Morning Joe - Morning Joe 3/27/25

Episode Date: March 27, 2025

Signal chat messages detail military plans for strikes in Yemen

One constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has ruled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it's a part of our past Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good. And it could be again. Oh, people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. And then they walk into the corn and you lose me there. Good morning and welcome to Morning Joe.

It is Thursday, March 27th, opening day so I'm not even going to try. I'm not even going to try. Along with Joe. George A. Stubb and Bush. They walk into the corn. Interviewed on baseball. I remember after when Solar Dreams came out he said, I don't get it. But so he and Mika, he and Mika are together. The rest of us though, get it so much.

Tear to the eye. Happy opening day. Mike, happy opening day. Thank you, thank you. It's a wonderful background. I'm looking, one who's in my walked into this. Yeah, heck is going on here exactly took a swing at home base. I just know I really did like did I not what I took a swing plates. Good swing. Nice swing I do have a good. I want to thank you really for being patient here a Yankees fan is as one who I literally will not step into Yankee Stadium this this has to be painful to have all of this red sock well.

It's a beautiful stadium. It is and it's appropriate that were a Fenway because if you read and look around the sexy World Series pick this year is the Boston Red Sox all the pressure in the world is on the Boston Red Sox starting today would be a shame if they finished second, you know really and the players are all out for that. I know that's my deal. And so we hope we can just stay competitive this really get a high draft pick and maybe

be good next year. It's very nice for you to say but as we all know around here boys people that know baseball and look at payroll they understand Dodgers yeah that no doubt the Dodgers and the Yankees that's in the World Series and if I'm the Yankees and I don't win that in 5 or 6 games with the death with the talent that they have couple that up of her coming back but if the Yankees don't win the World Series in 5 games, 6 games, it's it's another failed season.

The Yankees such a juggernaut that they're able to give one of their minor league stadiums to a major league team and say look you could take this this will be home for you this year. What I have this what you're learning how to do that. We would do this. I got a little bit what you can hear you can show. The formal. Subtle approach to their Brian playing you know.

You know all all this beat him 63 to 3 we will. But anyway baseball is exciting time it is back and David Ignatius I know Washington. It is well tell me David what you is it full of hope. We're not we're not like the these oligarchs of baseball in the. Little people. Yeah, little people on the World Series not so long ago. Be back. Yeah, they come back this year.

The national yeah, they have not a bad team not a bad team that we've got a good young 4th place in the division. Yeah, but you know the point about opening day I think as David just mentioned the word hope hopeful. I think, as David just mentioned, the word hope, hopeful. We've never needed baseball more than we need baseball today because baseball is an everyday proposition, and it gives you someplace to vent your anger, your hope, your dreams. It gives you a chance to realize that failure is an option

that everybody experiences because you don't win every game and it takes your mind off the things that we talk about your day which is so deeply depressing. Well, I got to say you were saying you were saying that like you've been saying that for 18 years deeply depressing but it's baseball you're right it's it's I but there's something But it's baseball, you're right. But there's something, David Ignatius, there's something that is uniquely

American about this game. And it's so exciting watching Japanese fans get so excited about it and fans in Mexico, fans across the world getting excited about it. But there's something unique about it, in part because people that weren't born here and raised here, so many just look out at the field when I take them there and they go, I don't get it. And my favorite story on this line was George Mitchell said that in 91, I think, when the Queen visited, they all went up,

the Queen, and 41, and George Mitchell, and I think Bob Dole all went up to watch the Orioles play in Baltimore that night. They had a state dinner, Mitchell sitting next to the Queen, and the then-majority leader said, so, what did you think about baseball? And here's a woman who spent 75 years being the diplomats diplomat she said not a lot really happened out there did just just get it and and you know it's again it's if you sat next to your dad that

you know I always think Doris Kearns Goodwin and Ken Burns documented on baseball talking about sitting there. Her father teaching her how to keep score and it's something all these years later stays with the same with my dad we every time we went to a baseball game. I was looking out of the field. He was keeping score and then explain to me this is you know how you yeah, so there is something constantly American

about it isn't there. This is this may be all the soft power we have left. Well, well done. With go with it can do an honorable mention of baseball movie and then we get to the news. I it's what I go back and I see time and time again the natural and I just every time baseball season comes around. I mean Robert Redford natural it's just that's a legitimate good left hand. Yeah, swing. Yeah, he played in college.

