Bulwark Takes - Trump’s New Tariffs Make Life WAY More Expensive

Episode Date: September 30, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger take on Trump's Tariffpalooza! Trump slapped a 100% tax on movies, tries to "help" North Carolina’s furniture makers, and leaves farmers begging for bailouts.

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Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connix Ontario at 1866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. But MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Hello, everyone. This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Egger. Andrew, it's tariff-palooza. All the tariffs are happening. Donald Trump is out there with two thumbs, setting new trade policy as we speak. We're going to get 100% tariff on movies. Hmm. Interesting. Very curious to hear how that works. We're getting furniture tariffs. We have Scott Besson, very upset that after we bailed,

out Argentina, the little disheveled hair maga down there, went and turned around and sold soybeans to the Chinese. Everything is kind of topsy-turvy, and I'm here for it, because this is some exquisite stove touching. And as you know, I like nothing more than watching people touch the hot stove. Before we get started, though, if you would like to follow bad things happening to the worst people, you should subscribe to this channel. Hit like, hit subscribe, follow our feed. Andrew, which is your favorite tariff of the new tariff regime, which is maybe

kind of happening or not? I love that you have already baked me in like that I'm bought in on the presupposition that all this stuff is good before I even opened my mouth, which I don't agree with at all. I'm very unhappy with all of this. What is good? What is bad, Andrew? We're beyond such words.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like maybe maybe in a universe where like you actually could just sort of, like, silo off all of this pain to only people who had pulled a lever for Donald Trump last year in the election. I still wouldn't agree with you, actually, but it'd be easier to agree with you. Okay. Then in the current case, which is just that we are going from sort of tariff disaster to tariff disaster. Donald Trump has rewired all global trade, you know, to fit his own sort of very dearly held protectionist model for how the U.S. is going to enter into its next golden age. And not only that, not only are we, you know, finally starting to see the actual

shocks hit from what we have now sort of settled into as the new synthesis from the old way and the liberation day tariffs from back in April that it all finally clunked into place over the summer. Not only do we have that to deal with, but Donald Trump still, just loves tariffs. It's his favorite thing to reach for anytime he has any kind of economic like problem that's presented to him. He's like, well, just slap a tariff on that. And so it like, it compounds, right? And it compounds for the dumbest stuff, for the silliest reasons. I mean, like, you guys, I genuinely don't know which of those two that you mentioned from the two, the two tweets that just just went up on truth social this morning. These are like the two new policies. I guess we can

talk about those. The one is, look, JVL, foreign movie studios are eating our lunch. It's like taking candy from a baby that all these other countries are able to make these good movies now. The South Koreans are making K-pop movies, and it's crazy. It's crazy out there. They're making lots of money in the U.S. Where are great American demon hunters? Shouldn't

we also have boy band and girl band demon hunters that we animate right here in America? Yeah, yeah. Come on, man. It's like they're eating our lunch. So that's one of them. And then the other one, which is like almost crazier, at least if you go by the wording of the tweet,

And I don't know. None of us know whether he meant it this way or whether he was just being sloppy or what. But what he said was, look, North Carolina, their furniture industry has really been, you know, really hurt by a lot of imported furniture. So what we are going to do is we're going to place a tariff on all countries that don't agree to buy all their furniture from the United States. Not what he, again, what he said was not just we are going to place a tariff on imports of foreign furniture. It was, if you, any country out there, do not consent to start buying your furniture immediately from our great North Carolina furniture manufacturers, we are going to put a retaliatory tariff on you for that. That was the plain text of the tweet. It's crazy. It's crazy out there. And again, this is on all of every single new tariff thing, you always have to keep in mind, is on top of these incredibly sort of strangulatory and bad and distortionary tariffs that are economy-wide now on basically every country out there, some more than others. But it's, I mean, it's just, this is where we are. We have separate tariffs for upholstered furniture

and then a different set of tariffs for vanities and cabinets. I guess that makes sense for reasons. Wayfair, hardest hip, I would imagine. What is Wayfair going to do? I am, so I am a little more struck by the movie tariffs, because that seems even more nonsensical to me. Like, movies are not a good. Movies are a service, right? And he says he's going to put 100% tariffs on movies. What does that mean? Does that mean that, so Disney finances a movie, then Trump says that your local AMC has to

charge double for like who who pays the tariff for this is it only for movies that are exhibited theatrically in a theater or uh does streaming content count as well if you are Netflix a global company and you you are making content in Moldovia or whatever can you do your things get tariffed because they're only stream how the answer of course that none of this makes sense right but there is a you're just you're getting bogged down in the details. These are all questions, policy questions to be sorted out later by U.S. Trade Representative Jameson Greer. You know, he's a big picture guy, you know, 100% tariff on movies, man. Just figure it out. That's a, that's figure it out. And looming over all this, of course, is the Supreme Court,

which may decide to save Trump from himself, which is just as a brief aside, that's kind of what I think they're going to do. I think the Supreme Court, this Supreme Court majority, is happy to subsume principles in ways that help Trump but is willing to stand up for principles if they think they're saving Trump from himself. So I think they're going to invalidate the tariffs.

