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We want to celebrate Jane Mayer on the Polk Awards.
C
No, no, no.
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Awards.
D
Yes, exactly. Home news. I believe this is right. Our very own Jane Mayer, a multiple time recipient of Recidivist.
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Recidivist, winner of the Polk Awards.
C
Thank you, guys. I am honored to be a colleague of yours and I really appreciate the shout outs. Thanks so much.
B
And in all seriousness, this was a sort of instant classic of investigative reporting or what you were able to.
D
Well, that's right. And, you know, even more relevant than to go back and if you didn't read it or you want to just read it again. Jane's important reporting about our now confirmed Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth.
B
Yeah, the overshare.
C
Thank you.
D
Before there was Signalgate, there was Jane's story. Welcome to the political scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glaser and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnos. Hi, Jane.
C
Hey, Susan.
D
Hi, Evan.
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Good morning, guys.
D
Much to discuss, much to catch up on since we were away last week. But there's no question what the biggest story in the world is. A global economic meltdown triggered by Donald Trump's announcement that the US would impose a minimum 10% tariff on goods from around the world and even higher duties for countries in Europe and Asia. The trade war, long awaited, long feared, has finally begun. In the words of the ever quotable Larry Summers. Never before has an hour of presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much. Well, we'll let Summers and the other economists explain just how much of a blow this is to the global economy and what's going to happen next in the trade wars. But for our purposes, I think it's important to look at this as something that Donald Trump has aspired to do for many, many years. This is a president who has called the word tariff the most beautiful word in the dictionary. So what is driving Trump's need to bring the rest of the world to heel, even at the expense of all of us? And what if Anything can stop him. Okay, deep breath. There's a lot to unpack here. But, you know, I think we do need to pause, take a moment, and acknowledge what a truly big moment this is, both for Trump and the country. What is the thing that strikes both of you as most shocking and most politically resonant from all this? Jane, let's start with you.
C
I mean, I think you could see both the power of the White House and the lack of concern for the destruction it's causing. It's quite amazing that the people who are making these decisions are just saying, well, that's too bad. Yeah, there's going to be some broken china and we'll just have to get through it. It's a completely optional trade war. There was no reason this had to happen. And it's just triggered the most amazing overnight destruction.
D
That is what's so striking, Jane. I'm glad you picked up on that. To me, this image of one person having that much unaccountable power, you know, when is any other moment, Evan, when you can think of a single man who can cause so much disruption in the world with no one apparently, to bring him to heal?
B
Well, it's. In that sense, our topic is not so much the specific economic implications as the political economy. What does this tell us about the way that power and information moves around Washington and among powerful people? If our listeners take away one thing from this show this week, let it be that they remember all of the ostensibly self described smart, plugged in analysts and business people who told them Trump is not actually gonna do these tariffs. These are a negotiat. This is all about leverage. This is all about just trying to scare people into submission. Well, $3 trillion of vanished value later, the global economic order essentially in shambles. Our allies now organizing, in effect, against us economically in response. It's important for people to remember, have some accountability for those folks who got this so wrong and why.
C
I totally agree with you, but I think it's so interesting. Why were they so deluded? I don't know if you two have the same experience I had, but I talked to two different financial advisors, one from my mom before this, and said, these people are serious, they're going to do this. The reaction in New York among the finance community seemed to be, nah, you know, there'll be some sort of small show of force, nothing like this. It'll be, as you say, a bargaining thing. You know, I think for once the people in Washington who really know Trump are the people who saw this coming.
D
Yeah, Jane, I Agree with that. I mean, that's the theme of my column this week in the New Yorker. It's a failure not to think about global trade policy or the ideology of the Republican Party, but to understand the nature of Trump himself. There was a really interesting dialogue online that captured this. The economics writer for the Washington Post channeling some of Evan's visceral rage there at Wall. How come they didn't listen to our reporting? He actually said, what are these people? They can't afford a subscription to the newspaper. But then Garry Kasparov weighed in on this. Who's the chess champion turned Russian dissident and he.
B
And a great sort of student of dictatorship.