Yeah, you always you always see these movies where you have these actors right really know this Johnny's and they they throw like this. Robert Redford left handed he goes back. Yeah, I and that swing sweet beautiful, yes, sometimes natural unnatural swing sometimes when actors play athletes, it's very clear they went to Juilliard great. I love to have a great baseball yeah, yeah, yeah, some all right. I've

given you all a good 8 minutes here so we're going to get to the news really quickly is going to win the World Series this year Dodgers how could it be anybody else. Yeah, better yeah, I mean they just have so much depth right it would be hard to think it's not the Dodgers baseball things can happen but now it's a lie. But what do you think well it was an upset barring injuries, 162 games long season if they know injuries with the Dodgers

the Dodgers in the World Series. Yeah, if they suffer a couple of injuries, the Red Sox win there. Yeah, but it's not that they make a win series. I got to go with with Mike's's backdoor Red Sox win. My mother, to the day she died in 93, was a Red Sox fan. Yeah. God bless her. God bless her.

The Yankees in five. What about you, Mika? The Mets. The Mets? Whoa! That's a good call, Mika. That actually is a good call. All right, now to the news.

Okay. A happy opening day, everybody. Happy opening day. President Trump and his administration continue to deny that there was any breach of national security after military plans were shared in a signal group chat with a journalist. Yesterday, editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg joined us first here on Morning Joe after sharing more of that text chain. In those messages, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out how and when attacks would

be carried out on Houthi rebels in Yemen. Despite clear evidence there was classified information in this group chat, Hegseth and others dismissed any wrongdoing or tried to downplay the incident. I noticed this morning, out came something that doesn't look like war plans. And as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to attack plans because they know it's not war plans.

There's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods, no classified information. My job, as it's set atop of that, everybody's seen it now, team update, is to provide updates in real time. General updates in real time, keep everybody informed. That's what I did. That's my job. There's no classified information transmitted. There were no war plans discussed. Why did the Atlantic downgrade their allegation about war plans to attack plans? They're now playing word games because they know this was sensationalist spin from a reporter who is well known for doing this. We have said all along no war plans were discussed, no classified material was sent.

You have the Secretary of Defense saying that. You have the Director of the CIA, the Director of National Intelligence, the FBI Director, all testifying to that under oath and they should be trusted with that. You said it's not war plans. Would you characterize these as military plans, military operation plans? I would characterize this messaging thread as a policy discussion, a sensitive policy discussion surely amongst high-level cabinet officials and senior staff. And I'm so glad, Peter, that you said the American public can decide for themselves

because I think the American public should decide for themselves based on the outcome of this operation. I think it's all a witch hunt, that's all. I think it's a witch hunt. I wasn't involved with it, I wasn't there, but I can tell you the result is unbelievable because the Houthis are looking to do something, they want to know how do we stop, how do we stop? Can we have peace? The Houthis want peace. Because they're getting the hell knocked out of them. But somebody in my group either screwed up or it's a bad signal. You know, it's a bad signal, happens to.

But it seems to be maybe came in with a staffer and it was by accident, from what we could tell. We'll know pretty much today, I think. But we have some pretty good guys checking out the phones. But it's something that is not a big deal, other than you want to find out who did it and how they did it, because you don't want to happen in the future. You can't have that happen.

There was nothing in there that compromised, and it had no impact on the attack, which was very successful. It was a very, very successful attack. All right, you sort through all of that, everything we heard, and yeah, the president finally got to, that can't happen again, which is a great way to start and finish.

Which is, somebody in my administration made a mistake, which he said at one part, and then a lot of other words, and then, that can't happen again. But in between that, everybody at the White House, well not everybody, Marco Rubio stood up and spoke out. But I was watching Pete Hegseth and it reminded me of The Last Jedi at the end where Luke Skywalker says, everything you just said is wrong. It really was.

