This is an adapted excerpt from the July 30 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
On Wednesday, Donald Trump issued another all-caps trade declaration on social media. “THE AUGUST FIRST DEADLINE IS THE AUGUST FIRST DEADLINE — IT STANDS STRONG, AND WILL NOT BE EXTENDED. A BIG DAY FOR AMERICA!!!” the president wrote on Truth Social.
We are already seeing higher prices on goods people buy every day, from ground beef to coffee to bacon to bananas.
Just over 24 hours later, the president made another post, announcing that the U.S. and Mexico had agreed to delay the deadline for a trade deal between the two countries by another 90 days.
Now, I follow and report on the news for a living, but I have to come clean and admit that I have really lost the thread on Trump’s tariffs. A reason it has been so hard to follow this story is because of the wild, sometimes daily or hourly, back-and-forth we’ve gone through over the past four months.
Do you remember “Liberation Day?” It was this huge, ridiculous disaster in the Rose Garden with prop tariff boards. The numbers made no sense at all, with the administration slapping a 10% tariff on the penguins living on otherwise uninhabited islands and 10% on an island group where the only humans are U.S. military personnel. The tariffs also included a 47% tax on Madagascar, our main supplier of the vanilla you might pick up at the grocery store.
It was just too stupid to go forward. The markets started tanking the next day and continued to drop, so just a week later, Trump cried “uncle” and paused nearly all of the tariffs he had announced. All except the ones on China. He decided China had retaliated, and he increased tariffs on Chinese goods to 125%, setting off a huge trade war with the world’s second-largest economy.
You might remember that a short time later, container ships from China suddenly stopped showing up at U.S. ports, causing Trump and his tariff gang to freak out about the repercussions if shelves started emptying. So Trump, again, called a truce. After all that, Wall Street started using an acronym to describe the president’s approach to trade: “TACO,” or “Trump always chickens out.” The markets decided the president simply does not have the nerve to go through with any of these trade threats, so they spent the summer ignoring the back-and-forth. But actually, beneath that monthslong roller coaster of Trump’s threats and rage and walk-backs, lo and behold, Americans are paying the price. We are already seeing higher prices on goods people buy every day — from ground beef to coffee to bacon to bananas — and more companies are announcing price hikes on everyday items like laundry detergent, sneakers and more. The No. 1 thing Trump said on the campaign trail is that he would bring prices down. But just a little more than six months into his second term, the president has accomplished the exact opposite — and he’s bragging about it, boasting that the administration has brought in $150 billion in tariffs. Paid for by American businesses and consumers.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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