Trump Learned NOTHING from the “Liberation Day” Disaster

Summary

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Bulwark Takes

Episode: Trump Learned NOTHING from the “Liberation Day” Disaster

Date: April 3, 2026
Host: Andrew Egger
Guest: Katherine Rampel (Economics Reporter)
Theme: Assessing the first anniversary and legacy of “Liberation Day”—Trump’s sweeping tariffs initiative—and its impacts on the U.S. economy.

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Episode Overview

On the first anniversary of “Liberation Day” (April 2, 2025)—billed by President Trump as the dawn of a new golden age for American manufacturing—Andrew Egger and Katherine Rampel dissect the chaotic reality and lasting fallout. They explore the economic wreckage, policy missteps, legal challenges, and the continued refusal of the Trump administration to learn from the policy’s failure. The episode covers both the direct impact of the tariffs and the underlying policy mindset extending to other crises (most notably, the ongoing war in Iran and its economic ripple effects).

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Key Discussion Points

1. What Was "Liberation Day"? [01:00–02:00]

• Trump’s Signature Economic Policy: “Liberation Day” marked the introduction of sweeping new tariffs via a so-called "reciprocal" formula. Trump claimed this would revive U.S. manufacturing and kickstart economic growth.
• Unprecedented Tariff Action: The tariffs targeted nearly all countries, often using dubious math and pseudo-academic justification.
• Initial Objectives: Trump claimed he would secure trade deals ("90 deals in 90 days"), raise revenue, and leverage tariffs for global trade concessions.

Notable Quote:
"Katherine, can you just kind of roll back the clock for us?"
—Andrew Egger [01:24]

Context: Rampel takes listeners on a recap of the introduction and evolution of the tariffs.

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2. The “Reciprocal” Tariffs: Chaos and Embarrassment [03:45–05:44]

• Pseudo-Reciprocity: The announced formula for tariffs was mock-academic and nonsensical. Tariffs were levied on countries (and even uninhabited islands like the Herd and McDonald Islands) with no clear grounding in actual trade relationships.
• Comical and Cynical Implementation: At one point, the administration claimed 200 secret trade deals, refusing to disclose with whom or what.
• Corruption Allegations: Notably, a Swiss delegation was said to have brought a literal gold bar and a Rolex to ease their tariffs—a memorable illustration of the absurdity.

Notable Quote:
"Reciprocating in what sense was really unclear. They used some, like, fake math, essentially, to come up with some numbers… even for places … inhabited only by penguins…"
—Katherine Rampel [01:49–04:45]

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3. Legal Challenge and Ongoing Defiance [05:44–06:31, 15:44–18:07]

• Supreme Court Ruling: The Court ruled that the administration’s use of tariff authority was unconstitutional—tariffs are the legislative branch’s prerogative.
• Refusal to Rectify: Despite the ruling, the administration refuses to refund the billions in overpaid tariffs and is scrambling to reconstitute tariffs under different legal authorities.
• Continuing Litigation: Companies are still pursuing legal remedies to recover payments.

Notable Quote:
"It was really easy for them to collect the tariffs on the front end, but it's very difficult somehow for them to return the tariffs..."
—Katherine Rampel [16:03]

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4. Market and Economic Consequences [08:35–11:38]

• Immediate Market Impact: As Trump announced tariff rates from the Rose Garden, the stock market fell sharply.
• Broken Promises: Trump stated tariffs would usher in a manufacturing boom, fuel job growth, and pay down the national debt. None of these materialized. Instead, manufacturing jobs declined and inflation ticked upward.

Quote from Trump’s Speech:
"So it's 67%, so we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%...So how can anybody be upset?"
—Donald Trump [08:58]

• Manufacturing Results: Instead of a renaissance, there are fewer manufacturing jobs than before.
  "No, none of these things have materialized. In fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we had a year ago..."
  —Katherine Rampel [13:01]

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5. Administrative Disarray and Wavering [14:05–15:44]

• Walkbacks and Delays: Shortly after the announcement, the administration delayed implementation of most tariffs, with further delays trickling out in the following months. The steepest rates were never realized.
• Chaotic Communication: Tariff announcements were sometimes issued by Trump on social media before agencies or customs could be notified, resulting in confusion at ports and in global markets.

