Courts Keep Rejecting Trump’s Tariffs | Receipts Live

Summary

Bulwark Takes: Courts Keep Rejecting Trump’s Tariffs | Receipts Live

Host: JVL
Guest: Catherine Rampell (author of the Receipts newsletter, Washington Post columnist)
Date: May 8, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, JVL and Catherine Rampell dive into the state of the U.S. economy amid ongoing policy headwinds, the impact of tariffs and energy prices under Trump, consumer sentiment, and the recent federal court decisions rejecting Trump’s tariff regimes. The conversation blends sharp economic analysis with wit and relatable real-world examples, providing a granular look at how policy choices are affecting businesses and households on the ground.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Jobs Numbers and Economic “Muddling Through”

00:24–03:20

• New Jobs Report:
  • 115,000 jobs added, above expectations (expected was ~55,000).
  • This number is down from prior months but “better than being negative.”
  • The economy is “still chugging along” despite multiple adverse Trump policy efforts:
    • Tariffs
    • The current war
    • Mass deportations
    • Politicizing the Fed/firing BLS officials
• Catherine Rampell’s Take:
  • “There are a lot of weights weighing on the economy, largely policy related… but the economy is still chugging along.” [01:32]
  • “I am not rooting for recession. I am not rooting for economic calamity. Even though it looks like a lot of the things that Donald Trump is doing would send us that way, I’m still worried...” [03:00–03:20]

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2. Wage Growth vs. Inflation – “Not Keeping Up”

03:46–07:47

• Wage Data Analysis:
  • Wage growth is not keeping up with rising prices.
  • Primary causes: energy price shocks (mostly due to war), but other cost pressures are mounting (fertilizer, plastic, aluminum).
    • “Aluminum prices have like close to doubled in the past year, which… means lots of bad things.” [05:18]
  • Ford’s commodity costs have doubled, notably impacting products like F-150 trucks, washing machines, beer cans, etc.
  • Weak wage growth, alongside rising prices, erodes consumer purchasing power.
• Broader Trends:
  • Stagnant labor market: “Low hiring, low firing stasis.”
    • Less job-switching means fewer opportunities for workers to negotiate higher pay.
  • “Not wage decline, it’s just that the wages are not growing as fast as [inflation].” [07:47]
• Inflation Dynamics:
  • Above-target inflation for 5+ years; not solely attributable to Trump, but exacerbated by recent policies.
  • Fear of inflation expectations becoming entrenched:
    • “When people start to expect higher inflation, it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.” [09:30]

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3. Trump, the Fed, and Political Interference

10:04–13:10

• Trump’s Pressure on the Fed:
  • Rampell discusses efforts to oust board members for not cutting rates (Jay Powell, Lisa Cook).
    • “They launched this bogus criminal investigation into Jay Powell because they were mad that he wasn’t… cutting interest rates.” [11:28]
• Legal Overreach and Threats:
  • Talk of potential indictments for Fed officials as a pretext for dismissal.
  • Trump wants the Fed chair “who would cut interest rates,” admitting this publicly regarding Kevin Warsh.
  • JVL jokes: “If the Fed has to raise rates… will [Trump] attempt to arrest or indict Kevin Warsh?” [10:15]
  • Rampell: “I don’t think it’s totally outside of the realm of possibility.” [11:56]

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4. Consumer Sentiment and Price Pain

13:24–15:33

• Consumer Survey Data:
  • High prices are the #1 complaint, especially among lower-income households (those without stocks).
  • Wealthier households are cushioned by strong stock market performance.
  • “The people who are richer… are seeing their 401ks go up, they’re like, okay, it sucks that gas prices are up, but at least my nest egg is growing…” [14:16]
• Market Euphoria Skepticism:
  • Rampell remains “not convinced that things are going to keep going so, so uppity up… This time is different.” [15:12]

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5. Oil Market Disruptions & Strategic Reserve Shortfall

17:10–21:03

• Strait of Hormuz Crisis:
  • Rampell: Despite hopes for Strait reopening, global oil reserves are already running down.
  • Jeff Currie (Carlyle Group) clip:
    • “You are going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms… and in the US it’s somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner.” [18:12]
  • JVL: “When you have the strait shut down… the size of that bubble… just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And even once you fix the strait… that air bubble has to work its way all the way through. And that is… very, very, very bad.” [19:17]
• Consequences:
  • Expect severe energy bottlenecks, especially in Asia and then in the West—all exacerbating inflation.

