently fearing.
00:32:28.000 That recession is on its way because if economic activity slows, if investors pull their money out of the markets, if there's less investment, fewer IPOs, less innovation, if all that happens because everybody is afraid of what comes next, then you will get an economic slowdown and it will affect everyone.
00:32:44.000 It will affect everyone.
00:32:46.000 As Bloomberg points out, there's a major problem with the possibility of debt default.
00:32:53.000 Donald Trump's global trade war is already priming financial markets for the next wave of corporate default.
00:32:57.000 A Bloomberg News measure of distressed debt worldwide swelled the most in at least 15 months this week, sending more than $43 billion of bonds and loans to levels that make it challenging to refinance.
00:33:07.000 Few expected Washington to go after so many of its key trading partners with such high duties.
00:33:12.000 So corporate debt is being called in.
00:33:14.000 The pile of distressed debt in the Americas region has now surpassed that in Asia Pacific for the first time since August.
00:33:21.000 Robert Schwartz, Portfolio Manager at Alliance Bernstein said, quote, Retailers are getting smacked.
00:33:25.000 If you're a retailer, you try to diversify into Vietnam or the Philippines.
00:33:28.000 Those tariffs were not priced in until this week.
00:33:32.000 Michaels, for example, the Arsene Kraus chain, have been working with its suppliers on pricing and sourcing in preparation for the announcement.
00:33:38.000 This week, its bonds due 2029 tumbled almost 10 cents on the dollar.
00:33:42.000 It's now trading at 44 cents.
00:33:43.000 On the dollar.
00:33:44.000 What does that mean?
00:33:44.000 It means people don't expect these companies to survive and be able to pay back their debt.
00:33:48.000 They expect them to go bankrupt.
00:33:49.000 Other companies that are now in serious trouble.
00:33:52.000 Wayfair, Nordstrom, Klairs, PetSafe.
00:33:56.000 The owner of luxury department store chain Saks Fifth Avenue is one of the biggest additions to the distressed universe.
00:34:01.000 According to Bloomberg, a $2.2 billion bond that it issued less than four months ago to finance the acquisition of Neiman Marcus is now trading at 73.5 cents on the dollar and yielding 16 percentage points more than treasuries.
00:34:12.000 So people are buying up the corporate debt because what they realize is that perhaps that corporate debt, maybe these companies come back, but people are freaking out because most companies have to operate on the basis of rotating debt.
00:34:25.000 Most companies, again, do not have a Scrooge McDuck giant vat of cash in the back that they dive into every night.
00:34:31.000 Most of them are operating off credit to get to payroll because the way that the cash flow works in pretty much every company, you use debt to pay the payroll, and then, kind of like your credit card, and then...
00:34:41.000 All the money comes in, used to pay back the debt.
00:34:43.000 That's how the cycle works.
00:34:44.000 What happens when, for tariff reasons, this cash stops coming in?
00:34:48.000 Now the debt starts to get really, really dicey.
00:34:52.000 This is just another reason that margin calls are getting steep.
00:34:56.000 So margin calls, hedge funds, are now being hit with the worst margin calls since 2020, since the COVID crisis.
00:35:02.000 This according to the Financial Times.
00:35:04.000 Wall Street banks have asked their hedge fund clients To stump up more money and security for their loans because the value of their holdings had tumbled, according to three people familiar with the matter.
00:35:13.000 Several big banks have now issued the largest margin calls to their clients since the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020.
00:35:19.000 For those who don't know what a margin call is, here's the simple explanation.
00:35:22.000 Let's say that you want to buy $10,000 worth of stock.
00:35:25.000 So what you do is you drop $5,000 in cash, you buy $5,000 with cash, and you borrow $5,000 worth of stock from the broker.
00:35:32.000 You get a loan, $5,000 worth of stock from the broker.
00:35:36.000 And... Because the broker's lending you the stock, you have to have some collateral.
00:35:40.000 So what's the collateral?
00:35:41.000 The margin of 30%, which is the actual equity against the loan.
00:35:45.000 So then the stock drops to $8,000.
