Morning Wire - Inflation Cools Down & Education Department Downsizes | 3.13.25

Episode Date: March 13, 2025

Inflations mellows as Trump’s tariffs hit, nearly half of the Department of Education has been let go, and thousands of Syrian religious minorities are slaughtered in jihadist purge. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Good Ranchers: Visit https://go.goodranchers.com/4hPfmTE for free bacon, ground beef, bacon, seed oil free chicken nuggets, or salmon in every order for a year + $40 off with code WIRE. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Inflation cools even more than economists expected, just as Trump's tariffs go into effect. The president wants steel and aluminum in America. And let me be clear, nothing's going to stop that until we've got a big, strong, domestic steel and aluminum capability. How do Americans feel about Trump's strategy on the economy? I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Thursday, March 13th. And this is Morning Wire. Nearly half of the Department of Education has been let go,

as the president prepares to shudder the agency completely. We want to bring the schools back to the states because we have the worst education department and education in the world. And more than a thousand minority religious civilians, including many Christians, have been slaughtered in Syria in a widespread jihadist purge. Today, we have an Islamist extremist

who is now in charge of Syria, who has already begun to persecute and kill and arrest religious minorities like Christians in Syria. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. Hey guys, producer Brandon here. Did you know that over 140,000 family farms and ranches in the U.S.

closed down since 2017? But by subscribing to Good Ranchers, you can help prevent the closure of more. At Good Ranchers.com, you can rest easy knowing exactly where your meat comes from. Support those who work to feed Americans with meat exclusively and locally sourced. Subscribe now at good ranchers.com for free bacon, ground beef, seed oil-free chicken nuggets, or salmon in every order for a year, plus $40 off with Code Wire. Good Ranchers, American Meat delivered. After years of record price increases, inflation just slowed to its lowest rate in years.

Daily Wire senior editor, Cabot Phillips, is here to break it down. So, Cabot, there were some welcome signs of economic relief recently. what did we learn on Wednesday? Well, according to the Labor Department's monthly inflation report, the Consumer Price Index, which tracks the general cost of everyday goods, rose 2.8% from the same month last year, and just 0.2% from the month before. Both of those numbers were better than expectations

and marked the first time in four months that we saw an annual decrease in the consumer price index or inflation. At the same time, core prices saw a 3.1% increase from last year. that is the best number we've seen in nearly four years. Here's White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt addressing those numbers Wednesday. You see the cost of eggs is going down, cost of gasoline is going down because of the massive deregulatory efforts of this president and also the fact that we are delivering on his promise to drill baby drill already. You saw this past weekend the National Economic Advisory put out a report that because of the

regulations we've already slashed in just 52 days, we've saved American taxpayers 100 $180 billion. That comes out to about $2,000 per American household. That's in 52 days. Looking through the data, inflation rates on housing saw the most notable cooling. They were up 4.2% from the same month last year, which doesn't sound great, but is actually the smallest yearly increase since 2021. So all that to say, inflation is still present.

Prices are still going up just at a significantly slower pace than we saw in recent years. But there are some warning signs, though, that we're. not out of the woods, how are tariffs affecting things? Right. These numbers do reflect February data that came in before President Trump ratcheted up his trade war with Canada, Mexico, Europe, and China, among others. On Wednesday, 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum products went into effect. Canada immediately responded with 25% tariffs of their own on more than $20 billion worth of imports.

For their part, the European Union also slapped retaliatory tariffs on nearly $30 billion worth of goods, including. including home appliances, textiles, and agricultural products. And it's worth noting that list of goods is not random. EU officials told reporters they wanted to target products that primarily came from Republican-led states. They're hitting soybeans and Mike Johnson's Louisiana, beef in Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, and produce in Alabama and Georgia.

So they're clearly hoping to exert political pressure on Trump from within his own party. The White House has conceded that these tariffs could cause prices to go up in the short term, but they will, in theory, increase demand for American-made products in the long run, incentivizing companies to up their domestic production, bringing hopefully lower costs. Here's Commerce Secretary Howard Ludnik making that point on Fox Wednesday morning. Inflation comes from a government printing too much money. The Biden administration having a $2 trillion deficit.