D
Well, exactly. And he made an observation that I think really crystallizes the conversation for me and the slightly elevating us from the pure visceral rage I told you so that I'm sure we wann feel here. But Kasparov pointed out that it's like Vladimir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine. People couldn't accept the almost irrefutable evidence before their eyes that it was being planned because it doesn't make any sense. The rational economists are looking for something that makes sense. Kasparov's maxim, I think, sadly for our unhappy times is a different one. Dictators always lie about what they've done, but are often quite plain about what they want to do.
B
Well, and you know, Susan, I think you hit on something important too, which is call it the sort of the bias towards logic to say that actually people won't do wildly irrational things when of course, Putin did a wildly irrational thing by invading Ukraine and Trump. Now in this case, there was this immediate groping for trying to figure out, okay, well, what is the complex math that has led them to these numbers? Why is it that we have seemingly put tariffs on islands, for instance, that have more penguins than humans on them. That's a literal example for people that haven't been fought. Following the details. And what we discovered is that the math is this kind of crude, really simplistic way of calculating what tariff rates would be. You know, the journalists put it pretty well. They said this is about as nonsensical as calculating your mortgage rates by taking the number of apples in your kitchen and dividing it by the number of bagels. That's, that's. And I think that, you know, I'm.
D
Not very good at math, Evan, but.
B
Even I know that the reason why. It just goes back to this point about people who have been trying to say this guy is playing, you know, six dimensional Chess. No, in economic terms, this is him sitting there eating paste. And we need to just acknowledge that's what this is. This is, to borrow the great line from all the President's Men, sometimes these are just not very bright guys.
C
You know, the thing is, there's a great phrase for it which came up earlier in the campaign, which is sanewashing. And I mean, there is a tendency to sanewash what's going on. And it applies to all the analysts on Wall street, too, watching this. They trying to see some larger logic and actually there may not be any.
D
Well, it's interesting you bring that up, Jane, because we've had this discussion over time about how to think about the intellectual patina that is often given after the fact, kind of retrofitted onto Trump's instincts and impulses. We all recognize that tariffs are a very Trump driven thing, that he himself is essentially the main force behind this policy. But there is a sort of a small, previously very marginalized faction of the Republican populist movement that supports this much louder now. You know, Peter Navarro, Trump's trade advisor, has been out there kind of advocating for this for years. I'm curious what you think about the power of this faction. Do Republicans now no longer believe in free trade or are they just kind.
C
Of humoring the leader in order to understand where this is coming from? I went back and looked at what Pat Buchanan was saying in 2000 when he was running for president. It's exactly what Trump's saying. I mean, it's a very sort of nationalist, protectionist line that free trade is going to rip off America and hollow out its industrial power and already had by then, and that they needed to just put up protectionist barriers everywhere. And I have to say there is a reality based problem here, which is that America has been deindustrialized. And if you go into the heartland and these trade agreements did hurt America's capacity in some ways, there is a problem. The solution that Trump is coming up with here is a radically destructive one. We can see the results now.
B
Yeah, it is interesting. And this is where in some ways, instead of an economist, you need a psychoanalyst here, that Trump himself, even when he was a Democrat, had this longstanding hunch, this belief that tariffs were the answer. I mean, he framed it in different terms back then, but way back in the 1980s, as you guys know, and some of our listeners will know, he was already talking about other countries ripping off the United States, either because we were providing defense to Japan while it was building its economy. And eventually, he sort of got his way there. In 1988, he was talking publicly about tariffs. What I find interesting, and I wonder, Susan, you've thought about sort of Trump's trajectory over time, but also the people around him. What seems so different now compared to that first term when he was talking about tariffs, but actually the tariffs in economic terms were quite limited, historically speaking. What is so different now about the environment that he's operating in or the degree of his motives that explains why he is now taking this, as you put it, this sort of maximalist approach?
D
I think that is exactly right. It turns out that the yes men of Trump 1.0 weren't quite as much the yes men of today. In April of 2017, it's coming to the end of the first 100 days of the first term. And Steve Bannon goes into the Oval Office and he's got an executive order that he wants Donald Trump to sign for a much more modest anti free trade gesture than what we've seen this week. He basically wants Trump to announce unilaterally that he's pulling out of nafta, the free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, and triggering the six month timetable for withdrawal. And that was at the time seen as a huge deal. It was gonna shock the global markets. It was gonna upset our good friend, our neighbor Canada and Mexico. And what's the difference? Well, the chief of staff at the time in the White House is Reince Priebus. He's against. He calls up all the Cabinet secretaries he knows are against this. So Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, Wilbur Ross, the Commerce Secretary, the Agriculture Secretary comes in there and they're all basically desperately lobbying against Bannon and what Trump himself wants to do. And they basically convince Trump very reluctantly, to not do it. And Trump is really kind of pissed at these advisors, frankly. He's constrained by them. And he actually gives an interview to the Washington Post the next day, and he says, well, I was all set to terminate. I wanted to do it. And to me, that's the difference between.