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6. The Broader Economic Picture: Polycrisis [06:31–07:18, 20:03–23:57]

• Ripple Effects and Magical Thinking: The tariff regime was implemented amid a ‘polycrisis’—including the Middle East war and domestic unrest. The administration has ignored the compounding economic challenges and continues to raise tariffs even as supply shocks (e.g., the loss of Middle East aluminum/helium) drive up prices.
• AI as a Lifeline: The only major economic bright spot—AI-related investments and data center construction—was specifically exempted from most tariffs, explaining the disconnect between economic pain for most and S&P/tech stock booms. Yet even this sector is now threatened by supply chain disruptions.

Memorable Analysis:
"I mean, we have…historically high, I think, concentration in the market in AI-linked companies… It's not clear that even that bright spot in the economy is going to persist because of other dumb things that the administration has done…"
—Katherine Rampel [21:01]

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7. Lessons Unlearned and Policy Stubbornness [19:01–24:26]

• Failure to Adapt: Rather than learning from the first year’s catastrophic results, the administration is repeating patterns of improvisation, uncertainty, and disregard for potential negative externalities. This mindset carries over into other major policy arenas (energy, geopolitics).
• Political Reflection: Despite the cost to consumers and businesses, and the Supreme Court defeat, the administration presses on with harmful and incoherent economic policies.

Notable Quote:
"A normal mind could…have learned a few lessons from that...There are going to be some negative externalities from that. There's going to be some bad side effects...And maybe a person should not run the economy at this sort of macro level in this sort of insane way."
—Co-host [19:31]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Administration’s Approach:
  "He can't get out of his own way… every one little bit of optimism that you can find within the US economy right now, Trump has found a way to squelch it out."
  —Katherine Rampel [22:18]

• On the Chaos:
  “If you were not actively following this…especially in the weeks and months immediately following Liberation Day, when it was just a blizzard of changes all the time…”
  —Co-host [18:07]

• On Politics vs. Policy:
  "Voters seem not to get their hackles up quite as much about...US service members [dying] as they...do as the price of gas..."
  —Co-host [23:57]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:00–02:00] - What was Liberation Day? (Origins/explanation)
• [04:45–06:31] - How the tariffs were constructed (the farce of “reciprocal” tariffs)
• [08:35–09:34] - Market meltdown as tariffs are announced live
• [11:38–13:01] - Trump’s grand economic promises, contrasted with reality
• [14:05–15:44] - Why projected disasters didn’t fully materialize and administrative delays
• [16:03–18:07] - Supreme Court ruling, legal limbo, and ongoing defiance
• [20:03–23:57] - Polycrisis, AI carve-outs, new threats looming
• [19:01–19:57] - Lessons unlearned, ongoing policy chaos

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Takeaway Themes

• Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, far from ushering in a golden age, caused market confusion, economic pain, and failed to fulfill any of their main promises.
• Legal, practical, and political challenges have left the administration unable or unwilling to clean up the policy’s mess.
• AI-driven stock market gains disguise broader economic weakness directly attributable to tariff policy and ongoing administrative improvisation.
• The Trump administration is repeating its mistakes, applying the same chaotic, evidence-free logic to new economic and geopolitical crises.

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Final Thoughts

The hosts end with a note of grim humor, admitting they’d love to be proven wrong a year from now but see little chance of dramatic improvement barring a fundamental shift in White House thinking.

"I hope that the outcomes are better than the ones that I fear are headed our way."
—Katherine Rampel [24:56]

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Transcript

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[Marine Corps Narrator]

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[Andrew Egger]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Bulwark. I am Andrew Egger. I am joined by our economics reporter Katherine Rampel to talk about the first anniversary of the most important economic day

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

in US History, according to the President of the United States of America, Liberation Day.

[Andrew Egger]

This is Liberation Day, April 2, 2025.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

A day that will go down in

[Andrew Egger]

history again, according to the President, as

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

the day America's golden age began. In fact, the day that the economy basically took a nosedive from which we have yet to really recover. Setting aside everything else that has happened

[Andrew Egger]

since then, that was one year ago today. We're here to talk about it. Catherine, can you just kind of roll

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

back the clock for us?