I mean, the fact that you have a sect F saying this has much to do about nothing and it's oh, nothing. There's nothing in there. The fact that you have a sec def saying this has much to do about nothing, and it's oh nothing, there's nothing in there. When he's talking about where the F-15s are about to launch, the target is in range. Nobody, nobody's ever been in national security, ever, ever. No general or admiral, no lower ranking officer, no NCO, nobody I ever talked to in 30 years of doing this, from the Armed Services Committee to the Pentagon to talk going in and out of one White House after another White House ever, another White House would have

ever said that, which brings me to the Wall Street Journal editorial, the one right below, a shock to the GOP from MAGA country, the White House protest signal, which brings us, the Wall Street Journal editorial says, to the administration's defensive insistence that the chat didn't disclose any war plans, which is a weak attempt to obfuscate or obfuscation. Here is one of the messages that the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg released on Wednesday from Defense Secretary Pete Haggiseth. 1215 ET, F-18's launch later, 1536, F-18, second strike starts. Also, first sea-based Tomahawks launched.

This writes Wall Street Journal, is obviously sensitive information about a pending attack. And in the wrong hands, it could have compromised the mission. It didn't and the Houthi strikes were a success and represent the best of Mr. Trump's instincts on restoring deterrence. But Mr. Hegseth on X.com on Wednesday was dismissing this episode as the media peddling hoaxes. The White House is allowing its mistake to dominate the news for days and devolve into a larger question of competence.

The administration seems to think it can bully its way through anything by shouting fake news and attacking the press. Sometimes, as we said yesterday morning, it needs to admit a mistake, take the loss, and move on, which we are happy to do. Willie? Donald Trump has one gear and so to do his underlings. Secretary Hegseth, which is blame somebody else. No surrender, no retreat, never admit a mistake, blame somebody else. So you get what we saw from Secretary Hegseth there. I don't think he believes a word of what he was saying. If he does, we have a bigger problem.

If he actually thinks it's okay to put what are clearly attack plans, you just laid them out, my God, they're on the front page of the New York Times this morning. The front page of the New York Times has the attack plan for this operation. If he actually believes that that's not a problem, that's an even bigger concern, I think, for the country. But you have the administration kind of flailing between the President of the United States saying signal could be defective, maybe the signal is bad, some suggestion he doesn't understand what signal is, which is a commercial app for ease for communication, saying it's not classified, and then perhaps the Jeffrey Goldberg broke into the conversation, which is of course not what happened as

he laid out and she very clearly yesterday. So David Ignatius, it doesn't appear that there's going to be any assumption of responsibility here. It doesn't appear there are going to be any consequences at the moment. So what are the implications of all this? Well, it's a sorry spectacle to see these senior officials defending, in very lame terms, something that every enlisted man or woman in the U.S. military knows is wrong.

There's been a chorus of people who have deep experience saying that. And also, I've been really troubled by the personal attacks, the nasty personal attacks on our colleague Jeffrey Goldberg, who just happened to be in the wrong signal chat. What effect is this going to have? There are thousands, I want to say hundreds of thousands of people in the military and intelligence agencies who have to live by the rules of protecting classified information. It's important that they do that. And what are they supposed to think as they hear these this parade of excuses and denials that something they can see with their own eyes is inappropriate as happened. I think that's some of the lasting damage here is it erodes the structure for keeping

secrets not just for this little group but for the whole country. And you know, we're gonna be bringing in Alex Ward in a minute from the Wall Street Journal, but he makes a great point. You know, as the Wall Street Journal editorial page said, they're having this semantics argument over war plans and attack plans. In a sense, attack plans are actually more dangerous because that's when you're specifically

putting U.S. servicemen and women in harm's way. So it's such a... The White House says they're downgrading it to attack plans, trying to distort the meaning of the word. Again, nobody believes that. Literally, nobody believes that. That has ever spent a day. And the military are the intel community.

We had General Hurdling here yesterday, sorry to interrupt you, just to underline what he said, which was, well of course he didn't put war plans in a signal group chat, that could be 100 or 1,000 pages. It's this broad document, but attack plans are a specific document telling me time and targets. Time, yeah, and targets, and that's what makes it so dangerous, I want yeah, and targets. And that's what makes it so dangerous.

I want you to you said something interesting about Donald Trump, about the president when he was saying certain things. There are a couple of tells there. He, of course, which haunt does plays all the the maga hits. But there were a couple of tells there. One which was this was a mistake. This can never happen again. That's a tell. But there was another tell in there that you said,

he usually says when you know he's really angry at somebody inside the White House. Yeah, it's something that has covered Donald Trump for a long time now. When he distances himself or something, I didn't have anything to do with it. I didn't know about that. That's a tell. And the people around him have confirmed this in the past.

