This is an adapted excerpt from the April 3 episode of “Inside with Jen Psaki.”
Donald Trump’s tariffs appear to be going just about as well as nearly every economist expected they would. Markets hit an absolute free fall on Thursday. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal summed it up: “U.S. Stocks Are Headed for Biggest Wipeout in Market Value Since March 2020.” Yes, March 2020, the Covid crash.
Even Trump’s usually reliable buddies on Wall Street see these tariffs as an enormous disaster — and it is easy to see why. Trump is raising prices on nearly everything Americans buy: toys, cars, furniture — even beer. These tariffs will almost certainly cost the average American family thousands of dollars. And now, lots of serious and sober economists are talking about the possibility of a recession.
The entire fate of the global economy rests on the whims of one man who does not seem to have any idea what he’s actually doing.
To be clear, Trump told us he was going to do this. Kamala Harris tried to warn us all, too. In September, she told my colleague Stephanie Ruhle that Trump’s tariffs would amount to “a sales tax on the American people.”
During a rare public appearance on Thursday, Harris referenced those warnings she gave during the campaign. “There were many things that we knew would happen, many things,” Harris told the crowd at the Leading Women Defined Summit in Dana Point, California. “I’m not here to say, ‘I told you so,’” she added before the crowd burst into applause.
But all the wizards on Wall Street didn’t listen to Harris. They did not want to believe Trump would do something so reckless. So they just put their heads in the sand and basically pretended it wasn’t going to happen. Again, another headline from the Journal: “‘I Should Have Sold More’: Wall Street Reels as Trump’s Plan Sinks Markets.” To a lot of folks, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Trump was the business guy. Some voters may have believed his positions on women’s rights, civil rights, climate and many other issues were abhorrent, but they thought he was at least good for business. Trump had all of the rich tech guys on the dais at his inauguration. They all gave him money because they thought he was going to make them rich. Even working-class people — who will lose the most from his tariffs — bought into Trump’s lies. And now it seems like Trump is just making up all of this as he goes along. Even the formula the president’s team said they used to calculate these tariffs isn’t adding up. “They pulled two numbers out of thin air that perfectly canceled each other out,” Anson Soderbery, an economics professor at Purdue University whose 2018 paper on trade elasticity was cited as a source by the White House, told The Washington Post. “This type of reductionist analysis is very troubling” and “scares me,” he added. So that’s where we are: The entire fate of the global economy rests on the whims of one man who, despite his reputation as a “great business leader,” does not seem to have any idea what he’s actually doing.
Jen Psaki is the host of "The Briefing with Jen Psaki" airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.
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