Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Kathryn Anne Edwards: Thank you so much for having me.
Edwards: This is something that I’ve always found rather bewitching about Trump: He is an incredible liar—just [look at] statistically the number of lies and untrue things that he would say and that he repeats, going back all the way to Obama wasn’t born here; the man is not trustworthy—and, at the same time, he is true to his word. He said he would do tariffs, and so many people would like to think that he wasn’t actually going to do it—that he wasn’t actually going to have the wealthiest person in the history of the world destroy the federal government; that he wasn’t actually going to deport people who might belong here; and that he wasn’t actually going to have tariffs. So you have this twin nature of someone who is in some ways very honest about what he was going to do, even if he is very dishonest in the things that he says.
Sargent: It’s interesting that you say that because that really is what’s going on with Trump. It’s the very thing that’s frustrating him so much. He’s supposed to be winning their submission, and they aren’t submitting. So he’s just going to keep dialing up the threats until he gets the result he wants. It doesn’t seem like he’s capable of taking a moment to be a little thoughtful and ask himself the question that you suggested, which is, Is this a really good idea? Do the underlying assumptions make sense?
Sargent: Yeah, exactly. If anything, he’s confirming exactly why we don’t want him to have this unilateral power. Speaking of which, there’s some meaningful movement among Republicans. Six GOP senators have joined the bill that would give Congress the authority to kill new tariffs. The bill requires Congress to pass a joint resolution of approval of any new tariffs, or they expire after 60 days. Trump is threatening to veto this bill, but the absurdity, Kathryn, is so glaring. He’s dramatically abusing his power here by unilaterally imposing the tariffs based on this invented national emergency—the basis of which is trade deficits. So with a bill like this, Congress would be asserting that Trump doesn’t have these extraordinary powers. And again, that’s why he’s raging. He doesn’t have the powers, but he rages at the very idea that Congress would actually dare to assert itself toward him.
There’s a reason why so much of our high-stakes economic policy is therefore rested with them—because there’s accountability over Congress, even if that’s hard to believe now. There’s an accountability over Congress that simply does not exist over the president. And this tension over the tariff fight, and how much is at stake for the economy, illustrates why this needs to go back to a deliberative process. And if we really do need tariffs, you’ve got to articulate that. You’ve got to sell that. You’ve got to put in contingency plans for the retaliation that will undoubtedly occur. And you’ve got to to give people a chance to protect their constituents.
Edwards: Is it a play on Republican?
Edwards: Oh, I read it and I went, I’m sorry, what am I reading here? What’s happening?
Edwards: What I would give to be a fly on the wall of a Republican office and the phone calls they’re getting. I was reading about a month ago that because of these town halls in which Republican members of Congress were getting yelled at that they had some informal policy memos circulating of, Just don’t do town halls anymore. People were upset about what was going on with the federal government and now they’re terrified of what effect tariffs will have. And you see your 401(k) balance slide by 5 percent, by $50,000. That scares people to their core. I would imagine that a lot of Republicans are feeling the heats, and they’re feeling the pressure of a very upset constituency who do not want to see the political world be upended the way that it is. They’re demanding accountability, and I think Republicans can only fight off that pressure from their constituents for so long.
Sargent: Yes, we haven’t even seen the negative fallout from the tariffs. It seriously kept rolling in a big, big way—and when it does hit, the pressure on House Republicans and marginal districts is going to get pretty intense. I think we’re going to see a bill coming very soon, if it hasn’t come out while we’re talking, from House Democrats and then a companion one from Senate Democrats that would terminate the national emergency that Trump is using as a fake justification for the tariffs. I think that’s a tougher one for Republicans to get behind than the other one that we talked about earlier. But still, little by little, this is going to get tough for Republicans. Like I say, the actual negative consequences haven’t gotten really, really terrible yet. Where do you see this going? How terrible is it going to get?
The data that will start to turn alarming really won’t start to come in until maybe end of April, but it’ll be May and June where if these do have a deleterious effect on the economy quickly, which they are projected to do. They’ll start showing up in May and June data releases. At the end of April, we’ll get the first quarter’s growth, which really could go either way if it’s going to be negative, but it’s certainly not going to be strong. I think it’ll be weakly positive, a weak amount of economic growth in the first quarter. And then it’s a series of data releases after that.
Sargent: Yeah. And I think when Republicans start getting a real earful from their constituents, even much worse than it is now, you’re going to see a whole other level of panic from Republican lawmakers. I want to try to get into one of the arguments Trump is making here. He had a series of tweets where he claimed that due to his tariffs, numerous countries around the world now want to make deals with the U.S., including Japan. This is supposed to mean that they’re going to now stop treating us unfairly thanks to his toughness. That whole line about them treating us unfairly is ridiculous. But putting that aside, let’s say for the sake of argument that other countries are knocking down our doors to make deals—would it even be that much to boast about? Given everything that’s going on, aren’t we still in a horrible spot right now and sliding into worse places? How much can we gain from these deals? What do you make of that big argument he’s making?
I was on a WNYC show that was a call in, and one of the people who called into the show about tariffs is starting his first board game company. He has investment money and he’s contracted with a board game manufacturer in China to make the game. But of course, now that tariffs are announced, he has no idea what his production costs will be or if he’ll able to afford to launch his company, his new game. I think that this is a great case study of what a tariff is supposed to do.
In the other version of the world, if it’s not to build out domestic board game manufacturing, tariffs are just a negotiating chip. In which case, any type of movement toward domestic production would be immediately superseded by renegotiating a deal with China. It then wasn’t about getting board game production to the U.S.; it was about just making board game imports cheaper. This guy is basically left wondering which way the world is going to turn as he wants to start his company because it’s not clear what the tariffs are trying to do. And certainly in the case of the former, if you did want to grow domestic board game production, you would do all of those things before the tariff. The tariff would be the last thing you did when you had the factory and the machines and the people and you were all ready to go. So it’s a struggle to find a coherent economic policy from this because manufacturing and negotiation are in conflict.
Edwards: And what would they make? I’ve always thought that this drive toward manufacturing is so misplaced—not because I don’t think they’re good jobs, but because I don’t think those jobs will be increasing in the future. We have shoes now. We had shoes in 1925. We’ll have shoes in 2125. If you imagine a shoe factory a hundred years ago versus a shoe factory a hundred years from now, I can bet that the first picture you think of is a grainy black and white photo with 200 people bent over a production line. And in 2125, I doubt there’ll be a person in the room. This is a lot of economic pain to throw around for an industry that decreasingly uses people.
Sargent: I think you’re getting at a very deep incoherence that really animates not just Trump but also MAGA. Can we talk big picture about where you see Trump’s arguments headed? What’s going to happen over the next six months? We’re going to see the arguments really start to break down more and more visibly. Do you think that’s going to actually have an impact on him and Republicans? How badly do you think the arguments are going to be unmasked as complete bullshit? And what do you think will happen when that does happen?
This is coming to a head of: Are we really going to sacrifice all of our economy to bring back unionized manufacturing jobs as opposed to thinking of something more creative? Are we really going to bankrupt the federal government for a tax cut that serves very little articulated economic purpose? At some point, are we going to address problems of basic rights in our labor market for workers that have long been not addressed? We don’t have paid sick days. We don’t have childcare. We’ve got a very aging population, and none of their kids have paid family leave to take care of them as they die. There are the actual issues in our economy, and there’s this incredible focus on issues that are being invented, so at some point you have to wonder when reality is going to win.
Edwards: It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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