00:35:46.000 So now your margin's 30%, because $8,000, the value of the stock, minus the $5,000 loan, which means $3,000, which is 30% of, again, the original purchase.
00:35:58.000 So if you're following me, what that means is that a decline in the stock now means that you have to invest more money in order to shore up the loan, in order to make clear to the broker, That you're not going to default on your loan.
00:36:09.000 Because if the stock goes down, how are you going to pay them back?
00:36:12.000 That's the problem.
00:36:13.000 So as the stock market craters, people are getting margin called.
00:36:16.000 And if they don't have the cash, then they're defaulting.
00:36:19.000 Meanwhile, Jerome Powell on Friday, of course, announced that this was going to have a severe impact.
00:36:23.000 He said higher inflation is now a likelihood.
00:36:26.000 Looking ahead, higher tariffs will be working their way through our economy and are likely to raise inflation in coming quarters.
00:36:34.000 Reflecting this, both survey and market-based measures of near-term inflation expectations have moved up.
00:36:40.000 Okay, then Powell acknowledged that there is tons of uncertainty in the market.
00:36:43.000 Again, these are bad factors for the market.
00:36:45.000 All of it being created by a wrong-headed view of trade.
00:36:49.000 If you wanted to renegotiate these trade deals, you could.
00:36:51.000 You just call up Vietnam and you say to Vietnam, hey, I want to renegotiate our trade deal.
00:36:55.000 And if you don't like it, I'll tariff you.
00:36:56.000 Just Vietnam. 0.87
00:36:57.000 And Vietnam goes, okay, and then they renegotiate. 0.75
00:37:00.000 Putting tariffs on everyone.
00:37:06.000 Here is Jerome Powell.
00:37:09.000 At the same time, surveys of households and businesses report dimming expectations and higher uncertainty about the outlook.
00:37:17.000 Survey respondents point to the effects of the new federal policies, especially related to trade.
00:37:22.000 We are closely watching this tension between the hard and the soft data.
00:37:27.000 As the new policies and their likely economic effects become clearer, we will have a better sense of their implications for the economy.
00:37:33.000 Meanwhile, Larry Summers, who you'll recall is the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton, who suggested to Joe Biden that inflation was going to break out because of his overspending.
00:37:44.000 Here's Larry Summer saying, guys, inflation's coming again.
00:37:47.000 I think it's almost inevitable.
00:37:50.000 This is the biggest self-inflicted wound we've put on our economy in history.
00:37:57.000 Increasing inflation because the prices are higher because of the tariffs.
00:38:01.000 That gives people less spending power.
00:38:04.000 That means fewer jobs.
00:38:07.000 Markets are looking at all of that and they think...
00:38:11.000 Companies are going to be worth $5 trillion less than they thought before these tariffs started.
00:38:19.000 And that's just the loss to companies.
00:38:21.000 If you add in the loss to consumers, a reasonable estimate would probably be something like $30 trillion.
00:38:28.000 Now, meanwhile, you know, all the talk about how we're going to build all these new factories here, as I mentioned before, the problem is you're going to build a new factory.
00:38:34.000 You know where you need stuff from, not America to build those new factories.
00:38:37.000 According to The Wall Street Journal, roofing products manufacturer IKO North America has been on a factory building spree in the United States with one plant completed and four more under construction.
00:38:46.000 After President Trump launched a barrage of tariffs on U.S.
00:38:49.000 trading partners, the math abruptly changed.
00:38:51.000 Chief Executive David Koschitzky said IKO's just finished factory in Texas now faces higher prices on steel.
00:38:58.000 The company will continue with the projects, but tariffs will make them significantly more expensive.
00:39:08.000 Companies are now double-checking the numbers on planned factories or halting them altogether.
00:39:14.000 So that's a problem.
00:39:17.000 Another problem.
00:39:18.000 The cost of the things that you are buying is about to skyrocket, which means less money left over for you to spend on other products, goods, and services in the United States.
00:39:26.000 Remember, if an iPhone gets a lot more expensive, that's money that you could have spent on other cool stuff that you were going to buy in the U.S. And now you no longer can, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:39:34.000 Apple's big moneymaker is a global patchwork.