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6. Federal Courts vs. Trump Tariff Regimes

21:03–26:34

• Court Rulings:
  • Supreme Court and a federal trade court have struck down major Trump tariff moves, ruling national emergency/other justifications illegal.
  • Trump’s administration keeps seeking legal loopholes for tariff authority.
  • “They have found every single possible tariff authority that exists in the law and have abused it.” – Rampell [22:01]
• On-going Tariffs Despite Losses:
  • New creative (and often dubious) justifications, e.g., on German cars (“Are BMWs a national security threat?”)
  • Some authorities are “battle tested,” but require legal processes and hearings.
  • Trump “can’t just… use his itchy Twitter finger and say, bam, I got more tariffs.”
• Refunds to Businesses:
  • Administration has dragged feet on refunding businesses hit by illegal tariffs.
  • “CBP said… the first tariff refunds may be dribbled out as soon as May 12…” [24:36]
  • Smaller businesses will struggle most with the bureaucratic process.
    • JVL: “You’re a small business on Etsy. Good luck.” [24:42]
  • Catherine shares anecdote (Pamela Reese, harp company): recovery of refunds won’t heal business wounds—lost customers, disrupted supply chains, and reputational damage persist. [24:45–26:07]
    • “Even if companies get this money back… doesn’t mean that the scarring is completely healed.” [25:09]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Economic “Resilience”:
  • JVL: “There is this weird sense of, well, anything that doesn’t end in nuclear holocaust means that we made it.” [03:20]
• On the Entrenchment of Inflation:
  • Rampell: “That is the state of the world you really, really, really don’t want to be in. That’s the state of the world the Fed is super worried about.” [09:50]
• On Political Interference:
  • Rampell: “Would [Trump] come after Kevin Warsh? I don’t think it’s totally outside of the realm of possibility.” [11:56]
• On Legal Creativity with Tariffs:
  • Rampell: “They have been very resourceful… maybe a little bit too creative in the ways they’ve tried to interpret the law.” [22:01]
• On Lasting Tariff Damage:
  • Rampell (quoting a business owner): “Even if companies get this money back… that doesn’t mean that the scarring is completely healed.” [25:09]
• On Small Business Struggles:
  • JVL: "You’re a small business on Etsy. Good luck." [24:42]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• Jobs numbers and economic context – 00:24–03:20
• Wages vs. inflation – 03:46–07:47
• Inflation, the Fed, and Trump’s interventions – 10:04–13:10
• Consumer sentiment – 13:24–15:33
• Oil market disruptions – 17:10–21:03
• Court decisions striking down Trump tariffs – 21:03–26:34

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Tone & Style

• Conversational but wonky—mixing dense economic analysis with sardonic asides and humor.
• Relatable anecdotes (small business examples) humanize abstract economics.
• Clear frustration at continued attempts to subvert legal and institutional norms.

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Summary Value

This episode is essential listening for anyone trying to understand how Trump’s ongoing trade and economic policies, war-driven shocks, and politicization of the Fed are affecting American households and businesses. The details on small business impacts, legal wrangling over tariffs, and the looming energy crunch are especially relevant for those who want more than just the headlines.

Takeaways: The U.S. economy is weathering storm after storm—not unscathed, but “muddling through.” Meanwhile, court victories against illegal tariffs offer only partial relief, the wounds of policy overreach slow to heal for real-world companies and workers.

Transcript

[JVL]

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[JVL]

play social casino void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my Bulwark colleague Catherine Rampel, author of the Receipts newsletter. And we're going to be talking about politics and the law today. We're going right to Virginia where the state Supreme Court is. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. We're not going to do that. Sorry, you're gonna have to. You're gonna have to tune into other Bulwark hashtag content for that sort of talk. Catherine and I are here because we have jobs numbers. You political sickos can go do your redistricting fight. We're here to nerd out about the economy. Catherine, job numbers are out. They are. They're up115,000, which is better than being negative, which is a thing that often happens during the Trump era, down from last year, last month, but better than the expectation, which was like 50, 55,000. So talk to me about this. What is it? Is there, Is this just meh.