B
You know, Trump and Trump two.
D
One and two.
B
Right.
C
Yeah, I was interested in his phrase, all set to terminate. It's as if he sees himself as the Terminator here.
D
Really.
C
No, that was a great anecdote. Some of that is in your column. And it just says so much, doesn't it, about the change between Trump 1 and Trump 2. He's now surrounded by people like Howard Lutnick. And, you know, I don't know that Bannon is in the inner sanctum, but I saw that he was so excited and so happy about yesterday. He's saying, from now on, every day is gonna be Christmas.
D
Well, but to Evan's point that I didn't really get at, the other element is sort of psychological as the power trip element. Jane. The legal basis that he's claiming to do this is invoking a 1977 law that allows him to impose tariffs in a quote unquote emergency, which of course is undergirding many of the most radical act that he's taking on immigration, for example, he's invoking 18th century law on alien Enemies Act. This is what would be authoritarians. Do they invoke emergencies in order to rule out constraints? Exactly.
B
The Reichstag kind of principle.
C
Absolutely. And there was actually a pretty interesting set of tweets from Senator Chris Murphy about this, which is what this emergency power has done for Trump is it's enabled him, in this case, to unbalance the balance of power, get rid of the checks and balances. The founders of the country very purposely put the pocketbook issues in the hands of Congress, and this takes them out of Congress and gives him this economic policy complete power over gigantic financial issues that are not supposed to be in his hands. And the reason the founders divided them up was they'd seen when you give tyrants control over the economy, they can do behave in irrational and destructive ways.
D
Well, I think we can all agree, frankly, that that's why this is Trump's circus. And the question really is, is Congress or anyone else gonna stop him? The political scene from the New Yorker will be back in just a moment.
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What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global Editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
B
I want a shark that that eats.
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The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
B
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
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Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False.
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Tell me more.
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Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
D
Let's call this the Cory Booker Honorary section of the podcast. We wanted to do a whole episode on that remarkable history breaking 25 hour speech of Cory Booker's, you know, so powerful.
B
It is time to heed the words of the man. I began this whole thing with John Lewis. He made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn't love him. He would not normalize a moment like this. He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble.
D
I think it really connected with so many people. Millions of people watched and liked part of this on TikTok or on Twitter or wherever. It seemed to crystallize the moment. But also the fact that there wasn't up until this point, a sense of meaningful opposition being articulated to Trump. And it begs the question of what, if anything, is anybody going to do so, Jane, the Republicans in Congress have been free trade for as long as any of us can remember. And yet when there was a largely symbolic vote in the Senate this week, the most that Democrats could get to join them was four Republicans, including Mitch McConnell. For Republicans standing up for free trade and against tariffs, that's not much in the way of opposition.
C
Well, let's just wait and see what happens when the rubber meets the road out in their district and the prices start to really skyrocket. It was interesting that Grassley in particular, Senator Grassley was one of the ones who's concerned because he represents Iowa and farmers. Trump may try to cut special exemptions for various constituencies to avoid the backlash that' coming. But I think if gravity exists, a backlash is coming.
B
Yeah, I think that, look, one of the things that Cory Booker's extraordinary act reminded us of this week was, yes, the power of political performance. Politics is partly about seizing public attention and you need to do that in whatever tools you have available. It is also, and he would acknowledge this, it was a gesture. It was not something that had immediate legislative effect. What Jane is talking about is fascinating because what, what we already know is that economists have said that the effects of these tariffs are going to be much larger, much more immediate and much more broadly felt. So you take just as an example, the fact that in the past it was one country or one item at a time. These are broad spectrum tariffs, meaning there's nowhere to go. So we already know from the last time around that if you put a tariff on washing machines, it meant also that the prices not just of washing machines went up, but also dryers went up. This is one of the things economists have figured out because there's this kind of collateral damage across the economy. At a certain point, members of Congress, even the ones who are scared of Donald Trump and cowering in the corner from a primary challenge, enough people get hurt by enough and they begin to yelp. I think we should be looking out for that moment when people say, hold on, we elected you because we wanted you to bring down the price of eggs. And now all of a sudden cars are estimated to be 3,000 to $10,000 more. That's what they're gonna cost as a result of this across the board. It's gonna be vegetables. It's gonn.
