Bulwark Takes - JD Vance’s Tariff Trolling Tweets Make Absolutely No Sense

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Tim Miller shares his take on JD Vance returning to Twitter to lecture people for being concerned about the stock market, the administration suggesting that the market collapse is intentional, and Trump donors expressing concern about the administration's handling of the stock market.

Hey guys, it's Tim Miller from the Bulwark Bad News. The Vice Poster-in-Chief, J.D. Vance, is back on social media. I was talking yesterday with Bill Kristol about how he'd been very quiet. I thought, who knew, maybe he'd gotten a spanking from Daddy Trump, or maybe he didn't want to defend the tariffs. I wasn't sure why he wasn't posting. Who knows what that reason was because he's back and at it this morning. And let me tell you, what JD has put out there should putious manner to lecture you if you are at all concerned about the direction of the stock market under the Trump-Vance administration. Let's go to the tape here, and then I want to talk a little bit about what else we're hearing from people around Trump-Vance with regards to the economic disruption that these guys are engineering for no reason.

Here's JD. It's bizarre to see all these limousine socialists screech desperately for dependence on Chinese supply chains and inflated equities. Inflated equities? What? What are you talking? What was inflated equities. What? What are you talking? What was inflated? Did you guys campaign on this? I mean, Bill Kristol pointed this out in reply to him.

I don't remember Trump and Vance campaigning on saying that equities were inflated, that the market was inflated, that we needed to bring the value of American businesses down. I don't recall that. I thought we were told about there was a golden age coming. I thought we were told that Kamala Harris was going to engineer a depression and that if Donald Trump came in,

everybody was going to be rich. That's what they sold. Now it's the vice president out there saying that equities are inflated. That is wild. I can tell you about one inflated equity that I'd be interested in hearing about. The Trump shitcoin. Your boss is running a fake cryptocurrency. That equity is inflated for sure because its value is zero. And there are, speaking of Chinese, there are Chinese crypto investors and who else, who knows who else, pumping money into Donald Trump's pocket. Meanwhile, we had another headline this morning saying that the Department of Justice was shutting down its crypto investigations unit.

So we do have some inflated equities. They're mostly in the Trump scam vertical of our economy. But for everybody else, for people who are just invested in regular companies, who have a diversified portfolio, for businesses that are doing their best to create jobs and create wealth in this country, their equities are inflated. I don't remember that pitch. So I don't know if we're screeching. I guess to the extent that there's any screeching, we're screeching about the value of our college funds and our 401ks going into the fucking toilet because you guys are having a temper tantrum

and Donald Trump really likes the word tariffs. So anyway, look, on this other part of the tweet, this dependence on Chinese supply chains, literally the Biden administration was working on this. That was the whole point of the CHIPS Act. That was the point of the Infrastructure Act. We are reshoring important parts of the manufacturing system, particularly when it comes to microchips, we're reshoring that because we didn't want to be dependent on Chinese supply chains. I think there's like a bipartisan agreement that the US and China needed to decouple, at least to some degree, maybe, you know, some would argue a little more, some would argue a little less, but like,

no one is arguing for that. Like, this is just a fake straw straw man in order to try to cover for the fact that like you're creating some noble rationalization for the fact that you're making us all poor sorry jd not interested in becoming poorer uh just so you know you can like advance your reactionary ideological ends so uh you know a couple other pieces of evidence that I'm not alone on this. Uh, there was a, uh, anonymous, um, these guys never have any chutzpah, do they? An anonymous Trump donor, a big donor told Rolling Stone this, I'm not willing to go public yet, but I will say this. I don't know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were

president. That's how bad this is. And there's very little time to fix the situation and turn the ship around. That's not me. That's not somebody with Trump derangement syndrome. That's not us never Trumpers. That's not a liberal. That's not somebody who likes Bernie Sanders saying that. That is a Trump donor, a rich guy, a capitalist saying Trump might have been a worse option than Bernie. So, JD, it's not the limousine socialists that you got to worry about. It's the people that funded you and put you in there that are concerned about the decreased value of their so-called inflated equities. The guys running these companies don't think their equities are inflated. The workers who are getting paid don't think so. So, you know, this whole thing is just an absolute mess. We had Trump, one more clip.

We had Trump a couple days ago summing this all up. Let's watch. Is there a Trump put though? Is there a Trump put, though? Is there pain in the market at some point? You're unwilling to tolerate this idea of a Trump put? Is there a threshold? I think your question is so stupid. I don't want anything to go down.

But sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something. Take our medicine. Put that on a red hat. Take our medicine. Put that on a red hat. Take our medicine. These guys are flailing. We're having a little market rebound this morning. We'll see how long that lasts. But I think that the broader signs,

I was binging CNBC yesterday on the plane. You know, things are bad when you're binging CNBC. And, you know, you just listen to experts and, you know, the market's going to fluctuate up and down. But like this, the way that they have created structural pain that's going to be hard to untangle, I cannot be overstated. And these little Twitter temper tantrums from J.D. Vance, to me, just reveal that they know how big of deep do to their end when it comes to the economy and the value of our equities. So there you go. We'll keep an eye on JD Vance's Twitter feed so you

don't have to. Everybody subscribe to the feed, tell your friends. I'll be back. We had a couple good interviews today, so we'll be seeing you soon.