[Catherine Rampell]

I mean, it's better than expected, as you pointed out. I'm a little confused, candidly about what's going on in this economy. I think a lot of people are at this point just because there are a lot of weights weighing on the economy, largely policy related weights dragging on the economy. And so I guess the question is, like, how much better could things have been without that boot on our necks? But the economy is still chugging along. Like as much as criticize Donald Trump's policies when it comes to tariffs or the war or mass deportations or trying to politicize the Fed or firing the commissioner of the BLS for that matter, the agency that releases these numbers, all of those things are bad. But our economy still keeps chugging along. So despite what seems to be lots of efforts to make things go south, we still seem to be surviving. And like, to what extent that's about the AI boom slash bubble, I don't know. I think it's a little bit hard to tell within this report itself, but as I have said many times, I am not rooting for recession. I am not rooting for a bad

[JVL]

person to root for a recession.

[Catherine Rampell]

I am not rooting for economic calamity. Even though it looks like a lot of the things that Donald Trump is doing would send us that way, I'm still worried that we're going to end up with some pretty bad economic outcomes. But so far, we're muddling through.

[JVL]

Muddling through. I, I mean, if you pull back the lens long enough, we always muddle through. We muddled through the Great Depression. Right? This is, I mean, there is a, there is this weird sense of, well, anything that doesn't end in nuclear holocaust means that we made it. And you people who kept warning about how terrible it was, look at you. We all survived, right? I mean, this literally, we had this

[Catherine Rampell]

with COVID I mean, I will say

[JVL]

people said Covid was going to be terrible and look, it was fine. Well, a million people died. No, but we're all here, right? This is right.

[Catherine Rampell]

I will say, like, there are some offspots, vulnerabilities that you can see even in this report. So, like, just as a for instance, I think Heather Long pointed this out that if you look at wage growth, it looks like it's probably not going to keep up with inflation. I know. Surprise, surprise, because again, leave that up there.

[JVL]

Matt, go ahead, talk, please.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah, yeah. So what you're seeing here, the blue line, is how much people's wages have been rising. You know, have you been getting a raise? Did you change jobs to get higher pay? All of that good stuff. The orangey line is what's happening to prices. And you see that line go up part at the very end. And that's largely about the war, right? It's about the fact that energy prices have surged and a lot of other prices may also be going up in the months ahead. Like this is just the initial shock of, like gasoline, for example, or natural gas prices, things like that. But pretty much everything else you buy has energy as an input in some respect. Either gasoline, diesel is being used to ferry around the goods that get to your door, or maybe fuel is used to manufacture those goods, or the workers who, you know, who ultimately come and do your nails or whatever, like, they're paying higher prices on gasoline, they're demanding higher wages, so lots of prices can go up related to this energy shock that we haven't seen yet, in addition to all of the other supply chain disruptions that we have seen, but maybe we haven't felt the full effects of yet, like the rise in fertilizer costs, the Rise in plastics costs, the rise in aluminum costs. I was, I was looking at the aluminum data recently. Not something that most normal people probably spend a lot of time thinking about, but alumina prices have like close to doubled in the past year, which, you know, means lots of bad things.

[JVL]

Sorry, I meant bad bad.

[Catherine Rampell]

Right.

[JVL]

I don't know why I got so confused with my reaction there. I meant, well, that's horrible.

[Catherine Rampell]

I know, I know. For all those beer drinkers out there or people who are trying to buy F150s, you know, like Ford said, or washing machines. Yeah. So Ford said that its commodity costs have doubled in the past year. They've gone from like 1 billion or they've gone twice as high as they were expected to. Anyway, they thought they were going to be like $1 billion and now they're $2 billion. What's $1 billion between friends? Right. And if you look at the Ford F150, you know, it's, it's largely made out of aluminum and has been for over a decade. So those kinds of things are going to seep into downstream costs ultimately for consumers. And we haven't seen all of that yet. And so if you don't have a huge amount of wage growth, but you do have a huge amount of price increases, that means every dollar that, that people out there earn is worth a little, little bit less, can buy a little less stuff in the world. So look, the job market hasn't crashed yet. I hope it doesn't crash.

[JVL]

Crashed.

[Catherine Rampell]

Right.

[JVL]

But Matt, can we have that graph again? Because it is important to say this isn't all war related. Like if you look, wage growth is trending down from inauguration. The, the prices. Right. The inflation numbers have been trending up since Liberation Day.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yep.

