Transcript: Trump’s Odd Ramblings to Media Make Tariff Fiasco Worse
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the May 27 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump’s arguments for his tariffs have always been pretty weak, but he’s now faced some extensive questioning from reporters—and if anything, the case for the tariffs now looks even worse. Trump was unable to explain why he’s threatening companies not to raise their prices. He couldn’t justify the threats themselves, and he said something revealing about labor costs and automation that seemed to undercut his arguments. Monica Potts is The New Republic’s new reporter on class politics, and she’s been arguing in a series of pieces that Trump-GOP policies are bound to hurt working-class people across the board. So today we’re going to talk about whether working people are starting to understand this and why the tariff debate might be so essential to making that happen. Monica, welcome to The New Republic and thanks for coming on.
Monica Potts: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
Sargent: So Trump put out this tweet on Truth Social saying that he informed Apple CEO Tim Cook that Apple must manufacture iPhones in the United States from now on. If not, Trump said, “a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.” A reporter asked Trump about this, and here’s what happened.
Reporter (audio voiceover): On Apple, you said this morning that if they don’t make their iPhones in the U.S., you’re going to hit them with a 25 percent tariff. Do you have the power to tariff one single company, and why would you want to hurt an American company in that way?
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): It would be more. It would be also Samsung and anybody that makes that product. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair. So anybody that makes that product. And that’ll start on, I guess, the end of June it’ll come out. I think we have that appropriately done by the end of June. So if they make that product.… Now again, when they build their plant here, there’s no tariff, so they’re going to be building plants here. But I had an understanding with Tim that he wouldn’t be doing this. He said he is going to India to build plants. I said, That’s OK to go to India, but you’re not going to sell into here without tariffs. And that’s the way it is.
Sargent: Monica, I think this isn’t talked about enough, but the tariffs are a really serious abuse of power, in addition to everything else. He doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs to begin with. Now he’s talking about imposing them on a company that displeases him. Your thoughts on that?
Potts: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve lived among Republican voters for a long time now, and they praise the free-market economy—that the free-market economy is how we run things in America. We’re not Communist. We’re not socialist. But when they talk about voting for Trump and what he might do for the economy, they do talk as if he’s like the CEO of the country, which is also a company, and there’s a central planning committee that’s going to set the price of eggs and gas. And so this is a really interesting, I think, division. It’s an abusive power, and he doesn’t have the power to go after one company like that. And also, why would you want a president to? It’s just not the way we do things here. It’s one of those things that amazes me every time it happens.
Sargent: It is extraordinary. There’s been all this joking about the absurdity of Trump wanting to create jobs manufacturing iPhones in the U.S. I think there was that joke about little screws getting put in. But this is a really genuine problem with Trump’s whole plan. Recently, he and 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’s hair up—literally. There’s this weird nostalgia I want to ask you about. It’s for a certain type of manufacturing job, and it poisons the whole debate. Can you talk about the difficulties in getting that part of the debate right?
Potts: Well, I think Trump hinted at it in his answer about Tim Cook. One of the reporters asked him if Apple could put a plant here that could build iPhones at a price that Americans would pay, and he said, A lot of these factories are computerized now. It’s amazing. Which hints at some of the issues, which is that a lot of jobs that used to be done by human hands are automated now. But I think some of the nostalgia for manufacturing in the U.S. is nostalgia for the time when the employment in manufacturing here was high, which was a time when wages were high—when you could graduate high school and roll into a job and start the week after your graduation, and it paid you enough to start a life and raise a family and buy a house.
We live in a different economy now. Trying to bring back manufacturing is not going to change that. And furthermore, like you said, a lot of these jobs aren’t good. They require people to stand on their feet. There were repetitive stress injury problems. A lot of them had environmental issues dealing with the chemicals they worked with, [which] people were routinely exposed to. We do have manufacturing jobs and jobs in America like that now that do pose some risks to the health of the workers, and that’s part of the reason that some of the things we might manufacture here would ultimately cost more—because we care about the things that workers are exposed to. We care about them having breaks. We care about them having access to health care. We care about manufacturers making their factories safe. And I’m not saying … we should care about that globally. We should care about the kinds of factories our goods are made in around the world. But that is part of why we struggle to compete in manufacturing with the world is because we have these systems in place that are meant to protect workers and protect people.
Sargent: I think you’re putting your finger on a very profound contradiction at the core of the whole Trump/MAGA agenda—and even ideology more broadly, if you think about it. This nostalgia you’re talking about is for an economy that was partly shaped by union power and worker power, which was doable because of these enormous manufacturers. It was easier to organize them and, of course, there’s been a decades-long assault on union power since then. But the thing is, Trump and MAGA are pushing this nostalgia for an empowered worker and empowered manufacturing worker. Yet across the board, they’re doing things like weakening worker protections, weakening regulatory protections for workers. You’ve done this series of pieces where you’ve gotten at some of these contradictions. Can you talk about that larger tension and why it’s just so amazingly revealing about what Trump and MAGA are really about?
Potts: Yeah. 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. 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, and the government is retreating from providing health care to people who are in the workforce already or are low-income workers, and they are retreating from a lot of the safety regulations that ensured that Americans lived in a good environment. They’re hoping to drill more oil and burn more fossil fuels, which will contribute to pollution and create an environment that is less safe for the Americans who live in it. I think you also see this with a lot of the health care regulations. They’re pushing a Make America Healthy Again agenda while cutting health care and rolling back some of the provisions that keep our environment safe. So these are intertwined things. You can’t fight a minimum wage on the one hand and then say, We’re going to introduce tariffs, and that’s going to bring back good jobs in America, on the other.
Sargent: That’s exactly right. You referenced this moment where Trump talked about the cost of building factories in the U.S. so I want to play that for people. Listen to this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): What makes you confident, sir, that Apple can build in the U.S. at a price that Americans can afford?
Trump (audio voiceover): Oh, they can. No, they can. And a lot of it’s so computerized now. These plants are amazing, if you look at ’em. But they can do that.
Sargent: So generally speaking, I think this argument does undercut itself. He’s basically saying that prices will be kept down by automation, but doesn’t that mean automation will replace low-level factory labor over time? And if so, what does that mean for the jobs he’s supposedly creating? Doesn’t that undercut in some very profound sense the argument for the long-term viability of creating low-level manufacturing jobs in the U.S. in addition to everything else we’ve said?
Potts: Yeah, it absolutely does. And furthermore, the jobs that factories provide now tend to require more education. They hire fewer people to do things that involve more technology, more computers, more interaction with technology—and that requires a lot of training and education. And they’re cutting the Pell Grant, which is the program that provides low-income financial aid to students to go to college. 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.
Sargent: I’m really glad that you mentioned the higher-skilled manufacturing labor ’cause I think that’s a big part of this debate that’s missing. And here’s why, and I’m hoping you could talk about this as well: As Trump and Vance—especially JD Vance, being the industrial nostalgia whisperer, the guy who is the conscience of the GOP for working people, the guy who constantly rhapsodizes about his own past and about manufacturing work—are nostalgizing about this, they’re also going out of their way, and so is the House GOP budget, to absolutely gut subsidies and tax credits and other encouragement for green energy manufacturing, which is another contradiction here and another way that all this nostalgia is so screwed up and so self-contradictory, right? The jobs that are being created in green energy manufacturing are high-skilled good manufacturing jobs, aren’t they? It’s so weird to be saying, Let’s bring back jobs sticking plastic legs on Barbie torsos, 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. Isn’t it strange?
Potts: Yeah. And former President Biden invested in American manufacturing. You could argue about whether the investments that were related to the Inflation Reduction Act were worth it or the right direction to take the country, but that’s what they did. It was an industrial bill meant to spur American innovation in the green energy field. And that has knock-on effects throughout the economy. They can provide good jobs for a lot of people who used to work in natural gas or in coal who are used to those jobs and can retrain quickly. They can employ a lot of people because they’re growing and they’re getting cheaper and they’re innovating. And that’s the future that we used to want to have for America: to think about what’s going to be the next big thing, not what we made 70 years ago and how to get it back here.
Sargent: That is so well put. I really appreciate that; it shows that the nostalgia is actually misrepresenting the past in a funny way because in the 1950s, the industrial policy and major investments in America like the interstate highway system were on the cutting edge and were forward-looking.
You know what I mean? And it’s so absurd to be nostalgic for this time in the past while also just demolishing the manufacturing jobs of the future in the country. Isn’t it strange? It’s inexplicable to me.
Potts: Yeah, Silicon Valley is called Silicon Valley because it was a hub of innovation for computer technologies and communications technologies. Those are the kinds of innovations that we want to spur here. We want to think about, like I said, what’s next? What’s new? Where can we grow? Where can we invent? And those passions and those inventions and those directions that we take our country bring good jobs with them.
Sargent: It’s just so crazy. All right, so I want to listen to another moment here. Trump is asked a key question: If he has to threaten Walmart to get it not to raise prices in response to his tariffs, as Trump has now very conspicuously done, then doesn’t that show that consumers will probably have to pay for them? Listen to this.