You don't get inflation from having a tariff because what a tariff says is if it's made in Europe, If it's made foreign, it costs, it might cost a little more. But that which is made in America does not cost more. Now, others on the right say Democrats are fearmongering over the looming impacts of tariffs. They point to President Trump's policies from his first term as proof you can implement them without broad price increases. To that point, here's heritage economists E.J. and Tony. Everyone said the sky was falling when Trump implemented tariffs in his first term. And most consumers saw no difference at all.

In fact, the price index that measures the overall price level of things we import into this country, so that would be the things on which tariffs were placed, that price index actually fell after Trump implemented tariffs in his first administration. So this idea that tariffs are always passed on in full to the consumer, the record of history as well as economic theory says that that's not the case. But look, there is certainly a very real political risk here attached to President Trump's strategy. Right. So what kind of reaction are we seeing from voters?

So during his first term, President Trump consistently saw a higher approval rating on his handling of the economy than any other issue. It arguably is what got him back in the White House. But in recent weeks, Americans do appear to be souring on his handling of the economy. A CNN poll found him at 44% on that front and his 12 points underwater and his lowest rating on the economy on record. Now, the White House is confident those numbers will turn around as inflation continues to slow and tariffs drive American manufacturing. But that does not happen. There is a risk the

president could lose support on the issue where he's typically been the most popular. Right. Cabot, thanks for reporting. Anytime. President Trump seems closer than ever to fulfilling his campaign promise to shut down the Department of Education. Here are the latest is Daily Wire Deputy Managing editor Tim Rise, so things are moving pretty fast here. There's been a lot of reaction already to this. What's the latest? Yeah, good morning, John. kicked off late Tuesday when education department staff across the country were told to stay home on Wednesday. All department offices were closed starting Tuesday night for security reasons. Staffers were

told to take their laptops and vacate their offices by 6 p.m. Shortly after that, the education department notified around half of its 4,133 employees that their positions had been terminated. This is probably the biggest round of layoffs we've seen since the Trump administration shut down USAID. Yeah. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement Wednesday that this reduction in force reflects the Department of Education's commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most to students, parents, and teachers. And then in appearance on Fox News Tuesday evening, McMahon told Laura Ingram that this was

indeed the first step towards shuttering the department entirely. Is this the first step on the road to a total shutdown? Yes. Actually, it is because that was the president's mandate. this directive to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education, which we know we'll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished. Trump addressed these layoffs from the Oval Office yesterday when a reporter noted that many of the affected employees served during his first term. I feel very badly, but many of them don't work at all.

Many of them never showed up to work. Now, there's been a flood of reactions from Democrats and media figures about this really sounding the alarm about what this will do. what impact will this really have? What exactly will happen if the education department is fully shut down? Well, to hear Trump and McMahon tell it, not a whole lot. McMahon has stressed that this first round of layoffs won't impact student loans or programs dedicated to students with special needs.

The cuts seem largely targeted at the Department's Office of Civil Rights, which is charged with enforcing Title IX policies. So things like whether or not schools should have gender-neutral bathrooms. Trump has said he wants to stop the abuse of your taxpayer. dollars to indoctrinate America's youth, and McMahon says she wants to return control of education to the states. The department has already cut $600 million in grants for training teachers in things like social justice activism and anti-racism. So we should expect to see a lot more of that type of cut, while the department reassigns things like student loans and special needs programs to other federal

agencies or even state governments. Well, it's certainly going to be interesting to see how these changes are handled. Tim, thanks so much for reporting. You bet. Just months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, government forces there are massacring religious minorities. Current estimates vary, but some human rights groups say more than 1,300 Christians and Alawites have been killed in the last few days alone. Here with more as Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan, Basham. So, Megan, the rebel group Hayat Terrier al-Sham, or HTS, took control of Syria in December. And they were promising to be tolerant of religious minorities, but it looks like they're not, sticking to that. What's happening? Yeah, a lot of disturbing reports and images are coming out of Syria