[JVL]

So like these now, the, the pace of inflation and the pace of wage decline has sped up over the last 67 days. But, but it's not like these trends weren't already there in the economy.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah. And just to be clear, it's not wage decline, it's just that the wages are not growing as fast as they. Yeah. So just, just like people are not losing pay. But the problem is that there is not a lot of there, there's not a lot of churn in the economy right now. So we're in kind of this low hiring, low firing stasis. And one way that people usually get higher pay is by changing jobs. So if you're stuck in your position, that's great that you didn't lose it, but there aren't a lot of other outside options out there. And so that limits how much more pay people can actually extract from their employers. So I think that's part of why you're seeing wage growth not be as good as, as you might otherwise. And again, meanwhile, those cost pressures are going up, not just related to the war, as you point out, related to lots of other things, including tariffs and including other things that this President has done, but not exclusively related to that. I mean, at this point we've had above target rate inflation. The target for The Fed is 2%. We've had above that for whatever it is, five plus years at this point. So not all of that is Trump. And the fear is that like we've already had inflation hotter than we want for a while now. And now you have this kind of one, two punch of tariffs and the war. And will those things help reset expectations for how much inflation people are anticipating? And when people start to expect higher inflation, it becomes kind of a self fulfilling prophecy like they, they reset the prices that they charge and things like that because they're worried about getting caught off guard where like they're charging one price but their suppliers prices go up. So they're like, I might as well preemptively raise prices. That's the state of the world you really, really, really don't want to be in. That's the state of the world that the Fed is super worried about. And it's part of the reason why, as much as Donald Trump is demanding lower interest rates, it's why markets do not think we are getting any more rate cuts for like at least the next year and a half. And again, largely comes back to stuff that Donald Trump has done to undermine his own objectives.

[JVL]

I mean, look, I realize that I'm asking you questions a little outside of your expertise here, but just roll with me, okay? If the Fed has to raise rates at any point in the next 18 months, do you think, think the President will attempt to arrest or indict Kevin Marsh?

[Catherine Rampell]

I think it's not outside of the realm of possible. I mean, look, Bill Pulte, who is the head of the fhfa, I always forget what it stands for. Federal Housing Housing Authority, right?

[JVL]

Housing lender.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They oversee like Fannie and Freddie. Anyway, he said on TV a couple of days ago that he was expecting to indict or that there would be an indictment of Lisa Cook, who is one of the Fed board members whom Donald Trump has been trying to fire. He said that he expected that there would be an indictment of her coming and, and that would be sufficient grounds, the indictment itself, not a conviction, to fire her from the Fed board. The, the President has already tried to fire her. The Supreme Court is hearing that case. So far, she's been allowed to, you know, that effort has been blocked. She's been allowed to continue serving on the board. But the real risk is that, like, Donald Trump and Bill Pulte and the other minions get greedy. And they say, you know, we realize that we have this tool at our disposal to kind of push out the people that we don't want if they don't do the things that we, that we want them to do, which is to cut interest rates. That's exactly what they did to Jay Powell. Right? They, they launched this bogus criminal investigation into Jay Powell because they were mad that he wasn' marshaling the troops to cut interest rates. That's why they're trying to push out Lisa Cook, because Trump wants to get a majority of the seats on the board that sets interest rates. So would he come after Kevin Warsh? I don't think it's totally outside of the realm of possibility. Kevin Warsh got the job, presumably because Donald Trump thinks he's going to cut interest rates. Not presumably. Donald Trump said that was a litmus test. He said this publicly that the person that he was going to appoint into that job of chairing the Fed would be someone who would cut interest rates. And Warsh is not exactly known as an inflation dove, someone who's normally erring towards interest rate cuts. He said that he planned to do it, but again, he's one of 12 votes. And if you look at where markets are, they don't think that this is where the Fed is heading. So how is Donald Trump going to respond to that? I don't know. He joked about suing Kevin Warsh at the Alfalfa dinner. So, you know, I don't know how funny Kevin Warsh found that.

[JVL]

Probably this just started with me trying to make a cheap joke, and you took us to a very dark place.

[Catherine Rampell]

Oh, sorry. What was the joke supposed to be?

[JVL]

It was just a joke about, like, oh, if we, if we get a rate increase, will he, you know, threatened a raise and you're like, no, actually, that could happen.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah, I think it's very possible. Totally possible.

[JVL]

All right, while we have all this other stuff going, consumer sentiment, we have some charts on consumer sentiment, some new numbers out by that. Catherine, walk me through.