[Andrew Egger]

I mean, this.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

This is like the signature economic policy of the. Of Trump 2.0. We have had all kinds of twists

[Andrew Egger]

and turns with this story in terms of the White House putting stuff on and taking it off.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

And I mean, there's.

[Andrew Egger]

There's such. Been such a crazy tariff story over the past year. Can you just kind of walk us

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

through the broad strokes of.

[Andrew Egger]

Of what happened a year ago today

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

and, and how we got from there to here?

[Katherine Rampel]

I will do my best. And, but first, I would like to wish Liberation Day a very happy birthday. It's now a toddler. Right? Right. It's. It's age one. Yeah. So what has happened in the past year? Trump declared that he was a tariff man, that he was going to renew the American economy, which was apparently in the dumps, was dead. All of these other horrible adjectives. And the way he was going to do that, the way he was going to revive manufacturing and other economic activity was through these tariffs instead. Of course, we have seen lots of economic wreckage in the wake of Liberation Day. So Trump has done a bunch of different versions of tariffs. He's used different tariff. Tariff authorities that are maybe allowed, allotted to him in the law. The Supreme Court says maybe not but the biggest set of tariffs came exactly a year ago, on April 2nd of 2025. And they were through this kind of bullshit formula that had the trappings of academia. Like it was supposed to look like, oh, this is. This is the reciprocal tariffs that we are putting in place on every country on Earth. Folks may remember that it was reciprocal, which was meant to imply fairness of some kind. Reciprocating in what sense was really unclear. They used some, like, fake math, essentially, to come up with some numbers, even for a place, you know, these are supposed to be reciprocating, allegedly, the tariffs that other countries had put on us. But we were putting tariffs on places that were literally uninhabited by humans, that were inhabited only by penguins, the Herd and McDonald Islands. So the penguins not terrifying us, as it turns out. And a lot of these other countries, you know, it wasn't really clear what. What this math was supposed to be grounded in. So he announced these big tariffs. Ostensibly, he was supposed to have something. What was it, 90 deals in 90 days or something? Like, the tariffs were kind of meant to raise revenue, kind of meant to bring back manufacturing here, also kind of meant as leverage in deal making with these other countries. Some of those objectives are at odds, like, you're not going to raise that much revenue if this is really only meant to be a temporary cudgel to get some other concessions out of other countries. But he put these tariffs in place. He said that he was going to use them to get deals. At one point, I think his administration claimed that they had had 200 deals already signed, but they were secret. He couldn't. They couldn't tell us which countries they were with or what the deals were. In practice, as a result of the pain that was being wreaked by these higher costs, the uncertainty, at the very least, the administration ended up delaying or suspending or altogether killing the tariffs, depending on how Trump felt in a given day. Sometimes they would suspend tariffs because supposedly there was some big concession made by another country. Sometimes it was because representatives of the country showed up with a literal gold bar, as in the case of a Swiss entourage that came through Gold, gold bar, and I believe a gold Rolex desk clock.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

I'm surprised more countries did not go that specific route. I mean, that's pretty. That's relatively cheap as far as your entire, you know, export import rates are concerned.

[Katherine Rampel]

Yeah, I mean, it's a. It's a great roi, right? Like, however much that gold bar costs, I don't remember a couple hundred thousand dollars or something, maybe more. It was still Worth it for whatever. I wouldn't say normalizing of trade flows, but whatever, to whatever extent, it allowed more trade flows to happen. So, anyway, so tariffs are on, tariffs are off, tariffs are on, tariffs are off. Then the Supreme Court ends up hearing a legal challenge to these tariffs that had been working its way through the court system and ultimately determined that the tariffs under this authority were unconstitutional, that the law that the administration was using did not permit use of tariffs, that, in fact, tariffs were the purview of the legislative branch, which has the authority to lay taxes. And that's close to where we are now, with the exception of the fact that the Trump administration is refusing to refund all of the tariffs that have been deemed unconstitutional. And they are trying to reconstitute versions of those tariffs using other legal authorities. And so they're in the process of that now.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

It's such a weird moment in time right now because, I mean, you'd think a big anniversary like this, you know, the White House would be doing, like, a full court press of PR and public pressure around its own tariffs and things like that. I think the fact that they are not is. I mean, you can obviously, obviously see why there's a lot of other stuff going on. The President had a big address on his ongoing excursion, his war in Iran last night. He's busy firing his attorney general, Pam Bondi, today.

