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- [00:06]
Ryan Knudson
Hey, Molly.
- [00:07]
Molly Ball
Hey, Ryan.
- [00:08]
Ryan Knudson
How was your Liberation Day?
- [00:10]
Molly Ball
Oh, my gosh. So, you know, we all put on our fancy hats. We went to the ticker tape parade, and we blew things up. For example, the global economy.
- [00:20]
Ryan Knudson
Right. That's what the fireworks were. Investors heads exploding over this news. We are, of course, talking about President Trump's announcement to impose massive tariffs on virtually every country in the world. Something that he's been calling Liberation Day. And while the economy didn't quite blow up, Wall street was not celebrating. Markets went down a lot, and a lot of business leaders are kind of freaking out right now.
- [00:46]
Molly Ball
That's right. It was really. I mean, I feel like we've used the phrase shock and awe a lot on this show. But they really did decide to go big. And it's interesting because he really went as far as he has ever threatened to go in. You know, there was this idea that he could do something across the board. He could do something, quote, unquote, reciprocal. He decided d all of the above. He did a version of an across the board tariff combined with what he called a reciprocal tariff, but one that was not based on tariff rates, but on trade imbalances. And so, yeah, they really went for it.
- [01:27]
Ryan Knudson
From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Ryan Knudsen.
- [01:31]
Molly Ball
And I'm Molly Ball.
- [01:32]
Ryan Knudson
It's Friday, April 4th. Coming up, we'll talk about the fallout from Trump's tariff plan, go over some election results, and dive deep on Trump's deportation efforts. Stay with us. This episode is brought to you by Lifelock. It's tax season, and we're all a.
- [02:02]
Michelle Hackman
Bit tired of numbers, but here's one you need to $16.5 billion.
- [02:08]
Ryan Knudson
That's how much the IRS flagged for.
- [02:10]
Michelle Hackman
Possible identity fraud last year. Now, here's a good number.
- [02:14]
Ryan Knudson
100 million.
- [02:15]
Michelle Hackman
That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second.
- [02:18]
Ryan Knudson
If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it. Guaranteed. Save up to 40% your first year. @lifelock.com podcast terms apply. So, Molly, the business world is reacting very negatively to Trump's tariff plan. The stock market is down. Many economists are now saying a recession is much more likely. How might this affect Trump politically if the economy is headed in the way most economists seem to expect?
- [02:52]
Molly Ball
So, Ryan, this is the penetrating political insight that you pay me the big bucks for if the economy goes into a recession or depression, that would not be good politically for Trump or the Republicans.
- [03:05]
Ryan Knudson
No kidding. I thought that everything bounced off Trump, no matter what it possibly is, and.
- [03:10]
Molly Ball
Leaves him with his perpetual sub 50% approval rating. Now, Trump, as far as we know, can't run for reelection, despite some noises he's made in that direction. So the fallout for this is really on Republicans. Senator Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky, who is not a fan of tariffs, pointed out on Thursday that when the Smoot Hawley tariffs went into effect in the 1930s, Republicans lost the House and Senate for 60 years. So you do have Republicans pointing out that they think this would not be good for them politically. What the administration says is this is temporary. These are essentially growing pains for the restructuring of the American economy. You had the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick, on television on Thursday saying, give it six months and we're going to come out the other side and everything's going to be better and we're going to have an America where we make things, where people have better jobs, where things are less expensive. So they're saying this is a little bit of an adjustment period and maybe the markets just don't get it, but in the end, everybody's gonna be better off.
- [04:17]
Ryan Knudson
How much time do you think Americans will give Trump for things to turn around before they say, no, this is not working for us?
- [04:26]
Molly Ball
The signals that we are seeing is that people are already losing patience with this approach to the economy. Generally, when the economy goes south, the voters inflict a very swift and decisive verdict on whoever is in power. And they are not very interested in explanations about why it's somebody else's fault or why this is better for everyone in the long run.