C
Susan, I'm really interested to hear what you think about this because you have reported, well, both of you have really reported from authoritarian countries where dictators often wreck the economy and people just suffer through it. Are you expecting to see some kind of backlash? And Susan, in particular, you've also covered Congress. So I'm just curious, what are you expecting?
D
Well, I am amazed at how quiescent and quiet Republicans have been so far, especially because this was one of their red lines. In theory, there was this amazing, depressing quote. I think it was an anonymous quote in a Politico piece from a Republican on Capitol Hill. Everyone is terrified, but I don't think anyone wants to cross the president right now. And it's a measure of just how much the Republican Party has become the party of Trump. I'm not optimistic that they're gonna be standing up in the next few months. And it's really bizarre because they definitely have in theory the to do something about this. But remember, even if they have the votes in the Senate, where there are certainly enough Republicans who are not in favor of this, but in the House, the way that the House rules work, the leadership, the speaker of the House has enormous power to dictate what gets on the floor and when. So even if they can muster a majority of votes in the House, it's not the same as in the Senate. They just don't have the ability to even get an anti tariff measure onto the floor unless they can command the majority. It's an extreme version of a winner take all system there. And that explains why winning the House gives you disproportionate power. But Jane, you brought up the farm states and how they're already talking about essentially a carve Out. This is a remarkable thing. David from in the Atlantic smartly pointed out this week that something like 80% of America's farm counties, its most rural counties, voted to support Donald Trump. Was Trump's support for tariffs a surprise to these people? Absolutely not. It's been a core thing that he's been talking about campaigning on since 2016. Why on earth should they get a bailout from the very core promise of the guy that they've supported in overwhelming numbers?
C
But isn't this exactly what Trump really wants? Which is it gives maximum power to him, like a boss, to sit there and do thumbs up or thumbs down on each of the different constituencies to come and beg. He loves to say, they begged me for this, they begged me for that. It just enhances his self image, is even more powerful. It's the opposite of fair trade. It's just a complete personal whim.
B
Well, I think the red states is a really interesting issue because last time around, the tariffs did hurt farmers enough that the Federal government in 2018, you remember, had to start making payments to farmers to pay for, in effect, the damage that the administration had done with the tariffs. 28 billion doll or something. On that level, we're likely to see much larger subsidies from this administration in order to mitigate the damage. But also, I would point out China overnight has already put in place retaliatory measures. Not only an equivalent 34% tariff, but they're also barring chicken exports from the United States. Knowing this is a huge piece of the US China trade and it's one that comes straight out of Trump country, China knew what they were doing. They planned this ahead. It was just about pushing the button.
C
Specifically, I have to just say one thing about the chicken business they actually blocked. It was one particular company, Mount Air, which is owned by one of Trump's largest supporters, Ronnie Cameron. I did a profile of him at some point in the magazine, and you couldn't be a more personal, like slap back to Trump on that one.
B
Susan, one of the questions I think a lot of people are wondering is what is this signal about the, the role of Elon Musk? Musk we don't think of as being at the frontier of the tariff regime. He's been certainly a beneficiary of trade with China over the years. Some reports this week that maybe Trump was starting to talk about life after Elon in Washington. What do you make of this? Is there any clear signal here about what this implies about Musk's role and future in the administration?