right now as the country shifts toward more rigid Islamist rule. So HTS is Sunni, like 70% of the rest of Syria, and they're tied to ISIS and Al-Qaeda. And HTS claims that the violence that erupted last Thursday began when some holdovers from the Assad regime attacked them. So they, the Sunni HTS rebel group, then began targeting provinces that are known to be Alawite, which is the Shia Muslim sect Assad belongs to. They've also been killing Christians, Kurds, and Drues, as mosques in these regions have started calling on people to wage jihad. Now, humanitarian groups say northwest Syria has been ethnically cleansed of Christians and Kurds,

and that whole families are being slaughtered. Essentially, they say that what started as small spurts of random vigilanteism has now progressed into large-scale organized violence. The evangelical news outlet World Magazine interviewed several Syrian Christians now in hiding, and one described seeing a convoy of military vehicles and tanks that stretched for miles entering the main street of his town before the militants began shooting everything in sight. He said he watched them kill four young civilians right in front of him while shouting, We will behead you pigs.

And it's not just executions. Residents of Christian and alawite cities and villages are also being displaced, and their property is being seized. So across the country, HTS soldiers are allegedly harassing young Christians for not adhering to strict Sunni customs, like demanding Christian women cover up in Muslim garb. They've also reportedly been targeting men who have Christian tattoos. In some areas like Damascus, Christians are protesting, but thousands are also fleeing to Lebanon or Russia, as Putin was Assad's ally.

And then one other interesting note here, the Alawites, who, again, our Shia Muslims are calling on Israel to, quote, save them from the brutal regime. In a letter to Benjamin Netanyahu, they wrote, We are a minority like you in the Middle East. Help us. And if you reach the Syrian coast, which is mostly al-Awhite, you will be received with songs and flowers. So are these attacks religiously motivated or are there other factors as well?

I would say it's both. Syria has been embroiled in civil war for more than a decade now. and those skirmishes are still continuing. So in rural areas where HTS has a weaker grip on power, targeting these religious minorities helps them exert some greater control. And also part of this is class-based as the Alawites are more associated with the political elites, as Assad was. But, you know, this is a catch-22 that we see so often in the Middle East.

Though Assad was by no means a good leader, he and his father before him did keep the region relatively stable. And those who opposed the U.S. meddling and trying to unseat him were concerned about these very kinds of alternatives. In fact, when President Trump first ran for office in 2016, he criticized Hillary Clinton over her support for arming anti-Assad rebel groups. This is what he told CNN at the time. The problem is the other side of the side. We have no idea who they are. They probably are racist. We have no idea who these people are. We give them weapons. We give them ammunition. We give them everything. Maybe it's worse than that. Assad. Why are we involved? I look at Assad, and Assad to me looks better than the other side. And,

you know, this has happened before. We back a certain side, and that side turns out to be a total catastrophe. And to that point, Syria's new president, Ahmad al-Shara, who replaced Assad, is himself a former Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorist. So what kind of international response are we seeing? The UN is calling for immediate action to protect civilians, and the U.S. has condemned the killings, specifically blaming radical Islamic terrorists. More pointed, the Israeli defense minister said Shara is showing his true face as a jihadist, though Shara denies this. He said these killings are a threat to his plan to bring unity to Syria, but he has not yet

acted to bring those loyalists who are acting in his name to heal. Well, absolutely terrifying situation for those civilians. Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. Another story we're tracking this week. Senate Democrats say they're going to block the House-passed funding bill, making the prospect of a government shutdown much more likely. Minority leader Chuck Schumer is pushing for a one-month extension for more negotiations,

but Republicans say the six-month plan endorsed by Trump is the best way forward. At least eight Senate Democrats would need to join Republicans to break a filibuster, and if no deal is reached by Friday, the government will partially shut down. Thanks for waking up with us, and if you enjoyed what you heard this morning, share this episode with a friend. Thank you.