We're like, that means he's angry at something and somebody, putting responsibility elsewhere. I didn't have anything to do with this. This is about somebody else. And further on the point, talking to people in Trump world yesterday, I mean, yes, the nonsense of the semantics of attack plan versus war plan. It's true. We're not at war with Yemen. But this was an attack with the Houthis in Yemen.

That is still clearly very sensitive and classified information here. The question is, what's going to happen next? There is a sense in the West Wing of circling the wagons. They're not sure they want to, to quote someone I spoke to yesterday, give some a scalp, particularly to a reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, who they disliked because of the tough coverage he's given in the past. It's Trump's instinct to keep this team together, but that's not certain just yet. Not just yet.

But it is interesting how the blame seems to be, at least within the Trump world, far more on Waltz than Hegseth, even though the initial purpose of this group was unclassified. It was a single group to get the names of staffers to coordinate a meeting. That's Waltz did that. He made the mistake of adding Goldberg. That's obviously a huge mistake. But it was Hegseth who then escalated by putting in the sensitive information. He's the one who actually turned this into a national security breach.

But Hegseth, far more popular in MAGA world than Waltz, his job, at least for now, safer, although both at this moment feel like Trump's not going to push out. Mike, and it is important for us to underline, Again, the one person who understood this better than anybody else is a former chairman, vice chair of the Intel committee Marco Rubio, who actually did come out and say, no, no, no, this was a screw up, guys. We can't do this again. You know, Jonathan mentioned the phrase, what's going to happen next? I would ask about, and I'd ask David Ignatius this, what is happening now across the river at the Pentagon? The military, as you know, David, is built upon command.

The command structure absolutely comes with the title of responsibility. You have a responsibility to the people who are serving under you. What is going on, if you know anything at all about this, in terms of morale over in the Pentagon about the acting of the Secretary of Defense, but talking with military officers, I think there's a sense now of keeping your head down, of avoiding saying anything controversial. People are watching things that they know are wrong, but the risk of speaking out and trying to do something about them is enormous. There are some people at the Pentagon who are happy to see new leadership, who chafed at what they thought was overly politicized DEI Pentagon. There are officers and enlisted people like that.

But I think this is a terrible period when leaders, rather than taking responsibility, I mean, the whole idea of the military is a chain of command and responsibility, and responsibility should be taken at the top, and everybody knows that. And to see these top officials try to pretend that nothing happened, push off responsibility, that's gotta be disturbing to everybody in a military that's already kinda dizzy.

Very discouraging. So up next, we're gonna bring in to be disturbing to everybody in a military that's already kind of dizzy. Very discouraging. So up next, we're going to bring in national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Alex Ward. Also ahead, President Trump announces 25% tariffs on imported cars and car parts. We'll talk about what that could mean for U.S. automakers and the economy overall. Plus, the White House is facing a new legal setback following the administration's decision to deport hundreds of Venezuelan

migrants to El Salvador. We'll have those details and much more straight ahead on Morning Joe. We're back in 90 seconds. Past the hour, time now for a quick look at some of the other stories making headlines this morning. At least two dozen people are confirmed dead in South Korea's worst ever wildfires. High winds are fanning the flames across the country's south, forcing widespread evacuations. Hundreds of structures have been destroyed, including an ancient Buddhist temple. Protests continue in Turkey. One week after that, the country's government arrested the mayor of Istanbul.

He's considered a top rival to President Erdogan, who has increasingly cracked down on the opposition. More than 1,300 people have been jailed in recent days as demonstrators staged nightly protests. The mayor was detained on corruption charges. On the same day, he was designated as his party's candidate in the next election. David, really quickly on this.

Erdogan, again, an autocrat who has taken Turkey back in so many ways. But Erdogan regularly faces challenges at the ballot box and usually expected to win easily and usually, again again faces pretty strong head wins, much like we saw Modi in India last year who is expected to strounce his rivals. But there is pushback against the authoritarianism, whether you're talking about the soft authoritarianism in India or what's happening, the much stronger authoritarianism in Istanbul? So Joe, what's interesting about these protests is the young people out on the streets for the most part haven't known any other leader than Erdogan.

He's been in power for so long. And my Turkish friends say, this pay close attention to this because it's different. The number of people, the intensity of the challenge, the fact that there is now an opposition to Erdogan. It's also interesting to me that these events followed what was apparently quite an intense phone call between President Trump and President Erdogan. We still don't know what was discussed in that. But Turkey is a critical country bordering the Ukraine war.