00:39:36.000 It has components sourced from all over the world, brought primarily together in China, where electronics manufacturing has been perfected for over a generation.
00:39:43.000 Moving the process to the U.S., not cheap, definitely not easy.
00:39:48.000 The iPhone 16 Pro, cost for a 256 gigabyte version, is $1,100.
00:39:53.000 The cost of all the hardware inside was about $550 to Apple when the phone was introduced.
00:39:58.000 Throw in assembly and testing, and Apple's cost rises to about $580.
00:40:03.000 Even when you account for Apple's advertising budget and all the included services, there's still a big profit margin.
00:40:08.000 Now, factor in the tariff for goods from China.
00:40:10.000 That currently totals 54%.
00:40:11.000 Now, the cost is $850.
00:40:15.000 How about an American-made iPhone?
00:40:17.000 Well, there's a problem, because first of all, the device has a lot of foreign parts, and you have to pay the levy on the foreign parts.
00:40:23.000 Then, a manufacturing move to the United States would be a massive mammoth undertaking that would take years.
00:40:28.000 The assembly ecosystem in China is labor-intensive.
00:40:30.000 It wouldn't make sense in the United States.
00:40:33.000 By Lamb's estimate, the assembly labor that might cost $30 per phone in China could cost $300 in the United States.
00:40:38.000 If every single component were made in the United States, then you would be talking about an increase of thousands of dollars in the cost of your iPhone.
00:40:49.000 That is what you're talking about.
00:40:51.000 So, does that sound like a great deal to you?
00:40:54.000 For the American worker, it turns out every American worker is also an American consumer.
00:40:59.000 So the question is, what other countries are also going to do?
00:41:02.000 Because we're not the only country with agency here.
00:41:03.000 So are other countries going to play along?
00:41:05.000 Are they going to go for a bilateral deal?
00:41:07.000 President Trump, one of the reasons, again, he should be signaling to Israel, Vietnam, Taiwan, these are all countries that have come and said we want 0% tariffs.
00:41:14.000 He should signal to them, yes, because if he doesn't, all these other countries are going to start reorienting toward China and they're going to start doing so incredibly quickly.
00:41:23.000 Okay, so, Other countries are going to have to respond.
00:41:25.000 And again, the question here is how they respond.
00:41:28.000 And part of that is going to be whether the president actually accepts them coming on bended knee and giving him the thing that he supposedly wants or maybe he doesn't want.
00:41:35.000 It's totally unclear.
00:41:36.000 Because again, does he want the trade deficit to go away or does he want the tariffs to go away?
00:41:39.000 They're not the same thing.
00:41:40.000 They're not the same thing.
00:41:42.000 The trade deficit is how much money we are spending that other countries are not spending on our product.
00:41:47.000 And a tariff is them taxing the product that's going in, thus to reduce our imports to them and to make their own businesses more competitive through artificial means.
00:41:59.000 Those are two very different things.
00:42:01.000 And what President Trump does here is going to make an awful lot of difference.
00:42:05.000 So there are a couple of reads of things that are happening.
00:42:07.000 One is we are putting China under significant pressure with the That's great. 0.98
00:42:11.000 We should put China under significant pressure.
00:42:13.000 They're terrible.
00:42:14.000 They're a communist, authoritarian state with global ambitions, or at the very least, regional ambitions.
00:42:21.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, even before Trump had announced an additional 34% duty on imports of Chinese goods, Beijing had vowed to strengthen domestic consumption, part of a larger effort to fortify its economy and keep its growth trajectory on track.
00:42:32.000 Now, with Trump's latest shakeup of the global trading environment, economists say it is more critical than ever for China to find an alternative to exports as a driver of economic growth.
00:42:42.000 According to Thomas Getley and Wei He of the research firm Geveco Dragonomics, they said this is the worst case trade scenario for China.
00:42:48.000 Chinese policymakers will need to step up stimulus efforts in response.
00:42:50.000 Okay, that would be great.
00:42:51.000 This is why we should do the tariffs on China. 0.56
00:42:53.000 There's one problem.
00:42:54.000 He's tariffing everyone else.