[Andrew Egger]

But this is kind of emblematic of

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

the, of the whole thing, right? I mean, like, this was, this was one of their cornerstone projects last year, right? They.

[Andrew Egger]

They spent an enormous amount of time

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

and energy, you know, all last year trying to kind of prop these things up.

[Andrew Egger]

And now we're at this strange moment

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

where, like, even though they're trying to backfill a lot of these things economically, the. This sort of, like, Omni crisis that has developed has, has pushed it all to the back burner a little bit.

[Katherine Rampel]

Well, I mean, yes and no, in that they are, yes. They're not, like, celebrating Liberation Day. They're not throwing at a big birthday party. But. But the administration is still very actively working on raising tariffs in other dimensions. Like, just as an example, you mentioned the Omni crisis or the Poly crisis. So aluminum smelters across the Middle east are being shut down right now because of the war. Some of them are getting bombed. Some of them are just, you know, like, precautionary, whatever. They're shutting down. And that is potentially effectuating, like an aluminum crisis, because there's a huge amount of, you know, a huge share of global aluminum supply, I guess, comes from the region. What is Trump's remedy for this? He is actually raising tariffs right now on goods made from aluminum. There was some reporting that kind of went under the radar a couple of days ago about that. So, like, at exactly the same time that the administration might think, oh, like, huh, we should. We should try to be doing things to reduce costs for people because they're so mad at us about this war raising costs, and instead they are doubling down on the tariffs and they're actually raising taxes on the things that are in many ways juiced in terms of higher prices by this war.

[Andrew Egger]

I wanted to go back just to

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

a year ago today. This day, maybe as. As much as any other day in the first term, really stands out in my memory. Like, I can remember the various beats of it. You know, I can. I can remember Trump getting up in the Rose Garden and making. Making his speech. I can remember, you know, watching the markets collapse in real time as he is, as he's, you know, pointing out these various new rates that are going to be on.

[Donald Trump]

So it's 67%, so we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%, I think. In other words, they charge us, we charge them, we charge them less. So how can anybody be upset?

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

I remember watching people kind of puzzle out what this formula meant. You mentioned the sort of, like, mathy looking formula that kind of like, suggested a certain amount of economic thought which people sort of within a few minutes had sort of picked apart on Twitter and realized that actually it was literally just sort of like a mathematical representation of the trade deficit that we had with these various countries. Right. Exports minus imports, over imports, and the tariffs were not reciprocal in any way.

[Katherine Rampel]

Yeah, I was gonna say I spent like days trying to figure out who was to blame for this embarrassment. And everybody was like, not me. You know, people on the CEA were like, oh, it was Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro was like, no, it was treasury or whatever. And treasury was like, no, it was cea. So nobody wanted to take credit for this thing that very well may have been created by Claude for all we know. But yes, like, it was not in any way an actual representation of reciprocity. It was just, you know, like a very dumb back of the envelope way of saying, like, how could we close the trade deficit entirely assuming no behavioral change? And this is what you get.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Egger]

But let's just take a quick trip

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

down memory lane here. Let's hit a couple of. A couple of the promises that Donald Trump himself was making. Again, one Year ago today, as he was rolling all these things out about what the actual consequences were going to be.

[Andrew Egger]

So let's, let's hear from the President.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

Let's hear from the President in the Rose Garden, which existed a year ago as well.

[Donald Trump]

My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day waiting for a long time. April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. Gonna make it wealthy, good and wealthy, man.

[Andrew Egger]

Is it just me? Like, this is a little off topic, but he looks, he looks pretty good there. He looks a little younger. He looks a little more energetic. Am I wrong? Am I crazy?

[Katherine Rampel]

I don't know. I mean, he did look pretty tired during his, whatever that speech was last night. So maybe if that's what's fresh in your mind, I guess he seemed a little more energetic then. He's been beaten down by the liberty.

[Andrew Egger]

I could be wrong, but I was a little struck. I had not watched that clip until

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

we watched it just now. I just read it and the vibrancy, the youth, the life.

[Andrew Egger]

Okay, anyway, so that's what we were supposed to do. We're supposed to get the golden age. Let's hear a couple more. Just one more snatch of the President's address right here.