And it suddenly, at least politically, seems much more fragile than it did a week ago. We'll be following that. And the Supreme Court has upheld a Biden administration rule that regulates ghost gun kits, which allow people to assemble firearms from parts purchased online. A 7-2 ruling with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in the dissent. The court determined ghost guns can be considered firearms and therefore may be regulated by the Bureau of Alcohol,

Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives. But the Trump administration could still seek to rescind the rule instituted by President Biden in 2022. So there we go. And Willie. Back now to President Trump and his administration's attempt to deny there was any breach of national security after military plans were shared in a signal group chat with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. Here's more from the president yesterday at the White House.

Do you still believe nothing classified was shared? Well, that's what I've heard. I don't know. I'm not sure. You have to ask the various people involved. I really don't know. I want to find if there's any mistake or if a signal doesn't work.

It could be the signal's not very good, you know? It's a company, and maybe it's not very good. I think we'd rather know about it now. There was no harm done because the attack was unbelievably successful that night. Could be the signal was not very good, says the president. Let's bring in national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal Alex Ward Alex good

morning thanks for being with us. Let you expand on that point a little bit Joe mentioned earlier which is this distinction the White House is trying to make between war plans and attack plans what's the significance of it. Sure so war plans are as you guys noted earlier kind of a larger set strategic picture of how the U.S. in this case would win a war, say the invasion of Iraq or the campaign against ISIS.

What are the big ideas in order to defeat that enemy? An attack plan is more immediate. It's more granular. It actually talks about the systems and the assets that will be used and can talk about the times of launches of fighter jets and the times the bombs will land and because Of that it's many military folks and national security leaders would say that it's more sensitive in the sense that if leaked if an adversary were to get a hold of it They would actually have a chance to scuttle the operation

It's hard to believe that the Houthis would have had that kind of capability if that were to leak also based on the timing of When the fighter jets took off, et cetera. But the point still is that that should not be on signal and that this is, this still could have put American service members in danger. And because of that, in and of itself, it is a scandal. Alex, let me just jump in here. What are you hearing from people in the national security world about what effect they think this will have?

Is Signal more widespread in use than we had thought? Are people going to have to change the way that they're operating? What do you think? Yeah, well, we do know for sure that Trump administration officials talk on Signal. And I've talked to previous administration officials, Biden officials, Bush officials, Obama officials. Yeah, they all spoke on Signal or versions of it, WhatsApp, regular text. That's not in and of itself not new. What does seem to be new is the discussion of military operations on signal.

I mean, what really was angering a lot of people in previous administrations was they said, look, I would get called into sensitive conversations all the time and they'd have to leave their screaming kids at home, go into the Pentagon, go into a secure facility and have that conversation, or open their very clunky classified computer at home, wait till it connected, or all the kinds of systems provided to principals and senior staff. The fact that the Trump administration circumvented that process, while understandably more convenient and more immediate to talk on signal, negates the whole reason that this apparatus exists,

which is to stop adversaries from getting access to this information to safeguard some of the nation's most sensitive secrets, including its military operations. And so you had, I have heard from just previous administration officials, senior officials, defense secretaries, four-star generals who were livid by this. And speaking of those four-star generals, I talked to John Allen, who used to command the troops in Afghanistan. He said, if I had heard of any of my subordinates doing anything like this, immediately would have called for an investigation, would have seen if there were any risk to our troops.

Maybe there would have been court marshals. I mean, he was pretty open about how livid he was. And Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, when I spoke to him, was very clear that this is about as much incompetence as he would have seen in his time in Pentagon. He immediately also would have called for investigations, which tells you that there just is a difference in the way this administration is handling this breach of security versus how other administrations might have handled it well.

And John, it's not just in the national security world or the intel world. I heard throughout the day yesterday, I'm sure we all did, from people who served in past administrations who said, you know, they worked in the treasury. They worked in treasury. They worked in Treasury. They worked in the Commerce Department. They worked in like other departments. They weren't even allowed to download signal onto their government phones. They just weren't allowed to do it, and they were not allowed to talk business on signal. And again, this is like this is in the Commerce Department.