00:42:56.000 And when you tariff everybody else, a bunch of other countries might tend toward China.
00:43:01.000 So, for example, a huge number of companies in recent years have reshored from China to Vietnam because China is our enemy and Vietnam is not.
00:43:08.000 In fact, Vietnam has become one of the best capitalist growth stories of the modern era.
00:43:13.000 There's a great book called In Defense of Capitalism that recently came out that traces What's been happening in Poland and Vietnam.
00:43:19.000 Vietnam still titularly has a communist party that runs it, but it's actually a pro-America, very capitalist country at this point.
00:43:26.000 Like Starbucks and McDonald's are there.
00:43:28.000 As the Wall Street Journal points out, after U.S.-China tension flared in the first Trump administration and Trump imposed his first round of tariffs on Chinese goods, suppliers for companies like Nike and Apple doubled down on Vietnam to avoid the tariffs.
00:43:40.000 Foreign businesses found Vietnamese officials to be pro-business and eager to give manufacturing projects a boost.
00:43:45.000 And with Vietnam, where if China getting too powerful, Vietnam's geopolitical stance actually aligned with Washington.
00:43:51.000 If you alienate the Vietnamese and you make it hard for them to produce, people are just going to reach over to China or Vietnam turns to China as its own possible export market. 0.95
00:43:59.000 And that's true for Europe also.
00:44:02.000 It means that all the countries we need to actually draw into our orbit are now alienated from us.
00:44:09.000 Patricia Kim, China expert at Brookings Institute, says the tariff shock gives U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific region An urgent need to hedge away from the United States.
00:44:17.000 They're going to be looking toward each other and toward China.
00:44:20.000 That's a given.
00:44:22.000 Part of blocking in China is being nice to the people who we need to block in China.
00:44:28.000 Being mean to everyone is not, in fact, a very good strategy.
00:44:31.000 Okay, so I have heard a couple of different sort of narratives that have been retailed that I just want to put to bed.
00:44:37.000 One is tariffs are not a tax because, hey, you can volunteer to pay for the product or you don't even have to buy that product.
00:44:44.000 Question. Are sales tax attacks?
00:44:46.000 They are.
00:44:47.000 Sales tax are attacks.
00:44:49.000 They're attacks that you pay because it goes right into the price of the good at checkout.
00:44:56.000 Now, it's clearer on your sales slip because it'll say sales tax right there on your sales.
00:45:00.000 But here's an important thing.
00:45:01.000 When Obamacare came out, it increased the prices of goods and services.
00:45:05.000 And your prices went up.
00:45:07.000 Was that effectually a tax?
00:45:08.000 Absolutely. It was government taking revenue.
00:45:11.000 From you, indirectly.
00:45:12.000 That is what a tariff is.
00:45:14.000 Also, I'm hearing this bizarre narrative on the right.
00:45:18.000 Do we really need stuff?
00:45:19.000 Is stuff really that good?
00:45:21.000 And the answer for the vast majority of people is yes.
00:45:23.000 Better stuff is gooder.
00:45:25.000 That is the narrative.
00:45:27.000 This whole idea that you are healing spirits here, I'm going to need to see your evidence of that.
00:45:31.000 Are you making the family stronger when dad can't earn as much money and get as much stuff for less work?
00:45:38.000 Are you really healing the church?
00:45:40.000 When it turns out that your iPhone costs three times what it used to cost?
00:45:44.000 Is economic recession what's necessary to restore the soul of America?
00:45:48.000 Is that the thing?
00:45:48.000 Again, this is not a case to be made, that we shouldn't be going after our enemies using trade as a tool.
00:45:53.000 We absolutely should.
00:45:55.000 The real question is, why all of a sudden the language coming from the right sounds exactly like the de-growthers on the left? 0.66
00:46:01.000 In order to fight this global catastrophe, we must have worse things all the time.
00:46:06.000 I'm not up for that.
00:46:07.000 And you know what?
00:46:07.000 I don't think the American people are up for that.
00:46:09.000 Stop telling people that their lives have to be worse because you are going to remake the globe and then not explain what exactly you're even trying to do.
