Courts Keep Rejecting Trump’s Tariffs

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Bulwark – "Courts Keep Rejecting Trump’s Tariffs"

Date: May 8, 2026
Hosts: JVL & Catherine Rampell

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Overview

This episode features JVL and Catherine Rampell (author of the Receipts newsletter) examining the latest jobs numbers, the state of the U.S. economy under the Trump presidency, and the growing concerns around inflation, consumer sentiment, and the politicization of economic policy. The discussion weaves together data trends, policy impacts (particularly tariffs and the ongoing war), and the new dynamics at the Federal Reserve, all while maintaining the hosts' signature analytical and conversational style.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Jobs Numbers: Better Than Expected, But Still Murky

• Opening Data: Latest jobs numbers show an increase of 115,000—higher than expectations of 50,000–55,000, though down from previous months.
  • JVL: “They're up 115,000, which is better than being negative, which is a thing that often happens during the Trump era…” [00:23]
• Uncertainty About Economic Direction:
  • Catherine: “I'm a little confused, candidly, about what's going on in this economy… There are a lot of weights weighing on the economy, largely policy related weights dragging on the economy.” [01:05]
  • Despite policy headwinds (tariffs, war, politicization of the Fed), the economy is “still chugging along.” [01:37]

2. Policy Impacts: Tariffs, War, and Supply Chain Pressures

• Catherine: “All of those things are bad. But our economy still keeps chugging along… to what extent that's about the AI boom slash bubble, I don't know.” [01:26]
• Concerns about worsening conditions: “I'm not rooting for recession... Even though it looks like a lot of the things that Donald Trump is doing would send us that way.” [02:32]
• JVL: Highlights the tendency to downplay crises by noting survival rather than outcomes: “Anything that doesn't end in nuclear holocaust means that we made it.” [02:51]

3. Wage Growth vs. Inflation: People Are Falling Behind

• Graph Discussion:
  • Wages growth is lagging behind inflation, particularly with recent energy price spikes due to the war.
    • Catherine: “If you look at wage growth, it looks like it's probably not going to keep up with inflation… That line go up... is largely about the war, right? It's about the fact that energy prices have surged…” [03:26, 03:50]
• Broader Price Pressures:
  • Supply chain shocks and increases in input costs (aluminum, fertilizer, plastics) have not fully hit consumer prices yet.
    • Notable moment: “Alumina prices have like close to doubled in the past year, which… means lots of bad things.” [05:08]
    • Ford F150 example: Ford’s commodity costs have doubled, directly impacting consumer products. [05:40]

4. Economic Stagnation: Job Market Churn Slows

• Catherine: “The problem is that there is not a lot of churn in the economy right now... one way that people usually get higher pay is by changing jobs. So if you're stuck in your position… there aren't a lot of other outside options out there.” [07:19]
• Above-target inflation has been persisting for over five years—not all attributable to Trump, but now exacerbated by recent policies.

5. Inflation Expectations and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

• Businesses may preemptively raise prices, fearing incoming inflation, which can itself sustain inflationary pressures.
  • Catherine: “When people start to expect higher inflation, it becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy…” [08:37]
• Markets don’t expect Fed rate cuts for at least the next year and a half, largely due to the compounded effects of tariffs and war. [09:15]

6. Politicization of the Federal Reserve

• Aggressive Moves Against Fed Officials:
  • Discussion about President Trump’s attempts to remove Fed board members (notably Lisa Cook and previously Jay Powell), sometimes based on unproven criminal allegations, to assert greater control over monetary policy.
    • Catherine: “He said that he expected that there would be an indictment of her... The President has already tried to fire her. The Supreme Court is hearing that case.” [10:08]
    • “They launched this bogus criminal investigation into Jay Powell because they were mad that he wasn't marshaling the troops to cut interest rates.” [10:49]
• JVL’s joke turns dark:
  • JVL: “If the Fed has to raise rates... do you think the President will attempt to arrest or indict Kevin Marsh?” [09:35]
  • Catherine: “I don't think it's totally outside of the realm of possibility… Donald Trump said [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.” [10:17]

