Bulwark Takes - Trump Caves on Tariffs After Insisting They Were Essential

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

Sam Stein, Andrew Egger, and Ben Parker react to Trump’s latest chaotic tariff announcement in a Truth Social bleat, including his stunning 125% tariffs on China and sudden U-turn on tariffs for dozens of other countries. Markets are surging, but confusion remains.

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And then at roughly, I don't know, 115 or so, that's about right, Trump puts out a tweet, a post, a bleep, whatever you want to call it, announcing that he is not in fact going forward with the tariffs that he had outlined. He's going to jack up the ones on China to about 125%. And then, Andrew, correct me if I'm wrong, he's going to put a pause, an undate pause, on tariff hikes for 75 countries that have approached him and been receptive or not adversarial towards him. But he will have a 10% reciprocal tariff in place with those countries still. I don't know. It's very hard because we're

just reading a bleat to figure out what's going on. Why don't you break it down for us, Andrew? Yeah. So bottom line, we are so back. The markets have gone absolutely berserk based on this tweet. Let's just pause for one second to dwell on how insane it is that this is how we get any news at all, let alone the news that is so world historically important that it has caused the Nasdaq to jump. Every time you refresh it, it's a little higher. Hockey sticks. Hockey sticks, baby.

This bleat is all we have. We don't have a statement from the White House. We don't have specifics yet. And the bleat is obviously written in Trump's own voice. It's a little bit unclear. Essentially what happened is Trump slapped these Liberation Day tariffs on a few days ago, right? And it was a 10% baseline tariff on basically everywhere in the world. But the real kicker was these reciprocal tariffs that he layered on top, which were massively, massively larger than that, upwards of 50% on a lot of countries, or in the neighborhood of 50% on a lot of countries.

Basically, just extinction-level tariffs for most trade between us on a lot of countries, basically just extinction level tariffs for most trade between us and a lot of different places. Different countries have responded to that in different ways. So China and the EU both have responded within the last 48 hours by slapping new reciprocal tariffs on us. And the markets have suffered from those. But the real reason that things have been diving down so hard is basically just that there's no safe haven, right? Everyone always kind of knew Trump was going to go after China. There might be tariffs and stuff involved there. But there were ways for companies to get around this sort of thing without abandoning the whole prospect of

global trade at all, right? A lot of countries moved some manufacturing from China to Vietnam in anticipation of new China tariffs and things like that. So that was why things spiked down so hard. Now what Trump is announcing is the 10% baseline tariff seemingly, according to the wording of his tweet, is still going to be in place on everybody. So still a real giant disruption to global trade, but with the exception of China and the EU. And again, he doesn't mention the EU in this tweet, but you can tell the implication is there, is that he says these 75 countries that have not retaliated, of about the 90 who he slapped the tariffs on in the first place, those 75 are going to lose the totally invented, totally catastrophic reciprocal tariffs and be only at the baseline. And again, we're seeing markets just blast upward like a

cork out of a bottle. A quick summarization from our friend Josh Wingrove at Bloomberg. He says this is a total reallocation of his tariffs and basically amounts to a 10% universal tariff, as Andrew said, 125% rate for China, which will basically amount to something closer to a trade embargo on China, and maybe rates higher than 10% for whomever else he thinks retaliated. I believe the initial number of countries was 90 plus or 90-ish. So that leaves about 15 countries. We don't know which countries.

I don't know. Mostly here. Yeah, but not the entire EU. There's more countries than that in the EU. So it's like pieces of it. There are 15 non-mentioned countries who still might be targeted with higher reciprocal tariffs. We don't know. We're just going off of the bleep. So yeah, odd way to make economic policy, Ben.

Yeah, definitely. I think Andrew wrote about this. We saw a little hint of this earlier when there was that fake headline going around that they were going to do walter bloomberg one yeah the walter blue he was just a couple days ahead he was just a couple days ahead of the news maybe like he was pre-right he got it right yeah you know they saw how the markets reacted so this huge spike that lasted all of what five minutes yesterday when everyone thought the tariffs might be not even coming off my name the tariffs aren't off they're delayed for 90 days now you know who knows a lot can happen in 90 days but the fact that yesterday the white house didn't just take the win and come out and be like yeah yeah we are delaying them it's not even great they wait even that it's not even that because last night i i i

think uh i don't know if you watched i know I know Andrew did because it was more in shots. But last night he was at – Trump was at the NRCC dinner. And he was talking about the tariffs in ways that suggested no pullback whatsoever. I think his quote was, this time I'm doing what I want to do with respect to tariffs. This time I'm doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs. And then he then like within 12 hours just completely reverses. I'm laughing because I'm relieved for the tariffs. And then he then, like within 12 hours, just completely reverses. I'm laughing because I'm relieved for the market. But this is a horrible way to produce global trade policy.

It's unbelievable. Yeah. And like, how are businesses supposed to make decisions when Trump can turn up tariffs to 125 on a whim and then take them off on a whim like yeah things are better than they would have been before but they're not better than they were three months ago well the most in the most platon in the most ideal situation right i mean if you were trump you would say well now you have 90 days to move all your manufacturing to the u.s great okay you have 90 days 90 days to build a factory. People watch this Bulwark channel, man. You have 90 days to train people to do all your manufacturing.