00:46:16.000 Don't do that.
00:46:17.000 It's bad.
00:46:18.000 Speaking of narrative fails, so over the weekend, again, the rollout of this proposal has been bad.
00:46:22.000 It just has been bad.
00:46:23.000 If you're going to do something this big, this earth-shattering, the kind of activity that has not been taken on the unilateral economic front for nearly a hundred years, we're talking about this kind of tariff activity.
00:46:34.000 And even Smoot-Hawley, by the way, did not go as high as this.
00:46:37.000 If you're talking about doing that sort of thing, you better have a damned good explanation that you retail to the American public.
00:46:42.000 Because I can promise you, if people are freaked out, ignoring them or confusing them or telling them to hold on for dear life is not going to be enough.
00:46:50.000 And you can see it in the markets.
00:46:51.000 It's not enough.
00:46:52.000 So over the weekend, Democrats latched onto this, as you knew they would.
00:46:57.000 It would be political malpractice not to.
00:46:59.000 The House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries, he of course...
00:47:03.000 He's finally found his talking point, gang.
00:47:04.000 The Democrats were on their heels and now they found their talking point.
00:47:06.000 Here's Hakeem Jeffery, the House Minority Leader.
00:47:09.000 What we're seeing is that he is crashing the economy in real time.
00:47:14.000 Costs are going up.
00:47:15.000 The Trump tariffs are likely to result in thousands of dollars in additional costs on the American people in terms of groceries and gas and goods.
00:47:26.000 And at the same time, we're seeing the retirement savings of the American people plummeting as well.
00:47:33.000 This guy is driving us toward a recession.
00:47:38.000 Okay, so that's going to be their talking point.
00:47:40.000 And you know what doesn't help?
00:47:41.000 What doesn't help is while the markets are tanking and everybody is freaking out, I understand.
00:47:45.000 President Trump owns golf courses.
00:47:47.000 I get it.
00:47:48.000 I get that he had an LIV tournament, a live tournament, over the weekend.
00:47:52.000 I understand all of that.
00:47:53.000 Also, optics matter.
00:47:54.000 They do.
00:47:55.000 They do.
00:47:56.000 Here's Hakeem Jeffries going after President Trump for being on the golf course.
00:48:00.000 At the same time that the retirement savings is crashing, the stock market is crashing, the economy is crashing, Donald Trump is on the golf course?
00:48:09.000 This is what he chooses to do?
00:48:11.000 And so, we have to continue to press our case aggressively on the economy, on healthcare, on social security, and we'll continue to do just that.
00:48:22.000 Well, again, First rule of politics, don't do things that make you look bad.
00:48:29.000 This is like the number one rule of politics.
00:48:30.000 CNN jumped on President Trump for going and playing golf over the weekend.
00:48:34.000 You knew they would.
00:48:35.000 Here they were playing a montage of President Trump criticizing Barack Obama for playing golf.
00:48:41.000 Obama, it was reported today, played 250 rounds of golf.
00:48:45.000 Everything's executive order.
00:48:47.000 Because he doesn't have enough time because he's playing so much golf.
00:48:51.000 Obama ought to get off the golf course and get down there.
00:48:54.000 I'm going to be working for you.
00:48:56.000 I'm not going to have time to go play golf.
00:48:57.000 He played more golf last year than Tiger Woods.
00:48:59.000 He plays more golf than people.
00:49:16.000 again, Again, don't make these kinds of mistakes.
00:49:18.000 And I understand that on the right, we don't care about this sort of stuff.
00:49:20.000 I get it.
00:49:21.000 I get that we are constantly saying nothing matters.
00:49:23.000 President Trump is Teflon.
00:49:24.000 And to this point, he has been.
00:49:26.000 Recession stops everything.
00:49:27.000 Economic downturn stops everything.
00:49:29.000 You can do whatever you want so long as things are chugging along.
00:49:32.000 When that number is going up into the right, everybody's pretty happy.
00:49:34.000 Rising tide lifts all ships and covers for a myriad of political sins.
00:49:39.000 It doesn't when people are feeling insecure.
00:49:41.000 When people are feeling bad.
00:49:42.000 That is just the reality of politics.
00:49:44.000 The rules of gravity still apply.
00:49:46.000 They do.
00:49:46.000 And there's no way really around that.
00:49:48.000 Now, it is quite possible that these tariffs end up basically knocked down by the courts.
00:49:53.000 That is a real possibility.
00:49:54.000 According to the Wall Street Journal, a stationary company in Florida on Thursday challenged the president's earlier 20% tariffs on China, but its legal arguments also apply to the Liberation Day tariffs.
00:50:06.000 As I mentioned before, President Trump is using National emergency authority to declare this massive tariff war?
00:50:13.000 I don't understand how it is possibly covered under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.
00:50:18.000 That sanctions law gives the president authority to address what is called an unusual and extraordinary threat.
00:50:24.000 Well, with regard to Canada and Mexico, he tried to declare that it was fentanyl.
00:50:28.000 I think you can make the fentanyl case with Mexico. 0.88
00:50:30.000 Hard to make that case in Canada when last year we seized a grand total of 43 pounds, which is a backpack of fentanyl at the Canadian border.
00:50:38.000 When you say that the national emergency is trade deficits, I don't know how you can do that.
00:50:44.000 I honestly don't know how that is upheld by a court.
00:50:48.000 It seems difficult to suggest that you should be able to declare a national emergency based on trade deficits that amount to wiping $6 trillion from the books in the first two days in terms of stock value.
00:51:04.000 So we'll see how that holds up over time.
00:51:06.000 Meanwhile... Economic policy has bleed over into the real world.
00:51:09.000 It turns out that trade policy does have intersection with foreign policy, more generally military policy as well.
00:51:15.000 Obviously, China, for example, growing its influence, has some significant military ramifications.
00:51:19.000 It is also true in Ukraine.
00:51:22.000 So, that giant cork board that President Trump held up, the poster board, it did not have Russia listed on it.
00:51:27.000 It listed dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of countries.
00:51:31.000 It did not list Russia.
00:51:32.000 Kevin Hassett tried to explain why Russia was not actually listed.
00:51:36.000 Obviously, an ongoing negotiation with Russia and Ukraine, and I think the president made the decision not to conflate the two issues.
00:51:43.000 It doesn't mean that Russia, the fullest of time, is going to be treated wildly different than every other country.
00:51:47.000 Well, it is pretty obvious at this point that all of the unicities toward Russia are bearing very little fruit with regard to Russia actually caving in, changing its position.
00:51:54.000 Over the weekend, according to the U.S. Sun, NATO had to scramble fighter jets as Vladimir Putin unleashed a barrage of nuclear-capable bombers and ballistic missiles on Ukraine.
00:52:03.000 Russia struck Central Kiev and other locations in brutal new strikes involving ballistics, cruise missiles, kamikaze drones, and aerial bombs.
00:52:10.000 That came one day after a Russian missile strike on Vladimir Zelensky's hometown of Kerviri, killing at least 19 people, including nine children.
00:52:17.000 The latest attack involved at least four 295 MS strategic bombers, with Putin's forces unleashing deadly KH-101 missiles from over the Caspian Sea.
00:52:27.000 So again, this is all in the middle of Zelensky saying that he is perfectly willing to sign A ceasefire like today.
00:52:34.000 And Russia continues to push forward.
00:52:36.000 And meanwhile, the administration continues to say we're not going to tariff you.
00:52:39.000 Everybody else on Earth gets tariffed, not you.
00:52:42.000 At some point, reality has to set in and Vladimir Putin has to be brought to the table.
00:52:46.000 If the idea is, push Zelensky to get to the table.
00:52:48.000 I'm all for it.
00:52:49.000 I've been calling for it since 2022.
00:52:52.000 I've been doing this for three years, calling for this.
00:52:54.000 But Zelensky's now at the table.
00:52:56.000 That ain't the problem anymore.
00:52:57.000 Putin is not at the table.
00:52:58.000 That is very clear.
00:52:59.000 And again, more niceties on trade are not fixing the problem.
00:53:02.000 Pretty obviously.