[Marine Corps Narrator]

Our nation has always counted on us to win, to fight for what better could be.

[Andrew Egger]

To.

[Marine Corps Narrator]

To secure our future together. We are Marines. We were made for this. The wrongs we must right, the fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.

[Donald Trump]

But even more importantly, they will give us growth. These terrorists are going to give us growth like you haven't seen before. And it'll be something very special to watch. I am so looking forward. And Brian, it's going to happen even faster than you said. You know, you might, you might say, but it's already started. It's already started.

[Andrew Egger]

And just a couple more things on top of that.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

He said, you know, we were going to get these trillions and billions in revenue. We were going to pay down the national debt. We were going to have jobs and factories roaring back into the country faster than we've ever seen. He said you've seen it happening already.

[Andrew Egger]

I mean, I don't know. Catherine, can you give us kind of a broad strokes assessment of some of these claims? Have any of these, have any of these things panned out at all?

[Katherine Rampel]

No, none of these things have materialized. In fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we had a year ago, according to the most recent data. Uh, we have not had a manufacturing renaissance. Again, we haven't had, I guess, the cataclysmic price increases that a lot of people had feared when he announced these tariffs. Right. Because they were going to lead to, like, the highest average tariff rates in over a century. And we haven't seen, you know, a huge resurgence of inflation. Inflation actually has ticked up. Like, if you look at the chart for inflation, it was kind of like slowly ticking down, and then you hit April and then it slowly starts ticking up. So it, you know, it does seem like the tariffs had an effect. It didn't have quite the cataclysmic effect. And I think that's due to a combination of companies front running the tariffs, you know, like building up a lot of inventory before Liberation Day, because they knew tariffs were coming and so they, they tried to buy stuff when, when it was still duty free or low duty or whatever.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

And we should say, too, I mean, you gestured this at this earlier, but just to put a finer point on it, it was after this that Trump first started to kind of walk back. I mean, he had announced all of these rates were going to go into effect very shortly. Then literally one week later, he said, we're going to delay implementation of basically all of them for a couple months. And then they trickled. You know, they trickled out with further delays and further delays after that. So some of these were implemented, but those rates that were first announced on April 2 that we've been talking about and everything like that, nothing even close to that ever went into effect. Which is another reason why some of these predictions are the predictions of what

[Andrew Egger]

would happen if they'd gone into effect

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

never materialized because the tariffs themselves never quite materialized at that level.

[Katherine Rampel]

Yeah, I mean, tariffs are higher than they were before Liberation Day, but they're not as high as Trump had advertised them to be. So it's still unhelpful. And I think, again, you've seen some increase in prices that you can connect to the tariffs if you look at, like, specific categories like appliances or whatever that we know are where the tariffs are binding. So they have had some effect, not as much of an effect. And that's partly because companies were trying to front run them. It's partly because the tariffs, a lot of them got suspended or delayed or watered down. And it's also partly that a lot of companies were anticipating that they would be struck down by the courts. And so even if they were paying the tariffs in the interim, they were assuming that they would get that money back. So they were, like, really trying to absorb as much of the cost themselves rather than pass it on to consumers and, like, piss off their customers, because they figured, well, if we just hold out a little longer, we'll get the money back. And, of course, like, that hasn't happened yet, so we'll see how long you're able to absorb that cost.

[Andrew Egger]

Yeah. Can I just ask a little bit

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

on that, on that front? I mean, you mentioned earlier that the White House is trying hard not to pay back these tariff revenues that were brought in last year, even though, as the court has ruled, those revenues were illegally collected.

[Andrew Egger]

They were.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

They never should have been collected in the first place. That's the upshot of their ruling.

[Andrew Egger]

Can you just. I mean, have there been any developments since SCOTUS's, you know, ruling there?