[Catherine Rampell]

Okay, so consumer sentiment, bad people are mad about the economy. Again, like, you don't see it in a lot of the hard data yet. But people really hate this economy, and in particular, they hate rising prices. This is one of the findings from the new consumer sentiment data that come that came out where they ask people about, you know, are your personal finances doing better or worse? I'm sort of sorry if I'm turning my head. It's because I'm reading the vertical axis on this chart. So this is the percent of consumers citing high prices for their worst personal finances. And the chart shows how different it is if you own stocks or if you don't own stocks. And so the people who own a lot of stocks, they're like, getting a little bit madder about the fact that prices are going up, but they're like, generally relatively okay. They're like, not as mad as they were in 2022. Whereas the people who don't own stocks. So the. Generally the lowest income people in this country. Yeah, they're real mad about gas prices. You know, they don't have this buoyant stock market sort of helping comfort them at the very least about the fact that they're paying more at the pump, they're paying more at the grocery store, they're paying more everywhere else. The people who are richer, the people who are seeing their 401ks go up, they're like, okay, it sucks that gas prices are up, but at least my nest egg is, is growing and growing and growing and someday I'll be able to retire and be super rich. As I've said many times before, I do not understand what's going on in the stock market. I'm not convinced that things are going to keep going so, so uppity up. But, yeah, that's what you're seeing here. This time is different.

[JVL]

This time is different. Not investment advice, but I'm sure that this time is different. All those case Shiller numbers about, you know, PE ratios. Yeah, this is. See, AI. AI is different. Just like blockchain. No way. Not like blockchain, just like. Well, whatever. Like something like the railroads. This is different.

[Catherine Rampell]

Like the housing boom in circa 2006.

[JVL]

Like the housing boom, 2006. Yeah. That's great. We're going to talk a little bit about oil in a minute when we come back because there is a. A little nugget from the Carlyle group that kind of blew my mind. First, we're going to do a quick pause for an ad.

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[JVL]

All right, Katherine, do you want to set up this Jeff Curry tidbit or do you want me to?

[Catherine Rampell]

Okay, so I can try.

[JVL]

Okay.

[Catherine Rampell]

So presumably people watching and engaging with us out there are aware that there are major problems with oil markets right now and that oil has not been getting through the Strait of Hormuz, certainly not at the rate that it was before the war, on February 28th or earlier. I think what people don't realize is that even if the Strait opened today, we already have this enormous backlog of oil that hasn't been produced. And so what's been happening is that countries around the world are running down their supplies of oil, right? They're using up their reserves, they're using up their stockpiles. And the real question is how much longer can they do that at the current pace? With that, let's play the clip.

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Which tanks run Empty your parts of the world, like Australia, Philippines, Thailand, you are. But the question is when and where? You know, I still say that with you. You know, it's going to be, you know, sometime the month of May that you're going to end up with Europe hitting tank bottoms. And in the US it's somewhere in that July 4th time period, if not sooner. By the way, the inventories number coming out of the US the ones we got last night, the ones last week, I've never seen anything like that before.

[JVL]

Now, when he Says he's never seen anything like that before. Does he mean that America is so hot right now that we're the hottest country around and nobody's ever seen anything like it before? Or is that, is this different? Oh, it's different. This isn't good. So that's very bad, I think. And what he seems to be saying is that we are going to get, we're going to get hitting the bottom of reserves in Asia first, which makes sense because a lot of the, the disruption in the strait is oil moving eastward. But then the, the question is what happens after, right? What Europe at some point is, is gonna top out. The US Is gonna wind up getting through their strategic reserves. And he says like, ah, maybe July 4th weekend. By the way, that would be amazing if it was July four weekend. So Catherine, are you with me still or no? Did we lose you? I think we lost Catherine. Well, that sucks. So anyway, we're gonna try to get Catherine back. Matt, if you could do that, that would be awesome. And I gotta say, I, I look at this thing and what Catherine was talking about is in the supply, you wind up, right. Think of the supply as like a water line, right? And when you have the straight shut down the way it has, you wind up getting a bubble in the airline, right. And the size of that bubble, the size that air bleed in the line, just gets bigger and bigger and bigger the longer the straight closure goes on. And even once you fix the straight and you open it, that, that air bubble has to work its way all the way through. And that is, that's bad. Very, very, very bad. So we're going to go here without Catherine for another minute or two because I want to talk about the federal court and some tariffs and I'll do this by myself. And unless we can get Catherine back in.

[Catherine Rampell]

I can hear you. Sorry, I don't know what happened.

[JVL]

That's okay.

[Catherine Rampell]

All of a sudden I lost out. So I missed your insightful commentary just now.

[JVL]

Yeah, you didn't miss much. So listen, I want to move on to the federal court decision on tariffs. Supreme Court ruled that Trump can't do his old tariff regime. The Trump administration's response seems to be, well, who knows if we can ever give anybody back their money? Can you make us? And also we're just going to keep doing tariffs. We're going to keep announcing tariffs.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah.