- [04:48]
Ryan Knudson
America spent much of the last century trying to set up this global free trade system. Trump has now undone that in a very short period of time. Is there any going back from this? Do you think that this is going to be just sort of the bookmark end of free trade as we know it? Or do you think that in a Democratic administration, or any administration that comes after Trump, unless he is successful in getting that third term that he's been talking so much about, where these tariffs could be rolled back and we could go back to the way things were beforehand.
- [05:18]
Molly Ball
Well, you know, I try never to predict what Trump is going to do. And I do think we should point out that even today, most of the tariffs still have not gone into effect. So there's always a chance they take it back at the last second. Obviously, there's a very intensive lobbying effort on the part of multiple governments and multiple industries to try to create carve outs and get exceptions. And that is one endpoint for this, is that it just becomes a sort of massive lobbying spree where people are able to get individual or country based exemptions and it actually ends up being far less than meets the eye at the end of the day. That being said, this reminds me very much of our discussion previously about the transatlantic alliance and the global security picture, where once you have blown it up because it is based on trust, because it is based on long term stability, it's very difficult to reconstruct because the trust is gone. Even if you could go back and recreate all the same agreements, you would not have that feeling that this is a lasting structure. This is an institution that has the durable backing of parties across the political spectrum. So I would say it's very hard to recreate an institution like that once you've destroyed it.
- [06:40]
Ryan Knudson
All. Right, I guess we'll have to wait and see if Trump is right and this ushers in a new golden age, or if all those economists are right and this ushers in a period of economic hardship. Meanwhile, I want to turn to something else, which is these two special congressional elections in Florida. These were to replace two lawmakers, Matt Gaetz, who Trump nominated for attorney general, but then later withdrew, and Mike Waltz, Trump's national security officer, who is of course, of the Signal Group Chat fame that we talked about last week. Molly, can you walk us through the results of these special elections and what we learned from them?
- [07:17]
Molly Ball
So these are all very red seats. They both went for the Republican candidate by 30 or more points last November. The Republicans won both of these seats. It would have been shocking if they didn't, but they won them by much smaller margins, basically cut those margins in half. Both of these new candidates, who've both already been sworn in, won by about 15 points instead of 30. So in the near term, the result is Republicans are happy they have two more seats in Congress. We know how narrow their majority is. They really needed those two seats to be filled. On the other hand, it's a shot in the arm for the Democrats because their candidates overperformed by such a large margin. But the really big game was in Wisconsin.
- [07:58]
Ryan Knudson
Right? In Wisconsin, a state that Trump only won by about a percentage point in 2024, there was an election for a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court where the liberal judge prevailed over her conservative rival. How big of a deal is this result?
- [08:13]
Molly Ball
The Supreme Court races in Wisconsin are quite consequential. There's currently a 4 to 3 majority for the liberals on that high court. This is a court that's deciding everything from congressional redistricting to abortion rights. So it Makes a big difference the ideology of which judge gets put in that seat. And both parties really went all in on this race, spending tens of millions of dollars to try to get their candidate elected.
- [08:43]
Ryan Knudson
And one of the people who put in a lot of money was Elon Musk.
- [08:47]
Molly Ball
That's right. The other really significant point to make about this Wisconsin judicial election is that both sides really turned it into a referendum, not only on Trump, but on Elon Musk. Elon Musk spent about $25 million trying to get the conservative justice elected. The Democrats made him the centerpiece of their messaging. In all of the ads that they were running, in all of the things that the justice in question was talking about, they were talking Musk trying to buy the election. They were pointing at the things that Elon is doing with Doge in Washington, really tapping into voter anger, specifically at Musk. And of course, Musk helped them by hyping his role in all of this by going to Wisconsin on the eve of the election and putting on a cheesehead and jumping around on stage and giving a big speech about the things that he believes in. And while Democrats were believed to have a slight edge, they overperformed. The liberal candidate won by a 10 point margin. And that really shows you that as much as we knew that there was a backlash to Trump and Musk brewing out there in America, as much as we knew that Democrats were energized and more likely to turn out, they exceeded expectations in this case. And that, I think, does tell you that there is some political juice behind the Democrats right now.