D
Yeah, I mean, My view is that Musk and the other billionaires who've thrown in their lot with Donald Trump, not tariffers, they're not protectionists. They've made their fortunes in a globalized world. They may be looking for individual advantage in any of Trump's decision, but this is why, one of the many reasons why I think we can say this really goes to the almost autocratic power that Trump is seeking to wield in his second term. As for the larger question of is Donald Trump ready to go cold turkey on Elon Musk and his money, my answer is no, not yet. He's addicted to the additional power that having Musk and his unlimited billions gives him in terms of politics, especially at a moment when he's going to come under greater pressure. Both his approval ratings are falling jittery members of Congress. Well, Musk and his money is one of the clubs that Donald Trump wields right now over the Republican Party. Remember, this is coming in the wake of Musk's embarrassment after spending millions and millions of dollars in a state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin this week and losing a big rebuke from the voters there and a sense that Musk's unpopularity and making himself an issue in that race was a big reason why Republicans lost. So this is a moment when people are naturally asking that question about whether Trump is ready to give up Musk. But for my money, Trump is still addicted to Musk and his money. We'll just close this section with an ominous note here that might affect politics as the China retaliated overnight. I think we'll see more news of more countries coming in with their own response to the Trump tariffs today. As we're having this conversation, JP Morgan has raised its estimate of the chance of a recession in the United states this year to 60% 6 0%, folks. So we're going to take another quick break, and when we come back, Trump emboldened. What does that mean we should be preparing for next? The political scene from the New Yorker will be right back if you want to see what we've been reading. Each week we put links to some of our favorite New Yorker pieces in the episode notes, including my weekly letter from Trump's Washington. And of course, you can see all of the New Yorker's insightful writing about politics and much more at newyorker.com America.
E
Is changing, and so is the world.
D
But what's happening in America isn't just.
B
The cause of global upheaval.
D
It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
E
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
D
Tristan Redman in London and this is the Global story.
E
Every weekday we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
C
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
D
Let's come back to the maximalist version of Donald Trump. I feel like, you know, we're only 75 days into the Trump presidency as we're speaking and we've run through so many of the worst case scenarios that I, I had thought about in advance, whether it is a full scale global trade war or the really maximalist versions of crackdowns on immigration. Nevermind, Musk's taking a literal chainsaw to the US Government. I guess my question for all of us as we end the show this week is what else should we be bracing for? If Wall street was so wrong about this, what else could they be wrong about? What's on your worry listen list?
C
So many things on my worry list at this point, but in looking at Trumpist Maximus, I am that's a good phrase. Trump is Maximus thinking that we have to take seriously his talk about taking over Greenland. These things that we laugh at because they're so daft, they turn out to be agenda items from the Oval Office and they are going back to seriously study somehow taking over another country, Greenland.
B
Along those lines, if you talk to people in the national security space, one of the things they're watching and worrying for is the idea that the US Will use its military in going after drug cartels in Mexico, that using some form of, again, a kind of emergency to justify what would become an international military act. What about you, Susan? What are you looking out for?
D
Yeah, well, it's interesting you both mentioned versions of deploying the military that Trump has gone to such lengths to politicize and to assert personal control over. If you go back and look at his first term, that is a theme that runs through, for example, the whole summer of 2020 when Trump was absolutely adamant and his advisors were pushing back on him when he wanted to invoke the Insurrection act against Black Lives Matters protesters around the country. They succeeded in stopping him from doing that then, but it's a theme and especially resonant, Jane, is the Greenland example, because look at the other two countries that he's talked about in worryingly militaristic tones. That's Canada and Panama. Both of those, I think would be much more problematic for him to actually launch a military operation against. And that's why Greenland to Me is the one to watch out for, because not only are there 50,000 residents of Greenland, but right now, the United States is already the dominant military power in Greenland. In fact, Denmark, although it controls the territory of Greenland, actually has essentially no military presence, and there's only the US Bases there already. So, to me, this has echoes of Vladimir Putin and Crimea, where he was able essentially just with a handful of little green men, to take over the country. What did he do? His playbook was referendum of the people, staged very quickly without the real election protections that you would want to have. And then using that as a justification to annex the territory. Didn't stop there, by the way. Jane, I can say that I have raised this issue of the actual US Takeover of Greenland with very senior European officials who have a real personal stake in this. This was a couple months ago. This was at a dinner here in Washington. And ran around the table, the question was phrased, we can rule out military takeover, but what are the likely scenarios? And it went around the table and got to me, and I literally raised my hand and I said, just please put me down as someone who thinks you shouldn't rule out the military option there.
