Bulwark Takes - Trump's Economy Is So Volatile It Might Just Sink Him

Episode Date: May 22, 2025

Tim Miller talks the latest developments with President Trump's economic roller coaster. Watch in full here: https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house

Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy Alliance, you gain access to leads, training, networking, and support from the number one brand of siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy Alliance today. Hey, y'all, I just finished doing Nicole Walls with my friend, Justin Wolfers, who's been, man, awesome as an economic analyst about what is happening. I loved having him on the pod last week. And we were talking about this negotiation on the Hill and really the fallout for the negotiation on the Hill in the markets. And we have seen this crash in the Dow today yet again, and this really uneasy increase in the bond markets as a result of the Republicans being stubborn about jamming through this debt bomb,

this Frankenstein monster of a bill that is going to increase the deficit substantially and create a situation where America is like a lot of the holders of debt start to become uneasy about whether they're going to get paid back, which means interest rates start to go up, which is going to have a negative impact on everybody. So me and Justin kind of talk about like what the impact of this is going to be on regular people and why we're seeing another market drop today. I want to add to that that maybe it won't pass.

I mean, I keep saying it is going to because they just have a political, there will be so much political pressure on the Republicans on the Hill to just do whatever Trump wants that they're just going to do it. But what you see today is that it's going to be a little harder than they thought. I mean, they thought that they were going to be able to jam this thing through today. And, I mean, they've that they were going to be able to jam this thing through today. And, I mean, they've barely made any progress. You know, and they're going to be into a situation where if they do jam it through, they're not even going to give the members time to read it. Massey tweeting about this earlier, about how major provisions of the so-called big, beautiful bill, we're calling it the big, beautiful turd, how they're still being negotiated

and written. How are you going to vote on something that they're still writing, that's going to massively revamp the economy in ways that are going to be pretty damaging for people who aren't at the very top of the income scale. It's quite the political pickle these guys are in. So we break it all down over on Deadline White House. I'm sure I'll have more on this tomorrow with tomorrow's podcast guest, once we kind of see how much of this they're able to get through tonight, if they're able to.

And we'll be monitoring it for you as always. Make sure to subscribe right here to the feed. We are keeping you posted on everything that's going on out there. Not bullshitting you. Radical candor. So why not? Subscribe if you haven't. Tell your friends if you have. Stick around for me, Nicole, and Justin Wolfers.

This will help to change the trajectory for the U.S. economy and send that message of stability to our allies and even our enemies around the world america is back is it what can safely be called some highly generous and only half-heartedly delivered spin there from house speaker mike johnson as he and and Donald Trump desperately tried to shove Trump's big, beautiful bill across the finish line. One group not buying it, Wall Street. Investors are spooked by yet another of Donald Trump's economic pillars. The Dow tumbling more than 800 points today over concerns about Trump's big, beautiful bill. New York Times reporting this, quote, for decades, budget hawks

warned that America's debt load was unsustainable and that runaway spending finance with borrowed money was eventually going to scare investors away from lending to the U.S. Those fears are now taking hold. Tax cuts pushed by the Trump administration are amplifying debt and deficit concerns among bond investors, a powerful group of market players who strongly influence how much it costs for the government to finance its budget. Those investors were already on edge over Trump's whipsawing tariff policy. Then this week's attempt to push through sweeping tax cuts without significantly slashing spending in what the president has called a big, beautiful bill set off a fresh bout of bond market turmoil. Joining our coverage, professor of economics and

public policy at the University of Michigan, Justin Wolfers is back. Also joining us, MSNBC political analyst, host of the Bulwark podcast, Tim Miller is here. At a political level, even if you don't have a granular understanding of all of that, even if you don't understand it at all, people feel like crap about their personal economy. And all of the headlines are bad for Donald Trump, driving his approval ratings on the economy in general, but inflation, taxes, tariffs and costs to historic lows for Donald Trump. Here's the thing is for those of us who have been deficit hawks, it might finally be our moment. And it's hard to get people to care about the deficit and the debt. Why? Right. Because it's like hard for them to translate it into what's happening in their lives. But right now, like the

interest rate issue is colliding with a lot of regular people in their lives. Republicans and Democrats, this is not a partisan issue. If you are about to retire and trying to downsize your home, and you're looking at the interest rates on housing versus the interest rates you pay. If you're young and you're trying to buy your first house. If you're starting a new family and you're trying to get a bigger house in the suburbs. No matter what, a lot of people are in a really tight squeeze when it comes to how much the interest rates are now as compared to how much they were

five years ago, 10 years ago. And so if these guys on the Hill who claim to be fiscally responsible, who claim to be doge trying to cut the budget, if instead of doging the budget, they said they'd dump another $6 trillion in debt on top of it. It's not surprising that the interest rates are going to go up. This is what any deficit – there have been plenty of Republicans over the years that have warned this is going to happen. And the rubber is finally meeting the road. It's meeting the road with a president who, when he was in the private sector, said he was the king of debt. And he was the king of debt in the first term, and it just didn't come back to bite him then.

And it seems like this might be the moment that it comes back to bite him, because it collides with some of the other stuff that Justin was talking about. And I do think it is gonna have a real impact on people's lives, and you're gonna start to see regular middle-class folks who the debt hasn't been at the top of their issue.

It's gonna start to be if they feel feel stuck because the cost of everything becomes so high because interest rates are so high. I call myself the king of debt. I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made a fortune by using debt. And if things don't work out, I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that's a smart thing, not a stupid thing. And I made a fortune. How do you renegotiate the debt? Because you go back and you say, hey, guess what? The economy just crashed. I'm going to give you back half. Tim, where does this break the MAGA movement politically, if it does?

Yeah, well, it would happen, I think, six months to a year from now. This is not short term, because you're seeing the cracks in Congress right now. And they're debating this. They can't get this thing through. It's the only thing that they're supposed to do all year. It's May 21st. They're supposed to vote on it tonight. We'll see.

Maybe it'll happen in the middle of the night. But it breaks apart this MAGA movement because this kind of uneasy coalition between your Wall Street Journal, you know, country club Republican crowd that wants the tax cuts, that wants the SALT deduction. You know, they want one element of this. You have your new populist MAGA types that don't want these cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, at least in red states. You have the remaining Tea Party budget hawk types that are trying to find the cuts to pay for these tax cuts. And so they're all infighting. And at the end of

the day, to get it through, what they've come up with is this Frankenstein monster that jacks up the debt by $6 trillion, that still cuts money for SNAP and Medicaid, and that gives the tax cuts to the wealthy and to these upper middle class country club Republican voters, particularly in big cities. They're doing that because they want to give a little bit to everybody. On the back end of that, when you end up with spiking interest rates for middle class folks, when you end up with working class people losing their SNAP benefits in health care, there's going to be big parts of the MAGA coalition that are mad. And I think that is where this is heading, assuming they jam this thing through. But, you know, it's going to take a little time to, for all that to filter through the economy. I mean, what's amazing is what you're both

describing is pain and suffering that will be indiscriminate at a partisan level, right? You will hurt everybody for whom every purchase is something they have to think about. You will hurt everybody for whom any, you know, sort of, sort of strain on their benefits or taking away from will be the difference between life and death potentially, which hasn't really happened in the Trump story in such a mass scale. Justin Wilvers and Tim Miller,

thank you so much for making sense of it for me. It's great to see both of you. Another break for us. We'll be right back.