New Republic columnist Greg Sargent says everything about President Donald Trump’s argument for tariffs crumbles with each reporter question as the market roller-coasters with each update on Truth Social.
Sargent interviewed The New Republic’s “class politics” reporter Monica Potts on the May 27 ‘Daily Blast’ podcast and discussed the many ways Trump negates his own line of reasoning.
To begin with, a U.S. president should not have the power to target one company or a series of companies for additional U.S. taxes, as Trump seeks to do with Apple and Samsung phone manufacturers. But his reasoning to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is itself riddled with holes.
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“[Trump] and [adviser] Stephen Miller talked about wanting to manufacture dolls in the U.S. as part of that whole controversy over kids having fewer dolls, and so forth. I looked into that and found that the jobs this would create are really not very good. They entail things like attaching plastic legs to plastic torsos and doing Barbie hair up — literally,” said Sargent.
“Part of the era that American workers are nostalgic for right now is not just an era when they could get good jobs that paid well but also when their paychecks went farther,” Potts said. “[But] that really required a government that was involved in building infrastructure and investing in people and providing them with the power to negotiate health care and other things from their employers.”
“We live in a different world now,” she added, one where the government is retreating from providing health care to people and low-income employees in the workforce.
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In addition, jobs that factories now provide tend to require people to work with technology and computers, which requires new training and education. But U.S. leaders are cutting the Pell Grant, which provides financial aid to low-income students to attend college.
“Plus, they’re going to make it harder for students to pay back student loans and to get student loans. Everything about our future hints that we need to invest in our people more and invest in their education and invest in their health, and they’re doing everything to undermine that while also trying to say that this protectionist rhetoric on the economy is going to magically bring back a different era,” said Potts.
Sargent pointed out that House and Senate Republican leaders are also gutting subsidies and tax credits for green energy manufacturing, which had offered a promising boost for high-skilled, well-paid U.S. employment.
“It’s so weird to be saying, Let’s bring back jobs sticking plastic legs on Barbie torso, and let’s bring back jobs screwing little screws into iPhones, but let’s kill all these nascent jobs that are actually good in advanced manufacturing and green energy,” Sargent said. “Isn’t it strange?
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Both Sargent and Potts noted Trump had to threaten Walmart leaders to not raise prices in response to his tariffs, after promising Americans that his tariffs will not raise prices. Trump waffled while answering one reporter’s question that his Walmart threat is “an acknowledgement that it is U.S. companies that bear the brunt in tariff, not foreign countries.”
“Sometimes the country will eat it. Sometimes Walmart will eat it,” Trump answered — but that is a core contradiction, Sargent argued.
“He wants private companies to eat the costs of his tariffs so he doesn’t get blamed for consumer prices going up, but that reveals that other countries don’t actually pay them. … And of course, he doesn’t acknowledge anywhere that all this just demolishes his core claim," he said.
Potts said U.S. consumers might not be accepting these contradictions on their own at the moment, “but they will when their prices go up.”
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“This is a crisis that is wholly the invention of the Trump administration," Potts said. "We didn’t have these tariffs. We didn’t need the tariffs. The tariffs don’t do anything. They’re not bringing countries to the negotiating table, even if you think that our trade deals need to be negotiated, which was probably not the case in the first place.”
Hear the full Daily Blast show at this link