Transcript
Heather Cox Richardson (0:00)
Foreign 12th, 2025 it was just 20 days ago, on March 24th, that editor in chief of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that the most senior members of the Trump administration discussed a military strike on the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure commercial messaging app, and that they included him on the chat. Their signal chat, which Goldberg published later in response to the administration's insistence that there was nothing classified in the chat, showed that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had posted precise details of the munitions and planes involved in the strikes. It showed that neither President Donald Trump nor the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a Biden appointee, was on the chat and that White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller apparently made the decision to strike based on his interpretation of what President Donald Trump wanted in violation of the Presidential Records Act. The app was set to delete the messages. There was apparently no larger strategy or diplomatic plan other than to strike, and participants greeted the news of the collapse of an apartment building into which a Houthi leader had allegedly walked with emojis of fists, fire and a US flag. This extraordinary lapse in national security protections would normally have defined an administration and caused a number of resignations, but the White House called the case closed on March 31, and there was more. On April 2, Dasha Burns of Politico reported that the team working with National Security Advisor Mike Waltz regularly used the Unsecure signal app to communicate about issues involving Ukraine, China, Gaza, the Middle east, the US And Europe. The officials to whom Burns spoke said they had personal knowledge of at least 20 such chats. That story has been almost completely driven out of the news by President Donald Trump's tariff machinations since April 2. On that day, after teasing the idea of what he called Liberation Day, Trump announced that at 12:01am on Wednesday, April 9, he would be imposing a 10% tariff on all imports to the United States, with significantly higher rates on countries he claims engage in unfair trade practices. By the next day, it had been established that his team, led by Trade Advisor Peter Navarro, arrived at the tariff rates with a nonsensical formula that simply took the US Trade deficit with a country, divided it by the value of that country's exports to the US and cut the resulting number in half. For the next week, the stock market plummeted, jumping only with rumors that Trump would back off on the tariffs. While while economists and financial analysts revised the chances of inflation and recession upward and economic growth downward, news coming out of the White House was contradictory. One advisor would say that Trump would not negotiate over tariffs and they were here to stay, while another would say he intended to negotiate and they were just starting points. Meanwhile, as predicted, other countries began to put tariffs on goods from the United States or pause exports, and global markets fell. Americans, from business leaders to small business owners to consumers and wage workers, called out the stupidity of Trump's trade war. Others noted that the tariffs appeared to be intended as a shakedown as countries or businesses who offered Trump the right price could get exemptions as trillions of dollars in stock values evaporated. Trump insisted the tariffs were here to stay. I know what the hell I'm doing, trump told Republicans. On Tuesday, April 8, he boasted that global leaders were kissing my A on Wednesday, April 9, at 9:33am he posted Be cool. Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before. At 9:37 he posted this is a great time to buy DJT. But as Tyler Pager, Maggie Haberman, Anna Swanson and Jonathan Swan of the New York Times reported, Trump's team, led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, was worried about setting off a financial panic that could not be stopped. Driving their concern was a broad sell off of US Government bonds, which in the past investors had seen as a safe haven during times of market turmoil and the rise in popularity of the government bonds of other countries. Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers noted that global financial markets were backing away from U.S. assets. Fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management George Cipollone told Bernard Condon and Stan Cho of the Associated Press, the fear is the US Is losing its standing as the safe haven. Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen. On April 8, US Trade Representative Jameson Greer defended Trump's tariffs to the Senate Finance Committee. He was offering similar testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee the next day at 1:18pm When a social media post from Trump pulled the rug out from under him. Trump paused most of the highest tariffs for 90 days and instituted an across the board tariff of 10% in their place. But perhaps unwilling to look weak, he announced that he was raising tariffs on goods from China to 125% effective immediately based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets.