The Trump Administration is Gaslighting Us About the Tariff Apocalypse
The Trump administration is urging nervous voters to “trust” it in response to the impending economic fallout from the President’s tariffs on virtually all foreign imports.
“To anyone on Wall Street this morning I would say trust in President Trump,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on CNN Thursday morning. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first time. We saw a wages increase, we saw inflation come down. We had a Trump energy boom, we had the largest tax cuts in history, and that’s exactly what the president intends to do.… The United States of America is no longer going to be cheated by foreign nations around the world.”
The trade war that the president announced on Wednesday as “Liberation Day” has already tanked the stock market. The country is lurching into a recession, and there is little indication that things will improve anytime soon. Indeed, the tariffs announced on Wednesday are little more than a spiteful policy intended to stick it to friend and foe alike, ostensibly for the purpose of reinvigorating American manufacturing. This is virtually impossible, as these aggressive reciprocal tariffs will most certainly drive up prices for manufacturers and consumers across the country. But the administration would rather have you believe that the economic impact won’t be that bad, or even noticeable.
“What can you tell the American people that—they just can’t afford an extra $3 here and there—about the government making up the difference from them?” Lawrence Jones asked Vice President JD Vance on Thursday morning. “Will costs go up at some point, will this just be temporary? Are we talkin’ three months or six months?”
“We know a lot of Americans are worried. So we are working very hard to bring prices down,” Vance said. “What I ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not gonna fix things overnight.… We know people are struggling, we’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us. But it’s not gonna happen immediately. But we really do believe that if we pursue the right deregulation, we pursue those energy cost-reducing policies, yes people are gonna see it in their pocketbook, they’re also gonna benefit from the fact that foreign countries can’t take advantage of us anymore, that means their jobs are gonna be more secure.”
Neither Vance nor Leavitt actually explain how actions like hitting China with a 34 percent tariff will bring prices down for the everyday American, or how this country will be a self-sufficient producer in just a few years. This backtracking and gaslighting is a far cry from Trump’s promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”