So it shows you what a massive breach this was of security. Yeah, a significant breach. And yet to Alex's point one, there seems to be no investigation undergoing here. We are from the White House. But the Congress has said, including some Republicans saying they want to get the bottom of this, which is interesting. And a Roger Wicker, Senator Roger Wicker said, yeah, yeah we we we need to investigate has already started calling the White House to cooperate with a rare moment here for Republicans to defy

the messaging coming from the White House. Alex I know you have all you also cover. So well, America's relationships with militaries around the world and NATO and the and the like a man of Brussels if you will so tell us a little bit about the rural reaction from overseas who are now you know the allies were already pretty suspicious of this administration and because of the broad sides emanating from Washington against Canada against Europe and the rest

does this now give them pause to share intelligence to share military planning with the U.S. because of how cavalierly it would appear it's being tossed about in unsecure commercial apps. Well there was already skepticism from allies of sharing information and high-level intelligence with the U.S. in part because of the Trump administration's stance on the war in Ukraine and the fact that they seem to be more favorable to Russia's position. They are also are skeptical of Director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, for her previous stances on Syria and towards Putin.

And so they're now I have no direct evidence, I should note, that intelligence has been withheld, that has been curtailed or not shared with the U.S. And in fact, when I talk to allies, they still expect to have a similar relationship, including the vaunted Five Eyes relationship with the UK, New Zealand, Canada, UK, and others. That said, they have once again, because of this incident, mentioned that they have pause, that they are concerned, that any intelligence shared by them to the United States

might end up in a signal chat, might end up in a conversation with a foreign leader, including Putin, might not be as secure as it had been in the past. Now, of course, there are different levels of intelligence, and we don't necessarily know that. No one is really concerned that the highest level intel is going to get out there, but they, even if it were military operations or the movements of their troops, et cetera, that could be damaging to their nation as well. So certainly more pause than there was even just 48 hours ago.

Well, especially underlining all of this is what will stay long after this signal controversy ends, and that is Europe's understanding the people that are running the White House have utter contempt for our European allies that helped us in our fight against not only the Nazis, but also the Soviet Union. Wall Street Journal National Security reporter Alex Ward. Thank you very much for your reporting this morning. His book about the Biden administration's national security team entitled The Internationalists is available now.

And coming up, European leaders are meeting in Paris, trying to shore up support for Ukraine. We'll have the latest on those efforts and how it could impact President Trump's ceasefire negotiations with Russia. Morning Joe, we'll be right back. 42 past the hour. Look at that beautiful shot of Washington, D.C. The sun's coming up.

It's a beautiful Thursday morning. President Trump has declared a new round of potentially punishing tariffs targeting foreign-made cars and auto parts. The president revealed yesterday that those items will face a 25 percent tariff, including car parts made abroad that go into cars assembled here in the U.S. What we're going to be doing is a 25 percent tariff on all cars that are not made in the United States. But if you build your car in the United States, there is no tariff. And what that means is a lot of foreign car companies, a lot of companies are going to be in great shape

because they've already built their plant, but their plants are underutilized, so they'll be able to expand them inexpensively and quickly. But others will come into our country and build, and they're already looking for sites. Trump also said he wants interest on car loans to be tax deductible for U.S.-made cars. The announcement comes less than a week before the president's so-called Liberation Day on April 2nd. That's when a massive round of new tariffs is expected to hit a wide variety of goods made by many of the United States' largest trading partners.

Liberation Day. Joining us now, former Treasury official and Morning Joe economic analyst Steve Ratner and columnist and member of the editorial board at the Financial Times, Jillian Tett. So Steve, we're gonna get into the effects on the economy of these tariffs but first let's explain to our viewers what Donald Trump is trying to do, the resonance of this issue. I remember back first time I ran for Congress, I was running against Bill Clinton's tax increases, right? But I would get out in rural parts of my district. They wanted to talk about NAFTA, GATT, and the World Trade Organization.

And I was like, what? And pretty soon I realized, you know, I said, let's start tonight talking about NAFTA. But it has been, I mean, the populist, you know, the populist message has been powerful for 30, 40 years now, if you're talking about open trade borders and, you know, would always say we want fair trade, not free trade. So talk about the theory of the case for Donald Trump and the protectionists.

You know, it really goes back, Joe, a lot to Russ Perot, which you'll remember, right? He showed those charts. We like charts, some of us, in the 1992 presidential campaign and talked about the great sucking sound of jobs that were going to be leaving America for Mexico and other places because of trade. And Donald Trump is like a 19th century mercantilist. He believes that trade deficits are inherently bad and it somehow represents a loss of wealth from America to other places.