If you had to put it, if you had to put five bucks on this. I might go the opposite way of you. Just to have a conversation about it, right? Because I can totally see that argument. I can also see the argument that like if you take the,

if you take the politics, this is like the basic, like, analytical question about the Supreme Court this term, right? Is it like, are they actually just doing politics? Are they actually, like, sort of like triangulating for for the, for Trump? Or, or, which would also be bad, are they so sort of like outside of the politics of some of this stuff that they are just sort of like out there in this la la land world where they're like, hmm, isn't it fun that we get to get to investigate these interesting not previously tested issues about executive power and and who wields, who wields it in the, independent agencies and stuff. And boy, isn't it fun that like, you know, finally we're getting

some good, some good cases that test some of these things. And let's really dig down on the case law and like, and, you know, you can construct an argument that would go the opposite way, where because they have, because they are so bought in on this sort of principle of, of, you know, the unitary executive and the power of the executive branch rests in the executive, that maybe they will take the expansive view of these trade powers, like they have taken the expansive view of so many other executive powers during this term. But if they don't do that, I think you have obviously hit on the most likely reason why. Let me tell you a little secret, Andrew, about not just this Supreme Court, but all Supreme Court's. It's always just politics.

That's what it is. The Supreme Court is always just politics. Not. not just this Supreme Court, but every Supreme Court, because that's the end of the system. The system is... If you say it's always just politics, it only takes one counter example to disprove that. On meaningful decisions, right? They will rule on procedure stuff here and there. But whenever they are given to Gorsuch in that sort of trans-discrimination workplace case a couple of years ago, like, I don't know, there are moments where these guys, I mean, they take themselves seriously as thinkers. And obviously, they're political beings, too.

We're getting kind of far afield from yelling at up here. we should get back to tariffs. Soybeans. Soybling tariffs still happening. Is he going to bail out our great patriotic soybean farmers? We honestly should have done a video just on this because this is so crazy. Like I've written about this a couple times in morning shots the last couple of days. You will remember we did this all before. Right. I mean, I covered it for the for the weekly standard. You know, back in 2017, 2018, like the early ramp up of the trade war with China where. you know, Donald Trump was was sort of, you know, paying pennies to the dollar, compared to the dollars he's paying now for these trade wars. But, but it was very clear even then that one of the most hurt groups from these, these tip or tat trade wars with China in particular was going to be American farmers because American soybean farmers in particular sell a, or used to sell an enormous number of soybeans to China to feed their sort of domestic hog production over there. That's kind of how that's what that's what soybeans are for, you know, is like, is like animal. feed. And much of it was going to China. At that time, China realized that because of that, they were totally overexposed to like political retaliation. Right. So, so here you have all these farmers. They're in, you know, the American heartland. They are Trump voting constituencies. And China's like, great, well, let's hit them. We buy a lot of stuff from them. We could easily

stop doing that. We could buy from South America instead, you know, Brazil and Argentina's sort of burgeoning, you know, agricultural industry down there. And that's what they did. And it really hurt farmers here. And as a result of that, Donald Trump, you know, reached down into his bag of goodies and was like, you know, our great patriotic American farmers have really been bearing the brunt of this. So we're going to bail them out to the tune of tens of billions of dollars a year for the rest of my term. Or as he would put it, you know, until the, until we win the trade war was kind of his, you know, on the far side of it, our farmers are going to be doing awesome. They're going to be to sell everywhere. It's going to be this new golden age. But until then, until then,

we will, we will just make you whole with these. Is that welfare? Is that welfare? Or is it only welfare when it goes to black and brown people? It's so hard to know. You get to the end of the first Trump term. And there's a lot of coverage of this of like, okay, this has basically created a new kind of economic dependency where there are these payouts, you know, hand over fist with very little oversight going out of the Department of Agriculture, out of the federal government, you know, to just farm. and just kind of just it's it's a cash bonanza out there and they were hurting i mean it's like there are questions about whether it made them whole at all you know it's not like they they probably

all things being being equal they probably would rather sold their stuff to china and just gone on doing it but like that was the problem that that that was the first term and now you get to now is that why all those farmers far is that why all those farmers went and voted for kamala harris in 24 because they believed in the dignity of their work is that is that why because iowa went for Harris last time around, right? It was like a tremendous swing. Or am I misremember? Well, there was this one poll, JVL.