[Katherine Rampel]

Yeah, there are a bunch of lawsuits that companies have filed. Some of them had filed before the Supreme Court ruled, like, in anticipation of this happening, but there are a bunch of lawsuits where they're trying to get the money back. The last I had seen, and there may have been development since then, basically, the administration was, like, initially arguing that they didn't have to, and then they were saying that they couldn't, that it was too complicated. It was really easy for them to collect the tariffs on the front end, but it's very difficult somehow for them to return the tariffs. And I'm sure it is complex to some degree. You know, there's like, you know, gazillions of dollars of goods that are coming through our ports and everything. But they had. They've had plenty of time to prepare for this possibility. And it's clear that the administration did not care. I mean, like, just to give you a sense of how little they cared about preparations, at various points, Trump was changing tariffs, you know, through the Liberation Day tariff bucket of things, like, from minute to minute, depending on how he felt. He was tweeting them out. So, you know, truth, social, posting them out. And there are all these stories about, like, if you go to the ports, you know, the CBP officers don't even know what the tariff rate is at any given time because Trump just, like, tweets it out, and it hasn't gone through the whole process necessary to, like, help people figure out, okay, if it's this good, then it's this amount, and if it's this good from this country, it's that amount. So it's all complicated. So, like, they didn't really do a lot of preparation on the front end to put the tariffs in place, which they were clearly much more interested in doing. So you can imagine how little preparation they did for the eventuality that they did not want to happen. So it's complicated right now. It's still going through the courts. I'm sure businesses are pretty ticked off that they don't have that money in hand when the Supreme Court says that they are supposed to. Now, the Supreme Court didn't do them any favors because the Supreme Court said that the tariffs were unconstitutional, but did not actually say, like, what's supposed to happen next. So that's why you have this ongoing litigation.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

It's almost, like, impossible to overstate just how, like, much chaos. I mean, like, if you were not actively following this. This stuff, especially in the weeks and months immediately following Liberation Day, when it was just a blizzard of changes all the time on all these different countries

[Andrew Egger]

going up and down. And I mean, the fact that we

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

spent all of last year with, like, massive AI, you know, expenditures and valuations and stuff in the stock market kept things basically moving up and to the right in terms of the stock market, in terms of economic growth and things like that.

[Andrew Egger]

But when you take all of that

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

out and look at the sort of non AI picture of the economy last

[Andrew Egger]

year, what you really see is the tariffs taking an economy that had been

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

chugging along pretty well coming out of the pandemic and everything, and just shaking

[Andrew Egger]

it, shaking the economy like a rag

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

dollar with all sorts of chaotic effects.

[Andrew Egger]

And I think, to me, the most

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

depressing thing, again, just sort of speaking a year on from when all this started, it was not like, I mean,

[Andrew Egger]

Donald Trump, this was not the first

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

time he ever decided he was going to be a tariff guy. Right? He'd done a lot of tariffs in his first term. He loves tariffs. For decades, he's talked about how much

[Andrew Egger]

he loves tariffs, but this was the

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

moment he was like, I'm done going small. I'm done letting anybody talk me out of things. We're going to do this the way

[Andrew Egger]

I want to do it.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

We're going to go. We're just going to do it and be legends. And he did, and he tried, and

[Andrew Egger]

he immediately walked it back.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

And then he spent, you know, months

[Andrew Egger]

and months trying to rebalance all of this stuff. But, like, a normal mind could, could, in theory, have tried that, have looked at that, have learned a few lessons from that, could have said, well, you know, actually when you introduce this much

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

chaos and this much uncertainty into the economy, there are going to be some negative externalities from that. There's going to be some bad side effects. And maybe a person should not run the economy at this sort of macro level in this sort of insane way.

[Andrew Egger]

And yet today we're not even hardly talking about the tariffs, even though, as

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

you say, they're still going in the background.

[Andrew Egger]

But this is exactly the sort of economic thinking that is running the President's approach to Iran and the Strait of Hormuz and oil markets and all of these things where he's essentially saying, like, it's, maybe we're going to, maybe we're going to reopen it. Maybe we're not, maybe it's going to, maybe somebody else is going to go in and reopen it. Maybe they're not. If they, if, if we do, that's great, but if we don't, that's great too because, you know, the Ron step up and yeah, and like, we'll make a lot of money. And it's just the same exact kind of magical thinking, the same exact kind of like complete disregard for the inefficiencies that the chaos that you create in these markets introduces. And it's just, it's just, it really

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

does make me kind of grind my

[Andrew Egger]

teeth to see the very, very most

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

basic lesson from a year of this tariff policy have gone completely unlearned as we barrel into this other second crisis. So that's just my, my rant on the, on the topic.

