Factually! with Adam Conover - The tariffs are just so stupid.

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!)Visit USAFacts.org for unbiased, nonpartisan data that unpacks topics that shape American life and subscribe here to receive their free weekly newsletter to get the trendlines behind the headlines. Trump's tariffs are a disaster, and it's only going to get worse. Here's why.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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First, the stock market crashed in one of the worst sell-offs since World War II, and people have been scrambling to buy iPhones and olive oil before the tariffs jacked up their prices higher than eggs. Of course I got all three so I'm all ready to make the world's worst crunchiest sandwich. Nintendo even delayed pre-orders for the Switch 2. Oh yeah, now Trump is really f**ked up. Sure, we're mad at you for sending innocent people to Salvadoran mega prisons, disappearing college students off the street, and firing the scientists who are curing cancer.

But delaying the release date of Metroid Prime 4? Now you done f**ked up, Donkey Kong-old Trump. Donkey...Donkey Don...Don...Donaldie Kong? Donaldie Kong...Donkey Donald Trump is probably... These tariffs were so destructive that just an internet rumor that Trump might pause them sent the market up trillions momentarily before it suddenly plummeted again. I mean the tariffs are so dumb, so insane, and so self-destructive that even Republicans sounded the alarm. Tariffs are a tax on consumers and I'm not a fan of jacking up taxes on American consumers.

Wow. When you find yourself agreeing with a notorious Zodiac killer, something has gone very wrong. So after a week of pushing the global economy to the brink of collapse, Trump finally blinked. He paused his tariff plans on most countries for 90 days, and stocks skyrocketed. For one day, then they plummeted again. Because after the so-called pause, Trump slapped 125% tariffs on our largest trading partner China, then said electronics like iPhones were exempt from the tariffs before declaring that that exemption was only temporary. Look, at this point it should be obvious that we are ruled by a mad king. Trump hath lost his faculties and his every whim bringeth us misery. Because these tariffs are one of the biggest

economic own goals in history. They're not going to bring down the price of eggs. They're just going to make you pay more for everything and put countless small businesses out of business. All because one senile billionaire won't give up on the one stupid idea in his head. And we're gonna get into why, but first, real quick, I just want to let you know if you want to support the channel, you can head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover.

And if you'd like to come see my brand new hour of standup comedy on the road in Charleston, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Spokane, Tacoma, a bunch of other great cities as well, we're always adding new ones. Head to adamconover.net for all my tickets and tour dates. So a lot has been made of how stupid and insane the tariff rollout was and that's because the rollout was in fact stupid and insane. For instance, Trump put tariffs on an island inhabited only by penguins and seals. You know if we can't get penguins to fly how the f*** are we supposed to get them to pay? They can't even reach the wallets tucked

into their cute little waistcoats. And the tariff numbers, the actual rates the Trump administration is charging, were based on math that no experts had ever heard of. And when they looked into it, they found utter nonsense. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, now points out their plans contain math errors. Serious math errors. Turns out that under that beautiful hair was not hiding a beautiful mind.

Because not only was Trump's math bad, the very idea behind the math was completely insane. See, Trump's formulas were based on the idea that we need to balance our trade deficit with each country, basically demanding that any country that sells things to us buy the same amount of stuff in return. But this makes no f**king sense. For example, take the landlocked country of Lesotho. They export diamonds and denim to the United States, things we want and need.

But they can't buy American goods in return because Lesotho has a per capita income of less than a thousand dollars a year. These people don't have money. Yet for the crime of not buying enough Harley-Davidson's or whatever with These people don't have money, yet for the crime of not buying enough Harley-Davidson's or whatever with money they don't have, they were slapped with a 50% tariff. I mean this whole idea is crazy. In life, you buy from some people and you sell to other people. They don't need to be the same person. When I buy an apple for lunch, I don't have to sell the grocery clerk a f***ing YouTube video. So since the tariffs that Trump unilaterally imposed on the entire global economy were

economically illiterate nonsense, it's no surprise that market's tanked. But for Trump's scrabbling minions, that just meant it was a bull market for bulls**t. I don't really care about my 401k today, but this is what I believe. I believe in this man. I mean, Jesus Christ, this is death cult level devotion. What's next? Is she going to send him one of her fingers in the mail? But no amount of sycophancy can change reality. After Trump's tariff plan was unveiled, the S&P 500 had its worst four days in its entire history. But you know what? Screw the stock