7. Consumer Sentiment: Divergent Experiences

• New numbers show consumer sentiment remains low, especially among those without stock market exposure.
  • Catherine: “People really hate this economy… they hate rising prices. This is one of the findings from the new consumer sentiment data…” [12:56]
  • Lower-income Americans, without assets in the market, feel the squeeze of rising prices far more acutely than wealthier households seeing stock gains. [13:25–14:10]
  • Catherine: “This time is different. Not investment advice, but I'm sure that this time is different.” [14:44]
• Skepticism about the current asset boom, with AI compared cheekily to past bubbles (blockchain, railroads, 2006 housing). [14:44]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On economic resilience:

  • “If you pull back the lens long enough, we always muddle through. We muddled through the Great Depression, right?... We had this with COVID… a million people died. No, but we're all here, right?”
    — JVL [02:51]

• On inflation’s corrosive impact:

  • “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… is worth a little, little bit less.”
    — Catherine Rampell [06:33]

• On politicized economic management:

  • “They launched this bogus criminal investigation into Jay Powell because they were mad that he wasn't marshaling the troops to cut interest rates.”
    — Catherine Rampell [10:49]

• On consumer sentiment divide:

  • “The people who own a lot of stocks... they're like, generally relatively okay... Whereas the people who don't own stock. So the. Generally the lowest income people in this country. Yeah, they're real mad about gas prices.”
    — Catherine Rampell [13:15]

• On historic bubbles:

  • “This time is different. Not investment advice, but I'm sure that this time is different… AI is different. Just like blockchain. No way. Not like blockchain…”
    — JVL and Catherine [14:44–15:07]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:23–01:04: Jobs numbers release & initial reactions
• 01:04–02:51: Policy headwinds and muddling through
• 03:26–06:42: Wages vs. inflation, energy and input cost shocks
• 07:19–09:15: Low labor market churn, inflation expectations
• 09:35–12:45: Threats to Fed independence, politicization of monetary policy
• 12:56–14:44: Consumer sentiment, wealth divides, and asset market skepticism

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Conclusion

JVL and Catherine Rampell provide a sobering, data-driven, and at times wryly humorous look at the current U.S. economic landscape. Despite persistent policy-induced headwinds—especially tariffs, continued war, and attempts to politicize the Federal Reserve—the economy is “muddling through.” However, underlying vulnerabilities remain: wage growth lags behind inflation, supply chain tremors persist, and broad-based consumer pain—particularly among lower-income Americans—contrasts with buoyant asset markets benefiting the wealthy. The hosts sound alarms about the normalization of political interference in economic institutions and caution against assuming that “this time is different.”

Next up: Oil and more on the supply chain shock—teased for the following segment.

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For a deeper dive into politics, policy, and culture, visit The Bulwark.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Katherine 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 going to have to, you're going to 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 up 115,000, 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 me?

[B]

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.

[A]

I am not rooting a bad person to root for a recession.

[B]

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.

[A]

Muddling through. I mean, if you pull back the lens long enough, we always muddle through. We muddled through the Great Depression, right? I mean, 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 with COVID I mean, I will say you 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.

[B]

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.

[A]

Matt, go ahead, talk, please.

[B]

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.

[A]

Sorry, I meant bad bad.

[B]

Right.

[A]

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

[B]

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.

[A]

Crashed.

[B]

Right.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

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.

[B]

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 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 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.

[A]

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?

[B]

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?

[A]

Housing lender.

[B]

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 that would be sufficient grounds, the indictment itself, not a conviction, to fire her from the Fed board. The President has already tried to fire her. The Supreme Court is hearing that case. So far she's been allowed to. 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 probably.

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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

[B]

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

[A]

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.

[B]

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 matter 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 stock. 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.

[A]

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.

[B]

Like the housing boom in circa 2006.

[A]

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 Carla Health group that kind of blew my mind.