[Katherine Rampel]

So I can tell you really like the tariffs. One point I would also make. So you mentioned AI, like kind of propping up the economy. Part of the reason why AI has been able to flourish or inflate, whatever verb you want to use is that we have carved the inputs, you know, that go into data centers and other AI capital expenditures out of the tariff regime. So those things have escaped this boot that Donald Trump has put on the neck of the rest of the economy because they are carved out of tariffs and they have been allowed to, you know, people who want to build data centers have been allowed to buy their inputs without having this additional tax, which is something that the administration like constantly ignores because they're really excited about, you know, stock market growth and things like that. But that market growth is largely related to investment in AI. I mean, we have like historical, historically high, I think, concentration in the market in AI linked companies, you know, the Magnificent Seven, I think now, or maybe it's the top 10 companies. I forget what it is represent like 40% of the value of the S&P 500 at this point. And it's not clear that even that bright spot in the economy is going to persist because of other dumb things that the administration has done, including this war. It all comes together again. It's all the poly crisis. So how does the war affect all of that? Among other things, to manufacture semiconductors, you need helium. A lot of helium comes from the Middle east and cannot be transported now because the Strait of Hormuz is closed. It comes from, in part from processing of natural G. So you have, like, the one thing that was protected from Trump's tariffs. It's now being undermined by Trump's other bad ideas, you know, disrupting supply chains. And so it's like he just. He can't get out of his own way every, like, one little bit of. Of. Of optimism that you can find within the US Economy right now. Trump has found a way to squelch it out. And, you know, I'm sorry to be like a. A Debbie Downer here, but I'm very worried about what the legacy of all of the Trump agenda, the economic agenda from Trump has been in this past year since Liberation Day. Not just the higher costs, but the uncertainty and the recklessness with which this administration goes headlong into major, major decisions that not only put lives on the line, but. But also have huge consequences in terms of their damage that they can wreak on the economy. And the thing that voters presumably care about perhaps more than loss of life and limb, unfortunately, going into the midterm.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, it's. I mean, you said it. The deaths overseas of US Service members are historically the sort of thing that voters seem not to get their hackles up quite as much about as they go into these midterms as the price of gas they put in their car every day. And you can.

[Katherine Rampel]

And food.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

Whatever kind of moral judgments you want about that, but that's kind of the political fact on the ground, and it's something Donald Trump's gonna need to be grappling with.

[Andrew Egger]

On that extremely positive note, you know what?

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

I think we're both just. We're negative Nancy's about this.

[Andrew Egger]

We're panicking. We're not trusting the plan. We don't know that right around the

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

corner, they're gonna reopen the straight. The tariff revenue is gonna come in. The second American golden age is gonna begin. All the factories and the investment's gonna pour in. The trillions of dollars in investment that

[Andrew Egger]

have been committed are gonna hit the U.S. economy. And we're gonna go to the moon.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

And won't we, Catherine? Look silly when all that happens.

[Katherine Rampel]

You know, I hope that the outcomes are better than the ones that I fear are headed our way.

[Andrew Egger]

Me too.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

I would be so glad to be so owned. But unfortunately I am. I'm not super confident of that.

[Andrew Egger]

But anyway, we'll keep tracking it and we'll let you know if we are. You know, we'd be happy to come

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

on and eat some crow if a year from now everything's great economically. We would. I would actually be very, very glad. Yes to, you know, we can, we can do.

[Andrew Egger]

We can come back. We can look back on this video

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

and we can make fun of ourselves as much as we are looking back on April 2nd of last year and making fun of the president again. Not. I'm not counting on it. But you know, it could happen. It won't happen, but it could happen. And if it does, we'll be happy about it.

[Andrew Egger]

Anyway, thanks Katherine for coming on and

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

chewing over all this stuff with me.

[Andrew Egger]

Thanks to you all out there for watching, for subscribing.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

We hope you will subscribe to our

[Andrew Egger]

feed on YouTube on substack.

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

Wherever you happen to be watching this,

[Andrew Egger]

go subscribe to Katherine's newsletter. Go subscribe to my newsletter if you like to read things. If you're that kind of a weirdo in this economy. Reading things in this economy. Anyway, thanks a lot everybody and we'll

[Co-host (possibly a political/economic analyst)]

see you all next time.

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