And as Jillian and I, what I think both agreeing can talk about, that's not really how it works. That's not really the point. But that's what he's pursuing. And so it's this combination of this populism you described and this 19th century view of how the economy should be managed that puts us here. Well, and it's interesting. You did have Ross Pro doing that in 92. Pat Buchanan, very successful in the Republican Party in 92. A lot of us saying the same stuff getting elected in 94. Perot doing well again in 96. There has been a strain of this in the Republican Party. The fascinating part is that Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin had a more traditionally Republican view of trade. And that's when the unions and working class

Americans started feeling left behind. That's something Donald Trump's taken vengeance politically. And it's interesting, we had the head of the UAW, Sean Fain, come out yesterday praising him for this. Well, there's no doubt that there has been a growing problem around the whole trade profile for many years. And so it's not surprising in some ways that the populists on both left and right

are howling about this and wanting to do something. The question is whether what they're doing is the right thing to do or not. And frankly, I think most economists would regard what Donald Trump calls the economic liberation day as economic lunacy day. Because essentially what you're doing with these threatened tariffs

is smashing apart business confidence because they can't plan, smashing apart consumer confidence and we've just seen consumer confidence plunged to the lowest level for 12 years. You're potentially going to have a lot of inflationary impacts. Again, consumer expectations of inflation have just jumped up dramatically to above 6%, according to the conference board's data this week, which is astonishing given that Donald Trump campaigned on bringing down inflation. And, of course, the other problem is that all of the supply chains are so integrated

that if you try and hammer the bilateral trade, you're going to eventually hurt American producers as well. So car parts, well, the process of making a car crosses the U.S.-Mexican border seven times back and forth along the supply chain. Now, Trump appears to have indicated that Mexico and Canada won't be caught up in the car tariffs this time around or the auto tariffs. But who knows? People are getting very nervous and uncertain. Yeah, one of the things that Jillian points out, Steve, that there are going to be tariffs even on auto parts that are brought into the United States, even if the car is assembled

then inside the United States. So just for people watching today who are thinking about buying a car, want to buy a car, own a car, what does that mean for prices? 25 percent if you talk about Mexico, Canada, but also Japan, South Korea. It means car prices are going to go up. And there are estimates out there. There was one consulting firm that put out an estimate the other day that it could be anywhere from $4,000 to $12,000, depending upon the car that you buy.

Remember one other thing about tariffs, they raise the price of cars that are imported, but they also raise the price of cars that are produced here. Because once the price of cars that are produced somewhere else go up, the people here who produce cars say, OK, well, fine, I can now charge a few thousand dollars more for my car. So you can expect the prices really of all cars to go up for consumers as a result of this. But I mean, I think that what the Trump team are betting on is that they will be able to

bully businesses into not passing prices onto consumers. And they're also betting on the idea that any inflation from this will be offset by more deregulation and above all else, a lower oil price or energy prices. That's a big bet. They could be right, but the problem is that pushing down energy prices right now is going to be tough when you're threatening tariffs on Canada over energy. Yeah, but again, the big picture is Donald Trump would say, we want, you know, factories to come back here. We want manufacturing to come back here.

We want American cars to be made here 100 percent. And of course, the great challenge of that is you're trying to unwind, you know, 40 years, 45 years of globalism that started when not to personalize this, but when Mika spilled caviar in Deng Xiaoping's lap. The normalization of relations with China in 1979. I mean, relations with China in 1979. I mean it it so how do you unwind that in a way that doesn't shatter the economy it is hard to see you say that that that's the butterfly flaps

is Wayne's moments because yeah exactly yeah here we are but it but it's to point this leader say how unlikely how lengthy this product process would be in David Ignatius you've written about this uncertainty to it and I want to go a step further with the tits discussion at the table how Trump has made this so personal in fact he took the truth social at one 50 this morning president was up late last night says this if the European Union works with Canada in

order to do economic harm the USA large-scale tariffs far large than currently planned we placed on them both in order to protect the best friend that either of those two countries ever had. So all sorts of the post brimming with resentment and anger there from the president to both Canada and the EU and just seemingly threats of further and further escalation and trade war. So, Jonathan, I think we often underestimate just how passionate Donald Trump is about tariffs. You go back years reading and listening to what he's had to say.