Boy, it's so weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you're correct. We get, you get to today. Trump's talking about the same stuff again. He's in the Oval Office the other day. He's like, well, you know, I think we're going to start, you know, making some payouts out of our, out of our tariff revenues is how you framed it.

You know, again, to start protecting. these farmers from this short-term pain. Meanwhile, the pain is humongous. China has, I don't know if you've seen these stats. China has not bought U.S. soybeans in any quantities since May. Like, it's just completely gone. And a big part of the reason why it's completely gone is because China has been able to just go back to those markets that profited so much from the, from the first term trade war. Like, like that, that, you know, Brazil and Argentina and these countries have, have been kind of scaling up these, this industrial agriculture for years. We just bailed out Argentina, right? Yeah, yeah. In the last few days. Because America first requires bailing out

Argentina because they have a junior maga. And then he went and turned around and sold some more soybeans. And Scott Besant is very upset about it. Anyway, we'll get to that. Well, and that's just the free market. Right. I mean, down there, it's like, wow. But honestly, like China, China, China's coming and calling. If you're an Argentinian farmer, it's just like great. They're like, okay, well, they'll, pay a bunch more money for my soybeans than they were going to. Otherwise, I'm going to invest in more and more, you know, production and scale to be able to meet that demand five years ago during the first trade war. I was already doing that. I already was scaling up because it was suddenly so much more lucrative. And that has now gotten me in a position where I can, I can pants the American

farmer that much worse this time. I mean, it's crazy. And yet, we're running the same playbook again. there's there's no end in sight i mean like and when when trump talks about you know what he's going to do for american farmers it is just it's so clear just from listening to him talk that that he thinks that like he's going to blow this gigantic hole in like what u.s industrial agriculture looks like in the country now and he's going to make it up by getting these concessions on the margins like he's going to knock down canada's you know embargo on u.s dairy and he's going to knock down Japan's, you know, a refusal to accept U.S. rice. I mean, it's crazy. It's, it, it, it betrays a complete, complete, like, just failure to grapple with, like, any of the actual economic

realities on the ground. I mean, like, I guess that's sort of like a dog bites man's story at this point is Donald Trump, like, just, just existing in this, in this economic funhouse mirror land when it comes to these trade policies. But it's, it is actively now already having enormous economic damage. And we're just talking about agriculture, but it's happening everywhere. Yeah, this is, again, this goes to my thesis

that, like, the kitchen table issues thing was always just cover. Like, it isn't actually about kitchen tables issues. It's like, Trump is going to be mean to the people you hate.

And if your business has to suffer for it or your farm has to get blowed up from it, so what? It's a small price to pay for self-esteem, Michael. And so I, but I don't,

I want to hit on something that is actually really sinister in all this, and I forget who made this point. I think it was Heather Cox Richardson, which is that one of the things the tariffs do is they provide Trump a workaround from the Constitution requiring all funds to be congressionally mandated and approved, because the tariff money goes straight to the U.S. Treasury and is the purview of the executive branch. So that becomes essentially Trump's private financing for whatever he wants. Do we think that he was smart enough to think that's what he was doing?

Then in addition to like trying to turn ice into like a private police force and trying to turn the military into his private military force, the tariffs part of it was, yeah, and I'm going to get my own national bank that I can use to do whatever I want with the money. What is so strange about all of this is the degree to which all of that was anticipatable, you know, before the election, right? Again, we were like writing about this at the time, that this was a newfound power and a newfound lever of control that Donald Trump was preparing to give himself. I, when I think back to the election, it remains sort of strange to me that there was so little talk of tariffs in general. You know, Kamala Harris had one line that she would routinely roll out in her speeches talking about, you know, the Trump national sales tax, which like was plainly like her way of trying to cut through the fact this is sort of like a wonky issue to make it more real for people. But like he was always planning to reorganize the entire economy in this way. And like people didn't really notice, you know, like searches for like what tariffs were spiked like crazy in the weeks after the election, you know, way higher than ever before. Let me read you one line from this New York. There's this New York Times piece up just this morning. Small businesses wither under Trump's tariffs is the headline. It's hard to breathe.

I don't know whether this woman's a Trump voter, JVL, so try to hold back here. But just listen to this quote. I mean, Kimberly Hyde, the owner of Beat and Yarrow, a flower shop in Denver, so that doesn't really code MAGA, does it? Said she was caught off guard by how much the trade policy would drain her business. Quote, I don't know why it didn't occur to me that flowers would also be tariffed, said Ms. Hyde, who sells flowers from countries, including Colombia and Ecuador and ceramic and metal bases from China and India. So, like, this is a woman whose entire business

is extremely exposed to tariffs, right? She imports everything she sells. And yet, I don't think it's at all unreasonable. And I don't think it's all that rare that, like, a million people have, like, saw tariffs before the election as this sort of, like, wonky, out there, abstract thing that was, like, going to happen someplace else and did not actually think about, like, I buy things from overseas to run my business, and I'm going to have to start paying like 40% more on all those imports if this guy gets through and does what he said he's going to do. And that's the weird disconnect that I still have not gotten my head around how exactly it all went down that way. All right. Well, you are not sure if the lady from that piece is a Trump voter. I have one who I'm sure is a Trump voter. This is from Hannah Knowles as the reporter. Can't tell. It's on like Microsoft News, so I can't tell you what.