market. The real victims of the tariffs will be average Americans. See, we import a lot of shit in this country. Imports of goods and services have been about 14% of our gross domestic product recently. That means we import close to four trillion dollars a year of goods that the rest of us buy, right? All of the necessities of life. Those are things that we import and tariffs are a tax on all of those goods entering the country. So if you raise tariffs on some or all of those imports, you are raising prices on a major chunk of all of US spending. We're not just talking about big-ticket items like cars and appliances, it's everyday sh**. Diapers, paper towels, toys, shoes, coffee and

avocados, you know, all the supplies you need to raise a hipster baby. So it's kind of weird that the guy who ran on making things less expensive would want to crank up the price on the basic necessities of life. What is the rationale for even doing this? What are we supposed to get out of it? Well, Trump and his people say that the tariffs are going to restore American manufacturing. And you know what? That has a lot of appeal. A lot of people have nostalgia for the good old days, or at least what they imagined the good old days to be like. Back when you could work in a factory for eight hours,

go home to your wife while you're trapped in a hot little room cooking for you, eat the fruit of her toil, and rest comfy in the knowledge that your hard labor with your own two hands made something real and gave you enough money to buy a big, boat-like American car that your wife is not allowed to drive. And it's true. That kind of manufacturing work has disappeared in America. American manufacturing employment peaked at over 30% in the 1950s, but today manufacturing

jobs earn under 10% of employment. So the idea behind these tariffs ostensibly is that by making things we import more expensive it'll bring back the good old days by forcing business owners to start producing them here instead. But unfortunately there are about a million reasons why this will simply never work. First of all we live in a very different economy today than we did in the 1950s. As Americans have gotten richer we've spent less of our money on stuff. So one of the reasons we make less stuff is because we buy less stuff. Instead, we spend more of our money on services.

And that is also where, surprise surprise, more of the jobs have gone in our economy. That's right, don't let those Black Friday riot videos deceive you. Americans topped out on materialism as a percent of income decades ago. And in fact, this kind of transition happens in every economy. The more developed an economy gets, the less manufacturing jobs it has and the more service jobs it has instead. We're also in an era of increasing automation and it is way easier to automate a factory worker's job than a home health aid.

All these trends help explain why manufacturing employment is down this century in all rich countries, not just America, even those countries that have policies promote manufacturing like Japan and Germany. It's true that globalization and trade deals like NAFTA accelerated the trend, but they didn't create it and that means protectionist policies like tariffs can't fully reverse it. In fact, tariffs actually could make the trend worse by disrupting the manufacturing that actually is happening right now in America today. Because remember, even if you make something here, you still might need to buy some of the parts for those things from foreign companies. And all those parts are now more expensive because of the tariffs. And guess what? Once you've made the thing, well, suddenly you have no place to sell it

because other countries have slapped retaliatory tariffs on America, making it more expensive to sell our stuff to them. All of this means that tariffs actually make local manufacturing harder, not easier. And you can tell this is the case if you look at what American companies are actually doing. Like, okay, if the tariffs were actually a boost for manufacturing, then an American

company that makes automation tools for factories would probably be ramping up production to supply all those new factories that are coming, right? Wrong. Haas Automation, a company that makes machine tools for, you know, manufacturing, cut production and overtime, and stop new hiring after demand tanked as a result of Trump's tariffs. The fact simply is that tariffs are a 19th century policy that are attempting to recreate a mid-20th century form of employment in a 21st century globalized economy. They simply will not work. But also we have to ask, even if they did work, even if tariffs did bring back manufacturing,

would that actually benefit Americans like you or me? Or would it just help out Trump's rich friends? Let's look at how Trump's Commerce Secretary is pitching the idea. The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America it's going to be automated. Okay so according to Lutnik the tariff dream is that sweatshop jobs are going to come to America but then they're going to be automated. Okay so are Americans doing the jobs or are robots? Do Americans really want to work in sweatshops whether or not they're also working next to a

tired sweaty robot? I mean it's not like unemployment is at record highs, it was at just 4.2% last month. So where are all these new sweatshop workers supposed to come from? That last ad, by the way, came from our data partner, USAFacts.org. If you want real data straight from the government, they're the place to go. And in a time when it's so hard to trust what you see or read, it's really critical to have useful and reliable data. And USAFacts.org is a great resource for us when we're writing and researching these videos. So check them out once again. That's USAFacts.org. So if unemployment is not at record highs, who is going to do all these new manufacturing jobs? Well, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant

painted this cheery picture. We are shedding excess labor in the federal government and bringing down federal borrowings and then on the other side that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing. What this dude is saying is that all those scientists for the federal government who were working on curing cancer or predicting the path of hurricanes until Trump fired them, remember those folks? Well they're going to be put to work in the factories. That's right, Scott's utopian vision of our post-tariff economy is a fired government climate scientist hunched over stitching Scott's business casual sneakers. Now, is that a good thing? It certainly

doesn't benefit the scientist to get that job. I think she'd rather be doing, you know, f***ing science. In fact, most Americans would rather be doing something other than working in a factory. You know how I know that? That's what Americans f***ing say. Sure, we think other people should work in a factory. Over 80% of Americans say that the country would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing. But only 20% say I would be better off if I worked in a factory.

You know why? Because working in a factory is f**king hard. It's loud, serious injuries are incredibly common, and you have to eat your lunch every time the cartoon whistle blows. Given the choice, a lot of people would prefer to kick back at a desk job and use all the nice things that other people toil away making. And you know what? That's what Howard and Scott and Trump are gonna do. But they want YOU to be the one working in the factory.

I mean, think about this. The right wing spent the last decade telling the rest of us to learn to code. Now they want us to learn to sew Nikes instead! These tariffs are fundamentally condescending. They're cooked up by rich assholes like Lutnik and Trump who think it's better for other people to work in factories even when those people don't want to. In fact, every part of the tariffs will hurt disadvantaged and average Americans most. Folks who earn less money spend more of their total income on necessity goods like diapers and towels than the wealthy do. So when the price of goods go up, they're impacted more. And even though the whole f**king point of the tariffs is allegedly to protect American

businesses, they are guaranteed to bankrupt countless small business owners across the country. Look, let's do a little math. America imported $438 billion worth of goods from China last year. Recent data shows that 41% of those imports were for small or medium sized businesses. Now if you throw in the 125% tariffs on Chinese goods that are now in place, I calculate that millions of small business owners are currently 100% f**ked. Your local plumber, your favorite board game creator, your favorite online clothing retailer, even the guy selling this fidget slug with the rock's head on Etsy. Sure, this abomination is 3D printed, but where do you think 3D printers and 3D printer

goo come from? China, motherf**ker! All these small business owners, these real people, are going to have their livelihoods obliterated by the tariffs. And you know what? A lot of small business owners voted for Trump. So again, why is he doing this? What is the purpose of all the pain he is causing to his own voters? Well, the answer is weirdly simple.

Donald Trump just loves tariffs. Like he's simply inexplicably obsessed with them as a concept. Simply the word tariff sends a charge through his body all the way from the top of his head down to his aged genitalia. I mean you think I'm joking, but you have to remember he's a very old man and his brain is melting. You know how your grandfather got weirder and weirder the older he got until he started insisting on putting ketchup on his pancakes and accusing the gardener of stealing his bicentennial coins. That's Trump.

For more than 40 years Trump has been haranguing countries for taking advantage of America and demanding they pay up. He took out an ad in the New York Times with this theme in 1987. He literally scribbled, trade is bad on a speech draft during his first term. The man is clinging to tariffs not because they're a good idea but simply because of the passionate belief that other countries are bad and so is trading with them period. That belief is just a part of him. Tariffs are so deeply personally ingrained in Trump's personality he is willing to crash the entire global economy

just to enact them. In other words, we are being ruled by a madman. And it isn't just me saying this, it's the fucking hedge fund managers. Look at this quote from an economic research firm recently. In the last few days, we have had many conversations with macro fund managers, and their concern is that the White House is not acting rationally, but rather on ideology. And some even fear that this may not even be ideology. A few have quietly wondered if the president

might be insane. Cool, Wall Street guys. Would have been great if you had figured that out before you got him elected, but you didn't. And now, the one silver lining of this economic crash is that we get to watch all of you Trump simping billionaires lose your goddamn shit. Ken Langone, the Republican co-founder of Home Depot, whose company could be well and truly fucked by these tariffs, called them, among other things, bullshit.

Even the weird kid who Trump lets come over to his house sometimes, Elon Musk, railed against the tariffs to no avail. And billionaire Trump bootlicker Bill Ackman threaded a needle between hysteria and obedience by saying that the tariffs could cause economic nuclear winter while blaming Lutnik rather than Trump. But don't worry, Bill weathered the storm and after Trump backed down, he proudly reinserted his tongue right back in Trump's ass, Patriot style.