- [10:09]
Ryan Knudson
Musk did say on X that this is basically all part of his chess game saying, quote, I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain. All right, we are going to take a short break, and when we come back, we'll talk about immigration, deportations, and the border. This episode is brought to you by Selectquote. Life insurance can have a huge impact on our family's future with Selectquote Getting covered with the right policy for you is simple and affordable. Selectquote's licensed insurance agents will tailor your experience to find a life insurance policy for your needs in as little as 15 minutes. And selectquote partners with carriers that provide policies for many conditions. Selectquote they shop, you save. Go to selectquote.com Spotify Pod today to get started. Okay, so let's turn our focus to immigration. This is something Trump made a really big deal about on the campaign trail. And sure enough, the Trump administration has made a big push on deportations during the first two months of his presidency, but not necessarily in the way people expected. In the last week or so, we've had tourists detained at the border, foreign students with green cards or visas basically snatched off the street, and even a Venezuelan immigrant with protected status that the administration admitted it sent to a prison in El Salvador by mistake. To help break down where things stand on immigration, we brought in our colleague, immigration expert Michelle Hackman. Hi, Michelle.
- [11:53]
Michelle Hackman
Hi.
- [11:54]
Ryan Knudson
So Trump made a lot of big promises about mass deportations and all the things that he was gonna do to change immigration once he became president. How would you say that that's all going now? That were a couple months in.
- [12:08]
Michelle Hackman
Yeah. So Trump on the campaign really emphasized not just that he was going to do deportations, but he talked about numbers. He was gonna do the largest mass deportation in American history when he would promise he was gonna get rid of 15 million, 20 million people. And it's hard to say what we would expect the beginnings of a mass deportation to even look like. But I seriously doubt that this is it. I mean, in the first six weeks or so of the Trump administration, deportations are actually down from the last year of the Biden administration. That's not a statistic that they want anyone to know.
- [12:44]
Ryan Knudson
I want to ask about the border, Michelle. Crossings at the border are down under Trump. Is there anything specific that the Trump administration is doing to prevent people from trying to cross the border illegally other than just to sort of send a signal that this is not a friendly place for immigrants to come anymore?
- [13:02]
Michelle Hackman
You're right. He has really slowed down things at the border. They had already really dramatically slowed in the final year of the Biden administration, I would say the really big thing they did was that they ended a Biden program that didn't really have a catchy name. People called it CBP1 after the app that people used. So Biden actually already said, if you cross the border illegally, you're not going to qualify for asylum. We're just going to shut you out. Trump said, even if you come to a port of entry, even if you come legally and ask for asylum, we're still not going to consider you. And so it's really shut down. Basically any avenue people have. And that's sort of acted as more of a deterrent, at least for now. And so a long term question is, are people going to be deterred forever from coming to the border, or is this deterrence only strategy is going to, at some point fail?
- [13:52]
Ryan Knudson
Getting back to deportations, they seem to be happening at a smaller scale, but it seems like it's happening at a more high profile scale because we're seeing these students right now, specifically on college campuses, people who have visas or in some cases green cards who are being picked up and deported. So can you explain the strategy here and sort of what the legal basis is for that?
- [14:14]
Michelle Hackman
I think that's somewhat by design. They want to really make a big splash and so they've started sort of taking on these high profile cases. And one of them is the students who they claim have participated in pro Palestine protests. They claim that these people are supporters of Hamas in different ways. And this is a battle that they really think they can win because they think most Americans are sick of the college protests, that most Americans are more supportive of Israel than they are of Hamas, and so that they're not going to be so upset if they go after an international student who, for example, wrote an op ed in her school newspaper expressing support for the Palestinian people.