Reporter (audio voiceover): When you say that Walmart should eat the cost of the tariff, is that an acknowledgment that it is U.S. companies that bear the brunt in tariff, not foreign countries?
Trump (audio voiceover): Sometimes the country will eat it. Sometimes Walmart will eat it. And sometimes there’ll be something to be paid, something extra. I’ve always been a fan and ...
Sargent: So Monica, this has always been a core contradiction about this whole thing. 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. Note how Trump dances around it there. He admits that the companies might have to absorb higher costs a little bit, and kind of admits that costs might go up for consumers. And of course, he doesn’t acknowledge anywhere that all this just demolishes his core claim. I’m wondering: Do you have a sense of whether ordinary Americans, particularly working-class Americans, are processing these elements of the debate and the glaring contradictions within them? What do you think?
Potts: I’m not sure if they are at the moment right now, but they will when their prices go up. And I think that this is a crisis that is wholly the invention of the Trump administration. 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. When we think about the ways that most people interact with the economy, especially working-class people who are stretching their paychecks as far as they can go ’cause they don’t have a lot of reserves; they are thinking about what they can buy, what their paycheck means, how far it can stretch, what kind of paycheck they’re getting, if they’re going to get a raise. And the cost of living shock that happened during Biden’s term, which was largely attributable to the Covid pandemic and the supply shocks that happened after that, really brought into relief, I think, a lot of inequality that people had been increasingly recognizing even before the pandemic. And what people want are fair prices, fair pay, fair access to the things that they need for their families.
They don’t want to get laid off because Medicaid was cut and their local hospital closed. They don’t want to have to spend more for their kid’s education because they no longer have access to the student loans that were helping them pay and their child’s Pell Grant has increased because the budget bill passed by the House wants to give billionaires and millionaires a tax cut. What they want is to be able to afford the things that they need—and that really requires people being paid fairly, having stable jobs where they’re treated fairly, and an economy that recognizes what it is that people need to buy and where it is that we need to step in and help when necessary.
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, Trump has had this advantage on the economy now that goes back years. I think it’s eroding now, but the advantage has been rooted in this idea that he’s not exactly like other Republicans on this stuff. He’s not the traditional plutocratic Republican, even though he’s a billionaire himself and fires people on TV for a living and so forth. So here’s what I wanted to ask you. We’re now at this point where the House Republicans just passed this budget, which absolutely guts all these protections for working poor people across the board, all the stuff you’ve been talking about like regulations, health care, union power—although that may not be in this particular bill, but generally they’re trying to weaken union power. Is there any prospect here for Americans to start seeing more clearly that Trump is on the side of the plutocratic ideology of the Republican Party when it really comes down to it? Even though he’s making noise about working people when he talks about his tariffs, how do we get to the point where that breaks through?
Potts: That’s the million-dollar question, because the stereotype of Trump as a businessman is so persistent and it predates his entry into politics. The idea that the country needs to be run as a business also predates him. It’s something American voters have been leaning into for a long time. They think it makes sense to them. They have to sit at a kitchen table and balance their budget, and they can’t spend more money than they have, and so it is intuitive-seeming that that is what the government should do as well. I think that there is just no way that the economy comes through the next year or two completely unscathed. Even if the tariffs are rolled back, even if we avoid a recession, the fact is that we’re now in a country where the president announces extremely high tariffs aimed at companies he’s displeased with and countries he’s displeased with on his own social media network. It’s not going to inspire confidence among business leaders and among our trading partners worldwide.
We already see European countries and Asian countries finding ways around American markets and making plans for the day when American consumers aren’t as available to them as they were before. We’re already seeing some of the ways that Trump’s erratic behavior and erratic statements on the economy are inspiring distrust among our former allies and our current allies. And we’ve had an election in Canada where the prime minister said, We can’t count on the U.S. anymore. I think that those things are going to wear away at the quality of living in the U.S. in ways that people will feel. And so I do think there’s an opportunity there to point at those harms and point at those insecurities and say, Trump did this. Trump’s administration did this.
Sargent: It sure seems like that should be possible. But man, as you say, his advantage on that issue has been remarkably persistent. Monica Potts, it’s so good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on with us today. Really appreciate it.
Potts: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: Folks, a quick endnote. We’re really excited to announce that we’ve made the list of Best 100 Progressive Politics podcasts on MillionPodcasts.com. You can check that out over at MillionPodcasts.com. Thanks so much for listening, everybody.