Now look, none of this is to say that globalism and unfettered capitalist free trade are wonderful things. They are not. They've been good for some people and some countries, and very, very bad for others, including a lot of working people. In America, free trade gave us a lot of cheap products at the cost of ruining some manufacturing communities. On last week's podcast, Trey Crowder literally told me about how free trade killed the economy of the town he lived in

and how that turned the town towards Republicans. NAFTA had passed. My town is very small. And it just utterly decimated my hometown, and it's's to this day never really recovered. But sometime in that timeframe, I remember my grandpa storming in holding a newspaper and he throws the newspaper on the counter and he says, I'll never vote for another Democrat as long as I live.

The neoliberal policies that did that to Tray's community were implemented by the Democrats and they hurt a huge number of working people in this country and that ended up not only wrecking the Democratic Party, they brought us all the way to Trump's Liberation Day. But you know what? If you want to do right by those people who were hurt, if you want a more just or fair economic system, which I do, you need to build one that, you know, is actually more just and fair, not one that hurts the very people Trump is claiming to help.

According to the Yale Budget Lab, Trump's tariffs will cost the average per household consumer $4,700. Prices for clothes are going to spike 64% in the short term, and 740,000 fewer people are going to be employed by the end of this year. These tariffs are simply going to be a catastrophe for working people across this country. Sure, they might be great for Trump and some of his billionaire buddies, because now corporate leaders and heads of state from around the world will come and beg the Mad King for mercy. Oh please my liege, remove the tariffs and I'll kiss the ring on your tiny hand. But they're going to be a disaster for you and the people you know in your community. So we have to ask if

free trade capitalism has hurt so many people, how do we help them if not with tariffs? Well here's what I think. I think when we think back on the good things about the middle of the last century, we're not actually thinking about manufacturing at all. We're not thinking of the last century. We're not actually thinking about manufacturing at all. We're not thinking about the factory itself. We're just thinking about having a good job. A job that guaranteed you a solid wage and a pension and enough time off to watch your kids grow.

And you know what brought us jobs like that? Unions. Unions that gave the average person power and dignity at their job. Unions that gave the average person power and dignity at their job. Unions that used to be everywhere in America, representing millions and millions of Americans. That is the economic system that people miss. But as I have covered elsewhere on this channel, the wealthy obliterated that system. They destroyed it and pocketed the rubble, sending unionization rates into the basement. And now they want to send us all back to the factories without unions. In fact,

Trump has declared war on unions again so that we can all make even less money, they can make more, and Trump can feel like a big powerful king. Well, f**k that. If we want to improve average Americans' jobs and lives, you know where we can start? Not by making everything more expensive and kicking us out of our current jobs and sending us back to the factories. We could make it easier for working Americans to unionize the jobs we already have so that we have more power in the workplace and can fight for better wages and benefits. We could do it by improving the social safety net so that unemployment doesn't mean going

hungry or homeless. We could do it by instituting paid parental leave so that parents don't have to choose between feeding their kids and spending time with them. And we could do it by building a movement that fights for all of these things loudly and optimistically, that makes the case that we really can have an economy that works for all of us if we believe in it enough to build it. And you know what? We might have the chance to make that case and start building that movement sooner than

we think. Because yes, our senile king sits on his throne of madness for the next three and some odd years and thus we must deal with the wicked and senseless pronouncements that fall from his gibbering lips. But Trump is also spending a lot of political capital on these tariffs. One of the darkest honeymoons in presidential history is almost over, and Trump's poll numbers are going down. Turns out a lot of people are really pissed about the switch too.

So as millions of people around the country start to be hurt by Trump's tariffs, we need to keep reminding them whose fault it is, sure, but that can't be all we do. We also need to explain that there is a better way, and we need to build a movement that lets us fight for that better way together. Because if we want an economy that works for average Americans,

then average Americans need to run the fucking***ing economy, not a single deranged billionaire signing dumbass decrees from on top. That was a Head Gum Podcast. Hi I'm Rachel Dilson. And I'm Olivia Allen. And we host the podcast. Broad Ideas. Yes, that's Rachel Dillson. And I'm Olivia Allen. And we host the podcast... Broad Ideas. Yes, that's now on HeadGum. On our show, we chat with people like Brittany Snow, Lucy Hale, Kristen Bell, Margaret Cho,

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