[JVL]

And so the federal court came in this week and struck down another 10% unilateral tariffs. And the Trump administration's response to this seems to be whatever we'll figure out another way to do it.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah, I mean, they have been very resourceful, I will say that much. They have found every single possible tariff authority that exists in the law and have abused it. So they've been resourceful, but maybe a little bit too creative in the ways that they've tried to interpret the law. As you point out, they tried to use these national emergency tariffs. The Supreme Court struck them down. They then moved on to a different tariff authority. Now a national federal trade court also struck those down. They've been trying to use other authorities, some of which he used in his first term, that are related to basically, well, different part of national security justifications, to put tariffs on individual products, like so rather than entire countries. That's why when I mentioned before, the

[JVL]

aluminum, like German cars.

[Catherine Rampell]

Right, Right. Yeah. Are like BMWs and Subarus and other things that, you know, if they're not made in the United States, are they a national security threat? Probably not. I don't know. But they're certainly trying to make that the case. And that authority, like that is more battle tested. So they can do it. It still gets challenged in court. And they have to check a lot of boxes to like, prove that there's, that they've done their homework, they've done their due diligence, but even those not totally solid. And Trump presumably doesn't like those things as much because he can't just like, use his itchy Twitter finger and say, like, bam, I got more tariffs. You know, like, there is a process that has to be done. They have to do hearings and whatever over at the, over at the Commerce Department, so there are authorities he can use. He's trying to cut corners and do a bunch of tariffs that the court says he cannot do. And as you point out, they've been really dragging their feet about issuing refunds for tariffs that the court has already said were unconstitutional. Although, side note, CBP said in a, in an announcement like a couple of days ago that the first tariff refunds may be dribbled out as soon as May 12, whenever that is, in a few days, four days from now. So you may see some things come out. And my guess is that it's going to be the bigger, more sophisticated companies out there that get their money first, just because, like, they have the resources to navigate this morass of whatever paperwork and bureaucracy the government is making them go through to get that money back, whereas much smaller companies out there, you know, they don't have.

[JVL]

You're a small business on Etsy. Good luck.

[Catherine Rampell]

Yeah, yeah. Exactly. If you're a small business on Etsy, I know that one of our Bulwark members, Pamela Reese, who has a small harp company, she. She and I have corresponded in the past and talked in the past about how she's dealt with the blow of these tariffs and has had higher input costs. You know, maybe she'll get her money back. The one thing that she said that stuck with me and then I cited in my newsletter last night, is that even if companies get this money back because courts say that they have to give it back, that doesn't mean that the scarring is completely healed. Because, like, think about the additional cost they had to bear from their suppliers who were passing on higher prices to them. Think about all of the business they lost because they passed along some of their costs to customers because they couldn't absorb it themselves, and so their prices got too high. And so, you know, if you're a harp manufacturer, you can't necessarily compete with a company in Italy or wherever that doesn't have to deal with these tariffs. So you lost some customers because of the higher pricing, and now maybe you're losing customers going forward because they're all pissed off at you because your prices are so high, because your president sucks. Things like that. So, you know, great that courts are striking these things down, great that the administration is at least starting to dribble out some refunds. But that doesn't mean that says damage.

[JVL]

Says they will.

[Catherine Rampell]

Says it will. Yeah. Hasn't happened yet. Look, I hope it happens. I'll be following it. I'll probably be writing about it. If you are listening out there and you are in this process, I want to hear from you. Tell me about what that process is like and. And how easy or difficult it's been to get your money back. But again, it's like that in and of itself will not heal the wound. And that's something we have to think about going forward.

[JVL]

Wow. Well, like it is every Friday. It's just a cavalcade of wonders. I. I can't thank you enough for being here and just being a ray of sunshine. Catherine Rampel. Go to the bulwark.com sign up for her newsletter. And if you're in the Southern California area, you might want to go see the Big Bulwark. I mean, it's basically Lollapalooza. They're gonna have Jane Coston and Jon Favreau and a whole bunch of stars at their shows in LA, in San Diego. Go to the bulwark.com events and get your tickets. Everybody else will be back next week and we'll do this over again, but by then the news will probably be really good news, and so I'm just looking forward to that one. Catherine Take care everybody else. Good luck. America, Forget everything you had planned for this weekend because you are sitting on your couch and winning from the comfort

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[JVL]

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