- [14:53]
Molly Ball
It seems like there's a sort of odd dichotomy here where on the one hand the sort of very straightforward, what you would think would be the sort of low hanging fruit of deportations, right? A lot of people are already in custody or people who like, we know where they are and we know how they got here, and those people are just nothing's happening with them. But then on the other hand, these people who would seem to have legal status or who came to the country. You wrote about a group of people who were literally given guarantees of safety to come to this country, and now that's being taken away. Or these students that are being targeted, is that strategic or does that have to do with a lack of resources? What's the reason for that?
- [15:35]
Michelle Hackman
I have to say I'm not entirely sure. I suspect that it is about a lack of resources, that it's easier to go after someone if you know where they live and they have a visa and you can go through that process. Trump talked a lot about going after criminals. But. And notoriously, people who are convicted criminals are better at dodging the police than everyone else. And so it's hard to go after those people. We've seen an uptick in people who are here illegally, but who sort of have no criminal record whatsoever, who have lives in the US who have US Citizen spouses and children. Those are the types of people that we're seeing being targeted more. But it's a good question, why are they not being deported in bigger numbers? I think we just don't have enough bodies to do the arresting.
- [16:22]
Ryan Knudson
And that's something that Tom Homan, the head of ice, has talked about. Right. He has said that Congress needs to give him more money so that he can accomplish more of this agenda.
- [16:31]
Michelle Hackman
Yeah. He's kind of the only one in the administration who came in from the get go saying, I'm not sure how mass this deportation's gonna be. I need to see what resources we have. And now that's sort of pivoting well, because Congress is negotiating this huge spending package, and so Tom Homan is trying to put pressure on them to put in as much money as possible for ICE politically.
- [16:52]
Ryan Knudson
Molly, how do you think that this is playing for the Trump administration? Because on the one hand, a lot of Americans really want the government and Trump to be tough, tough, tough. But then on the other hand, when you see these videos of, like, that tough student being picked up by these agents with masks on, there's also a lot of reaction from people, I mean, primarily on the left, but not entirely people saying that this is dystopian. This is terrifying to just be. To be picked up and swept away like this.
- [17:17]
Molly Ball
The politics of this are very interesting. So far, Trump's approach to immigration is more popular than his approach to most other issues. It is a slight majority in most polls. I've seen proof of the way that Trump is handling immigration so far. It was, as you mentioned, a very central premise of his campaign. More important, he believes, than the economy in motivating people to vote for him. So people do seem to like that he seems to be taking control of a border that they felt was out of control. I do think there is a chance that it becomes less popular as these incidents pile up. I do wonder if it does start to go into politically dangerous territory as more of these sort of sympathetic victims come out, as more and more people who appear not to have done anything to deserve it are being singled out and deported.
- [18:13]
Michelle Hackman
People really respond to patterns. If it had been one case like this, I think the public would sort of be able to brush it off. But that these things pile up tends to affect public opinion more.
- [18:25]
Molly Ball
I want to ask about that long term question. What do we see as the administration's end game on immigration, given that it has, as you point out, only been a few weeks and they are sort of picking their spots to send a strong signal. Presumably this is all building up to something. Where is it going?
- [18:44]
Michelle Hackman
It's such a good question, Molly. And I think maybe part of the problem is that everyone in this administration has a slightly different endgame. For someone like Stephen Miller, he ultimately wants to really, really significantly reduce immigration so that we're only getting small numbers of people and they're sort of the best of the best from wealthy countries so that they won't ever end up on our welfare. And sort of that's why things are seeming to head in that direction. But for other people, you know, for example, Kristi Noem, she's the Homeland Security secretary when she was in Congress and when she was governor of South Dakota, she took a much more sort of rosy look at immigrants because they were really critical to running industries like agriculture in her state. And so I think she's thinking we've got to get this illegal activity totally under control. And at some point that's going to lead us to a conversation where we can actually change the immigration laws.
- [19:39]
Ryan Knudson
Speaking of the immigration laws, we have a question from a listener, Doug Hunt from Colorado Springs, who is wondering about this very thing.