00:53:03.000 Meanwhile, the Trump administration is actually doing a bunch of good things, and this is the thing that's killing me about this trade war that is, again, being poorly run out.
00:53:13.000 Get to the off-ramp.
00:53:14.000 The off-ramp should be zero tariffs.
00:53:15.000 Get to that off-ramp.
00:53:16.000 If President Trump uses leverage to get there, great.
00:53:19.000 He did it.
00:53:19.000 He did the thing.
00:53:20.000 Awesome. Get there, because there's too much other important stuff that is happening.
00:53:24.000 So, for example, the Trump administration is absolutely kneecapping higher education.
00:53:29.000 The Trump administration escalated its campaign against American universities, according to the Wall Street Journal, by preparing to pull five hundred and ten million dollars in federal grants from Brown University, while also laying out demands Harvard must meet to avoid losing billions in government dollars.
00:53:40.000 The administration is freezing National Institutes of Health grants to Brown while investigates the Ivy League schools handling of anti-Semitism and DEI.
00:53:48.000 Additionally, new developments emerged regarding Harvard after the government opened a review of nearly nine billion dollars in federal grants and contracts earlier this week.
00:53:55.000 This is great.
00:53:56.000 This is necessary.
00:53:57.000 This should be done.
00:53:58.000 Administration is also looking into wastes of money, like, for example, an initiative called the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
00:54:05.000 Brent Schur reports this exclusively for Daily Wire.
00:54:08.000 More than three decades ago in 1990, Congress mandated an initiative called the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
00:54:14.000 Now it spends billions of dollars a year empowering liberal climate radicals to spread climate change doom.
00:54:18.000 The government group says its role is to provide the scientific foundation to support informed decision making across the U.S.
00:54:23.000 on climate change.
00:54:24.000 What that has amounted to is the production of five national climate assessment reports, the crown jewel of climate research.
00:54:30.000 The report appears to be just about the only thing the group actually does.
00:54:34.000 While the U.S.
00:54:35.000 Global Change Research Program states on its website it has a budget of nearly $5 billion in 2025, it only lists two full-time employees.
00:54:43.000 Mostly, the National Climate Assessment outsources its work to a group called the ICF, a massive government contractor that has an active contract to work on the report.
00:54:57.000 It's said to be paid millions of dollars during the Trump administration to, quote, assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.
00:55:06.000 That contract was first announced in June 2021 and described as a $34 million five-year contract to help with national climate assessments.
00:55:15.000 So basically, it is a giant sop to a left-leaning organization.
00:55:19.000 And now, Russ Vought, who runs the powerful Office of Management and Budget, is taking a look at this sort of stuff, which we should be doing.
00:55:28.000 And this is the sort of stuff that has to be done.
00:55:30.000 Doge is doing this sort of stuff.
00:55:32.000 I was on the All In podcast last week, and one of the former members of the All In kind of team, Antonio, he is part of Doge.
00:55:40.000 He's going through everything at Social Security, and they're coming up with giant lists of people who have been imported to the United States and given Social Security cards.
00:55:49.000 And the vast uptake in the people who are being given those Social Security cards cannot be explained by simple legal immigration.
00:55:57.000 It is because Joe Biden was importing people across the border.
00:55:59.000 Doge is doing really important work, really important work.
00:56:02.000 If that's getting obscured by a tariff war, the rationale for which is utterly unclear and the endpoint of which is utterly unclear.
00:56:10.000 And all of that is resulting in significant losses across the economy.
00:56:13.000 This is not what the Trump administration should be focused on.
00:56:16.000 There are things that are really important to do.
00:56:19.000 And if this is really important, then let's hear it.
00:56:20.000 Let's explain.
00:56:21.000 What is the end goal?
00:56:22.000 What does the future America look like at the end of the pain that President Trump is pitching here?
00:56:26.000 All right, coming up, we'll be jumping into the latest from the Atlantic.
00:56:30.000 We now know how that reporter from the Atlantic got into that secret signal group.
00:56:34.000 Plus, we'll jump into the mailbag.
00:56:36.000 But remember, to have your question answered in the mailbag and to actually listen to any