what the actual home publication is on it. Jesse Meadows told her mother-in-law not to panic when business slowed at the family flower shop last year. They just needed to hold on a little longer until Donald Trump got back in office. She's still waiting for the turnaround. The phone that used to ring all day during Trump's first term sits mostly quiet.

Customers are still reluctant to spend on extra like flowers in her corner of small town, Georgia. A box of faux berries from China recently. arrived at the shop with a note explaining that they cost 17 percent more because of Trump's tariffs. Fruits getting outrageous now. Meadows 36 lamented to a customer one recent afternoon explaining the rising price of the gift basket the woman orders every year for a friend's birthday. Ben goes on to list the other thing she was expecting. She was expecting energy costs to be cut in half, immediately bring prices down, draining the swamp, free IVF, and ending the war

Ukraine in 24 hours and she's been disappointed by all this. I mean, I guess this is, I'm roping you into a long running conversation that Sarah and I have, which is, are people stupid? Or are they not stupid? And they know what they want to know. Because it's one of those two, right? And obviously, 330 million people in the country, the answer is both. There are some people are just dumb. dumb as a bag of rocks, who really did think, well, I thought we were going to get free IVF everywhere. But the median American, is the medium American that dumb? Or do they just know what they want to know? Do you see what I'm getting at, Andrew?

Yeah, of course. I think there's a lot of knowing what you want to know going on everywhere all the time, right? And like, you can go back to, again, this has been the hallmark of the tariff stuff all throughout this second Trump term. term as well where it's not just sort of like the the you know the the flower shop owners and the small business mom and pop shop people just trying to get by who have been kind of gobsmacked by the effects of this but if you will recall we had a giant stock market panic right after liberation day where all of the where the entire financial industry and you know all of the traders all the smartest guys in the room whose job it is to see around corners and all this stuff looked at

one another and we're like oh shit he was serious about all that stuff like what what's going on? And then when he kind of pulled out of the deepest part of that dive, they were all kind of like, oh, thank goodness that's over. And they all went back to normal. And we're now in yet another period of sort of bizarre, like, all of these, you know, red lights are flashing on the control panel. And yet everybody's just kind of going about their business as though it's going to be fine. Again, like not just at the level of, you know, you own a flower shop, but at the level of you trade stocks for a living on the New York Stock Exchange. You know what I mean? So it's like there's a certain amount of willful blindness that affects us all, I would say.

Not me, but speak for yourself. Yeah, everyone but you. I would say this. The long term version of the story will wind up being the most important version, and it will be the one that nobody sees, the one that will be completely invisible, which is that it isn't just the imposition of tariffs. it's the mindless on again, off again, nature of it, the total chaos that is then commingled with Trump's lingering popularity. I am sorry, but he's still somewhere between 40 and 40% of 40 and 44% approval, which given the externalities around like what is happening in the real world, is astonishing.

And what this says to the rest of the global order is that you can't make plans around the United States. The United States is still very large and has a lot of money. And so you have to be prepared to be able to take advantage of that when you can. When there's an opportunity to make a buck

by dealing with the United States, you should probably take it. But in terms of like ordering your long-term interests, you can't do that with any confidence, right? You can't go like, hey, let's encourage our companies to go make $100 million investment in physical plants in the United States.

are you kidding? Are you high? And this, you know, mixed with the health care stuff, mixed with the pharmaceutical tariffs which are coming online, mixed with the slashing in NIH and research funding and the pushing out of foreign students to universities, which is like long been one of America's big strategic advantages, means that the rest of the world is going to move on because they have to. And they can't just say, oh, well, it's just Trump. You know, it's just this one weird guy. The truth is, the American people know better. They're chomping at the bet.

They have buyers remorse. Anybody who's rational looks at American. I come back to this all the time. I forget who it was. I think it was like the Minister of Defense from Poland or something, who said something to the equivalent of, we cannot make long-term defense plans based around the whims of 40,000 people in Wisconsin every four years.

And that's right for NATO, and it's also going to be right about the global economic order. This is what you all voted for. Enjoy it. Andrew, thanks for sitting with me, buddy. It was great stove touching. And I can tell you enjoyed it, even if you're determined to pretend that you didn't. I like talking about it. Guys, hit like, hit subscribe, follow the channel.

We'll be back with more soon.