- [19:47]
Michelle Hackman
Hi, Molly and Ryan. Now that the Republican Party is the party of working class Americans of every color and creed, it seems short sighted to deport 11 million migrants who fill much needed working class positions across American industries and agriculture. Why wouldn't the Republicans use their control of government to secure the border and reform immigration policy to create a pathway to citizenship for these law abiding migrant workers who might someday become loyal Republican voters? Thanks. That's a good question. I think there are probably two reasons. One is that a lot of Republicans don't see these migrants who are working in similar jobs as them, as their friends. They see them as competitors. You know, these people are taking a job that then I can't have, and so helping them out feels sort of directly antithetical to their own interests, I would say. The other thing is a lot of Republicans I've spoken to, and this is kind of unscientific, but just from years of interviewing people, is that they're really driven by this sense of fairness and they can't get over to the fact that many, not all, but many of these people broke the law when they entered the country. And so why should they just be forgiven for that?
- [20:58]
Ryan Knudson
Molly, what's your sense of whether or not we'll see immigration reform legislation get passed in Congress during Trump's administration?
- [21:06]
Molly Ball
I would say it's very unlikely. And I've been like Michelle, covering this issue for many years. I was here when they came close back in 2013 to passing comprehensive immigration reform. And it was torpedoed essentially by a revolt among the Republican base, among conservative Republican voters, elites, the business community, the chamber of Commerce, the agricultural lobby, they would all love to see a big, comprehensive immigration reform deal get done that would legalize millions of people and allow them to work in all of these industries and so on. But when you drill down on the specifics and try to get Republicans to vote for it, particularly Republicans in safe districts who are much more concerned about a primary threat, who are much more concerned about someone to their right coming in and accusing them of not being loyal enough to Trump or not being conservative enough, they see that as more of a threat to them politically than the general election. So I think even though it remains politically popular, it is not something you're going to see this president or this version of the Republican Party taking up anytime soon.
- [22:22]
Ryan Knudson
Okay, guys. Well, that was enlightening as always. Michelle, thank you so much for being here.
- [22:27]
Michelle Hackman
Thank you.
- [22:27]
Molly Ball
Thank you, Michelle. That was great.
- [22:29]
Michelle Hackman
Of course.
- [22:32]
Ryan Knudson
All right, Molly. Well, I know that this is we're not at 100 days yet of the Trump administration, but this is my last episode with you. I am starting paternity leave next week.
- [22:42]
Molly Ball
Congrats, Ryan. That's so exciting.
- [22:44]
Ryan Knudson
Thank you very much. Yes. I'll be honest, I'm looking a little bit forward to stepping off the Trump treadmill.
- [22:55]
Molly Ball
You only made it three quarters of the way. We almost got you to 100, but you couldn't quite hack it. It's okay. I forgive you.
- [23:01]
Ryan Knudson
Yeah. I don't know how you political reporters do it. You will be in good hands with Kate Linebaugh, though, who's gonna take my place and get us across the 100 day finish line. And I will certainly be listening.
- [23:12]
Molly Ball
You could submit a question. Do you know how to do that?
- [23:15]
Ryan Knudson
I think I know who to email. I think I know. Yeah, I'm gonna do that.
- [23:19]
Molly Ball
Thejournalsj.com Just another listener out there. A fan of the pod.
- [23:24]
Ryan Knudson
Yes, I'm gonna do that, actually. I am literally gonna do that. Watch for that. Watch the space, as they say.
- [23:29]
Molly Ball
That'll be fun.
- [23:33]
Ryan Knudson
Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing? Email us and let us know. Please send a voice Note to thejournalsj.com that's thejournalsj.com Trump 2.0 is part of the Journal, which is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa with help from Alessandra Rizzo and edited by Katherine Whelan. Molly Ball is the Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent. I'm Ryan Knudson. This episode was engineered by Nathan Singapak. Our theme music is by so Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard. Fact checking by Kate Gallagher. Artwork by James Walton. Trump 2.0 will be back with a new episode next Friday morning with Kate Linebaugh. See you then.