This has been this idea that we can somehow go back to the 19th century and build Fortress America and revive our manufacturing behind tariff walls is something he's long believed. I want to ask Gillian, Gillian you published a very influential column, several columns, one in particular, that says there's a big idea behind this tariff campaign expressed by the White House Council of Economics advisor Stephen Merrin. Maybe you could just briefly explain that to people. It's one of the most insightful pieces of journalism I've seen since this began. Well, thank you very much indeed. I commend your journalism for teaching me a lot. Briefly, it's very important to separate out what the Trump team is doing using a framework that

Goldman Sachs used to teach its incoming analysts, goal, strategy, and tactics. Goal vaguely is an instinct to so-called make America great again. The strategy is to try and reset the global economic, trade, tech, and military relationships. The tactics are tariffs and all the threats and bullies and the uncertainty. And it's important not to confuse the tactics with the bigger goal, which is basically to try and reorientate the whole economic system. So these on-off tariffs, these threats, these bullies, are all about trying to soften up what Trump would regard as,

or used to regard as friends, many people now think are more like foes, soften them up to agree to some big reset of the global economic and trading system. Whether it's going to work, we don't know. But insofar as I think these tactics about trade threats and tariffs are going to keep giving them leverage and power, it's all about hegemonic power being the biggest bully in the room, if you like. They're going to see a lot more of these.

Wow. Steve, you wanted to jump in. I'm also thinking about how at the early days of this administration, both Japan, South Korea came and said, we're going to invest tens of billions of dollars in America, hoping to stave off some of these very tariffs. Mexico, we're going to put more troops on the border, hoping to stave off tariffs. And yet here we are. Yeah. And countries like Japan said, we'll buy more liquid natural gas and so on. Everybody was trying to stop this. But what I would, because what I wanted to say to go to Joe's point, it also relates to Jillian's point, is that we are not going to go back to where we were in 1950 in terms of what we make here.

We can all discuss, you know, like sort of like who lost China, we can all discuss who lost manufacturing, why it happened, and why we are where we are. But we're not going to go back to where we were. And so all of these, all of what he's doing, in my opinion, is not going to reset the table. What it's going to do is basically cost consumers here a hell of a lot more money, because the whole point of trade is to lower costs for people, and it was doing that. Part of why we had such a low inflation rate post the GFC until COVID was because we were importing a lot more and it was all cheaper and better because we were importing it.

And so American consumers, we may help a few manufacturing workers, we'll see, but for the bulk of American consumers, they're simply going to find that things are more expensive and so forth. And Trump is not going to win this trade war because the trade lines are now so dispersed, there's a certain amount of manufacturing capacity like you mentioned, Hyundai and Louisiana and so forth that may come back here, but it's not going to reset the table in any way. Don't just say one thing very quickly.

The other irony is that Trump only focuses on manufactured goods. Now in the case of the UK, that's great news because actually we have a pretty equal trading pattern between the UK and the US. He ignores services, which are critical. They're in many ways the biggest part of the global economy today. And those patterns of trade flows are often very different. Yeah. You know, it's so interesting.

You know, I grew up. You have people like Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, others whose formative years were in the 50s and the 60s. They remember, like, post-war America. But I grew up, I was younger. I remember in the, you know, 70s, the mid-70s, in the backseat in the car, my parents grousing about, you know, all the jobs going over to Japan

and all the cars being in Japan and this company going down and sort of this post-industrial rot era. I mean, you go even into the early 90s, Bill Clinton goes to New Hampshire, what's he talking about? Deindustrialization. And then it gets worse throughout the night. I mean, this has been going on since 1979. It's called globalization.

And we can't go back to 1950 and 1960, but I will say a lot of these baby boomers look back at those glory days and they're trying to recapture that every step of the way. Yeah, it's a question of whether you want to turn the clock backwards or look ahead. We can't turn the clock backwards. I'm agreeing with you. And what we have to recognize is we have enormous strengths. Jillian mentioned services. We're enormous importers of services.

When someone comes here to study at one of our universities, that's counted as an import. When tourists come here, when people come to be treated at the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic from overseas, that counts as an export that we are making. And so this is our comparative strength. I was in California and San Francisco last week, and obviously what's going on out there in AI and technology is unbelievably exciting. Now, of course, not every American

is going to get retrained to become a computer programmer to develop AI. I know that. But we are too focused on turning the clock backwards, as you said, and not focused enough on turning the clock forward.