That was done. 90 days to build a factory, hire a bunch of workers, and train them on the process. Yes, that's going to work. We should talk a little bit more just about the structure of this tweet because it's so good. Because, yeah, all the stuff Ben is talking about. It's not a tweet. We have to be technically correct. A close read of the tweet. A truth social post.

All the stuff that Ben is talking about is true, like if the point of the White House here were to make things easy for the business climate. But all the chaos and stuff, they have not shown any indication that they particularly care or that it matters to them at all. Based on the White House's rubric for how they are strategically assessing all this, this tweet is very funny. Because, I'm sorry, this post, this bleat is very funny. Thank you. Because the whole question for them is, gosh, we've got these markets cratering. How the heck can we stop the bleeding here

without making it appear that we are reversing course, that we're weak, that we are, you know. Well, how do they do that? Well, the way they do it is by leading off with the China news, right? I mean, yes, he did. He did bury it based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets. I am hereby raising the tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125 percent effective immediately.

At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the USA and other countries is no longer sustainable or acceptable. So he leads with like the I'm the alpha dog. You can't, you know, China can't tell the U S what to do. It's the other way around. We're the, we're the bosses. And then he's like, and also by the way, um, because these other countries were nice enough to reach out to us about, you know, to come to us hat in hand and, and do the sir story, like, please, sir, what can we give you, sir? Uh, because of that, we're going to let, we're going to let we're gonna i mean like that's that's not the reason like they're gonna give a shit whether whether any country came petitioning him he's not he's not rewarding them he is stopping the bleeding here and i think it was i think it was finally impressed on him that this is the way

that you could do that with that while still saving a little bit of face and this is why whenever tim and i talk and we're you know we do the over-unders on how long the tariffs will last or if they'll go in place at all, I always take the under because I just feel like this is ultimately just what Trump does. It's erratic. And then his favorite thing is to try to take credit for fixing the problem that he created. Right. He's going to say this is the best thing the stock market has had in years. Yeah. Okay.

So just to give you an idea, my dentist made this point to me the other day when i went in for a cleaning he like your teeth great they're doing great but really my dad's about the tariffs that's really what i wanted to do the final let's talk about trade uh he's like he's done this before like he's tried this before and every time the same thing like why does he keep trying the same thing we're gonna 90 days we're gonna be back all right tariffs are back on markets you're gonna tank oh i took them off look at what i fixed the problem that i created aren't i amazing we're just gonna do this for four years right back and forth and back and forth because i think my theory go high see my theory because obviously i mean not obviously but it

seems clear to me that he likes doing this he just likes the chaos and he likes the idea that he has people calling him and begging him for deals or that he can cosplay a tough guy in the international stage. He doesn't really care about the actual policy. It's just the ability to have somewhat controlled chaos through which you can negotiate. And that I think gets his rocks off. So yeah, we'll be back here in 90 days. The funniest thing about this to me, one other thing is I would love to know Peter Navarro's take on this whole thing, because this is not the America first kind of vision that Navarro and even Trump himself have laid out for, you know, we're bringing it all back to America. You're going to have to do it here. The whole

reason the market is shooting up is because now there's less disruption because people can just move out of China to Vietnam, move out of China to India or Japan. Because we can keep buying things from overseas. Right, exactly. And if the point of this was that, as Trump just said yesterday, we have so much money coming in, billions of dollars coming in. We're going to be so rich. We're going to be so rich. But what, now he's making us poor by taking the tariffs off? Well, exactly. And the tariffs were supposed to be the revenue raiser for a bunch of different initiatives. I guess we don't get those now. And then to your point, Navarro and Stephen Miller, you know, it was all about nationalizing pipelines and supply chains and things like that. And I guess we'll have to wait for 90 days for those as well.

I will note, because it's just so extraordinary and it gave me the giggles, Howard Lutnick went on Twitter to talk about the bleep that was put out by Trump. And I just want to read it because I think we should marinate on it for a bit. Scott Besson and I sat with the president while he wrote one of the most extraordinary truth posts of his presidency. The world is ready to work with the president to fix global trade, and China has chosen the opposite direction. Does this qualify as the most extraordinary truth post of his presidency? I haven't really taken stock of all of the truth posts. It's up there, I guess. There have been a lot in the first three months, I guess. The only one that boosted markets 10%

in about five minutes. I have to say that we've talked about the uh the drama between navarro and musk in the trump administration yeah the the besant uh lutnick drama is so good like wasn't lutnick originally supposed to be treasury secretary but then he lobbied too hard for it so yeah so like scott besant is only there to frustrate howard lutnick and it's working and it's like you can't keep track of which one's arguing which point they are either negotiating or they're not negotiating this is a negotiation it's like there's so many different variables coming from

this right now uh any other final thoughts andrew and ben uh we should just be we should just be grateful for this moment because the news is always so stupid and this i'm so grateful but but at least like this is one of those stories where they're doing this insanely stupid stuff but to an outcome that is so much less worse than the one we thought we were going to get yeah except we're going to be back in 90 days doing the same exact thing yeah they're they're backing off and the all the funny is in how they're pretending that they're not but they are and it's great yeah we still worse than we were, worse off than we were a year ago, but better off than we were a day ago.

So there's that. I will say the funniest part of this to me was the very last sentence of Trump's post, which we didn't talk about, which is, thank you for your attention to this matter. I didn't read that far. Oh my God. Thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome that I paid attention. All right. Andrew Egger, Ben Parker, thanks so much.