Despite Donald Trump’s insistence that he doesn’t “chicken out” when it comes to enforcing his tariffs, the president has, once again, backed down. On Monday, Trump announced that he was extending the trade truce between the United States and China, just hours before a new tariff hike was set to go into effect.
Shortly after Trump’s eleventh-hour announcement, “The Weeknight” co-host Symone Sanders Townsend blasted the president for his reversal: “Donald Trump folded.” She said the extension is more proof that the administration is failing to reach a “consensus on trade deals” across the board.
While the president has touted various frameworks of deals, Sanders Townsend said those agreements are not final or concrete: “Let’s just be very clear: The fact that he’s doing trade deals is a lie. These are not trade deals.”
Co-host Alicia Menendez added that such lies have consequences, saying that one of the “most important” elements at play is the “uncertainty that he is absolutely dedicated to infusing into the economy.”
“The on-again, off-again, the fact that the deadlines are [coming],” she continued. “The deadlines are self-imposed. He is arbitrarily deciding on these deadlines, announcing these deadlines; there are no proof points that it has actually helped him to move these negotiations along.”
Menendez went on to quote an op-ed from The Wall Street Journal, which compared Trump’s efforts to exert political control over the U.S. economy to those of the Chinese Communist Party.
“This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of production,” Menendez read, quoting the Journal. “It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” “This is the point right here,” Sanders Townsend interjected, adding: “If we really pull the layers back, we need to ask: Is it the government that has a stake, or is it a private entity somewhere that somehow Donald Trump or his treasury secretary has his tentacles in? “This is not American capitalism, if you will, and good old American ingenuity being spread across the globe. So I just think people should continue to ask more questions.” You can watch the remarks by Sanders Townsend and Menendez in the clip at the top of the page.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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