B
And I think to that point, I'm glad you mentioned 2020. One of the things that you hear a lot from people who study comparative political systems or what's happened in dictatorships and authoritarian systems is there is almost inevitably a mom when the leader calls upon the uniformed military to do something at home to essentially crush an act of opposition brought by his own people. Historically, people in uniform, the ones who have real experience, know that that is a cancer on a military. To go against your own people is the beginning of a corrosion that takes a generation to recover from. The Chinese military Learned that in 1989 in Tiananmen Square. What's so notable now is that true. Trump has been pruning the highest ranks of the uniformed military, chucking out powerful people. You saw him get rid of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. All of that is to avoid a Mark Milley situation where you had somebody, a career military veteran, who would say, no, this stops now, and this stops with me. Unfortunately, that is not a scenario that seems as likely today.
C
Good point. The other thing that goes along with that is this. This talk of the enemy within being the enemy that Trump says is the most threatening are other Americans. That's sort of laying the groundwork for exactly that kind of unthinkable situation.
D
And, Jane, it also lays the groundwork for the kind of internal purges and prosecutions that accompany many an authoritarian, especially an authoritarian under pressure. And if we're headed into a recession or a cratering of the global stock market, I think that makes the likelihood of this more, not less. And on the front of the enemy within, Jane, you've been looking very closely at the Justice Department at the kind of pressure being exerted on law firms. That to me is another area of Trump maximalism that I feel like I did not fully appreciate. The tactic that has been remarkably successful of these executive orders targeting individual law firms. Where do you think that's going and what kind of a maximalist scenario should we be afraid of there?
C
Well, he is attacking the nodes of opposition power as he sees it in civil society, just as he's doing in the more ordinary political spheres. What occurred to me thinking about the stock market meltdown and how it computes with the rest of this is that the difference is the destruction that is taking place in the economy is measurable because we have the S and P index and things like that. There is exactly parallel amount of destruction taking place in what they're doing to the federal government and what they're doing to civil society. It's just we don't have the measurements, but we just have the anecdotes. And the law firms are exactly one such anecdote.
D
This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Susan Glasser. We had we have research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Julia Nutter, mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. And Chris Bannon is Conde Nast Head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. We'll be here next Friday and thank you so much for listening. Foreign.
E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
B
I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
D
And I'm Lauren Good.
E
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
D
And our show, Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
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At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
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From prx.
Episode: Donald Trump Finally Gets His Way on Tariffs
Date: April 5, 2025
Hosts: Susan B. Glasser (D), Jane Mayer (C), Evan Osnos (B)
Theme: The epochal impact of Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs, the political and economic aftershocks, and what these reveal about the nature and dangers of Trump’s power in his second term.
This episode delivers an incisive discussion on Donald Trump’s unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs—10% minimum on all imports, higher for Europe and Asia—triggering an overnight global economic meltdown. The roundtable (Susan Glasser, Jane Mayer, Evan Osnos) dissects the political, psychological, and systemic implications: Why did so many doubt Trump would go through with it? What does this maximalist approach signal about the nature of power in Trump's Washington? Can Congress or anyone else actually constrain him? The panel also reflects on historical echoes, immediate fallout (including retaliations and congressional inaction), and dark possibilities for what comes next.
Larry Summers (via Susan Glasser, paraphrase; [03:14])
“Never before has an hour of presidential rhetoric cost so many people so much.”
Evan Osnos; [08:18]
“People who have been trying to say this guy is playing six-dimensional chess—no, in economic terms, this is him sitting there eating paste.”
Jane Mayer; [08:39]
“There is a tendency to 'sanewash' what’s going on... trying to see some larger logic and actually there may not be any.”
Susan Glasser; [20:36]
“I am amazed at how quiescent and quiet Republicans have been so far, especially because this was one of their red lines. In theory... Everyone is terrified, but I don’t think anyone wants to cross the president right now.”
This episode distills a moment of profound rupture: Trump's maximalist tariffs mark not just an economic, but a systemic political crisis, revealing the dangers of unchecked presidential power. The show dispels comforting narratives that Trump's outlandish statements are mere bluff and forces listeners to confront the risks of rationalizing or minimizing autocratic impulses. With no meaningful congressional or institutional constraints in sight, the panel grimly anticipates further shocks and “maximalist” moves, both domestically and abroad.
In the words of Jane Mayer:
This summary covers key content areas and arguments—excluding sponsor messages and unrelated podcast plugs—preserving the language, tone, and analytical depth of the original conversation.