The Daily - Do Trump Voters Like His Tariffs? We Went to Michigan to Find Out.

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

President Trump’s tariffs have terrified stock markets, business owners and anyone with a 401(k). Does that mean that his approach to trade is becoming a major political liability?Astead W. Herndon, a national politics reporter, asked voters in Michigan what they thought. He found that the answer to that question was not so simple.Guest: Astead W. Herndon, a national politics reporter and host of the politics podcast “The Run-Up.”Background reading: Video: Mr. Trump loves tariffs. Do all Americans?Here’s what six voters think of the administration’s latest actions.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. President Trump's tariffs have terrified stock markets, business owners, and anyone with a 401k, and raise the question of whether his approach to trade is becoming a major political liability. For voters in Michigan, the answer to that question is not so simple. Today, my colleague Astead Herndon explains what he found on the ground in Michigan and what it reveals about the dilemma that tariffs now pose for Democrats. It's Friday, April 18th. Astaad, welcome back. Thank you.

I love being here. You know, the last time you were on the show. Yes. Was election night itself. Yes. The live Nate Cohn call of the election, we'll never forget. You were very memorable yourself. And what made you, I think, such a tremendous asset and colleague to have in the campaign

was the fact that you were traveling the United States talking to voters, a lot of them Trump voters, and seeing things in a very clear way. And ever since, you have been waiting for the right moment to return to a lot of those voters and follow up with them, basically figure out what they make of his presidency so far. So why this moment? Well, I think that I wanted there to be some time for things to set in. And I have had the experience before of the year after an election, a lot of the electorate, particularly the folks I spend a lot of time with,

people who are not hyper-politics obsessed, they're news consumers in a huge way, they often step back from politics in that year after. They disconnect. Disconnect, you know? They got lives, unlike us, you know? And it felt like this moment was the time to check back in, specifically around tariffs.

And just explain why. Yeah, I mean, obviously this has become his signature economic policy, and it's his signature economic policy after an election where he was largely successful because people attributed his competency on the economy to being preferable to the Democrats. I mean, we heard more about groceries and eggs

and all that stuff last year than any other issue. And so considering, I think, the shock of the Liberation Day announcement, the sweeping nature of it, and the prospect of increased inflation in the future, it just crystallized, I think, a moment that feels like we're finally in the Trump presidency, right? Like, we've turned the page from the kind of Biden moment to him kind of reshaping policy and government itself. And it's so kind of total and complete in a way that I thought it was a higher likelihood page from the Biden moment to him reshaping policy and government itself. It's so total and complete in a way that I thought it was a higher likelihood that it's cut through to people and they might have some sense of reaction.

As you begin to reconnect with these voters on the specific topic of tariffs, where do you begin? Who do you begin with? Well, the first person that came to mind is a woman named Monica. I'm a Motor City Detroit homegirl. I love building cars. Monica's someone we met last spring, and we tracked how she kind of made her decision on who to vote for throughout the months leading up to the election. I wanted to know how you ended up voting.

I ended up going with Trump. Basically what it came down to was I feel like Trump is going to keep U.S. manufacturing going strong. And I thought of Bonica specifically for a couple reasons. One, she lives in Michigan, kind of home of auto industry. She's a fourth generation auto worker. And then most specifically, I remember her explaining to me after the election that tariffs were part of the reason she voted for Donald Trump. Tariffs aren't great, but if a vehicle built outside of the US costs so much more than one inside the US, then maybe we'll just keep buying American.

It's a Hail Mary. I don't think he's going to fix everything for us. The plant that she works at is a Chrysler plant, which is owned by Stellantis, and it's been going through a lot of changes over the last several years. And actually, the car that she was making got outsourced to Mexico and she's been laid off for several months. And so one thing that Monica said was that she liked the idea that Trump was talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back to America and that tariffs were his tool to

do so. Right. Specifically, he has said tariffs are how we bring domestic manufacturing of cars back. Right. So whether it's the campaign trail or his announcement on April 2nd that specifically mentions Delantis, Monica is directly in the middle of the impacts of Trump's policy and a voter who I think represents the type of optimism that's surrounded kind of Trump's economic pitch.

And so I was wondering what the expectations to reality were specifically with someone like her. Okay. So tell us what happened when you followed up with her about the tariffs. So I wanted to meet Monica in person. So me, along with producer Anna Foley, headed to Michigan. And we met at a brewery that is near her hometown, and it's about 30-ish minutes outside of Detroit. And when we met her, my first question was just, how has she been since the election? And what was her reaction to kind of the first hundred-ish days of Trump?

And simply her response was, you know, a mixed bag. I'll tell you this, I didn't think that he would go ham on the entire world. I thought it would be a little more, uh, pick and choose as far as, as who we went after. She mentioned a couple things, and they really reflect some of the other voters we've been checking in with also. So before the election, you didn't have a big opinion on tariffs or did you? Because you know, like, you know, like...

I had a minimal, sure, sure, you know, but I did not think it would become a global trade tariff war. An idea that they thought these tariffs were going to focus specifically on places like China or places like Mexico, not be sweeping and include, you know, random islands like Heard Island and McDonald Island are getting tariffs. Right, the ones without people on them. Yes, inhabited by penguins.

Poor penguins. She mentioned how the uncertainty causes real instability. What I love about Trump's foreign military policy is what I hate about his economics policy. Explain that. He's unpredictable. Unpredictability can be a little strong if you're like, I don't know if I want to mess with these guys, you might drop the Moab.

Finances needs security. Finances needs, hey, if you do A and B, then we will do C. And so I think that, you know, there was a kind of understanding that Donald Trump means disruption, right? That Donald Trump means chaos. It's just that on this issue specifically, this isn't what she was expecting. And I think this overlaps with a lot of other voters we talked to who are expecting Donald Trump to focus on bringing prices down. So she's somewhat skeptical. She is somewhat skeptical. However...

I'm really hoping that Art of the Deal is just not the name of his book. There was still remaining amounts of hope that the uncertainty in the short term would bring back the job in the longer term. She's still holding on to the kind of economic premise that Trump lays out that say that this could actually be a runway for him to cut some deals with these companies or deals with other nations that open up a space that could bring manufacturing jobs back. I am thinking that I cast my vote and that I need to trust the process. Let the man cook, hopefully he knows what the heck he's doing.

So it reminded me that although the branding of Donald Trump can feel tiresome, and I think can feel like political spin. It's potent. It's potent. And it really is the number one way a lot of laypeople have come to him is a sense that he is a kind of assumed level of competence when it comes to business and the economy. Everything's a negotiation or a poker game, especially with Trump. It sounds like that branding brings to a person like Monica a measure of patience. It earns Trump a level of trust with her,

and it gives him some sort of runway to see how this policy plays out. Now, I think we should also say that some of that runway is built on her individual kind of preference for Trump But it's also about her lack of trust in Democrats when we ask her Has this kind of chaos made you feel regretful about voting for Trump or things like that? She says no one she feels as if she's happy with her choice She made the choice and she feels fine about it

But she really mentioned something I think is really important that she felt that Trump had at least feels fine about it, but she really mentioned something I think is really important, that she felt that Trump had at least diagnosed a real problem in her life, which is that she feels as if these free trade agreements have, in the macro, pulled these jobs away from her community. And she doesn't feel as if Democrats named that problem or have provided a solution. What was her experience of the Democratic Party's message around this issue in the campaign, and I guess even up to this point.

Right. She has a really specific interaction with this because, as you remember, President Biden actually came to Michigan to walk the picket line as UAW workers were striking. I remember very well. Became the first president, I think, in history to walk the picket line. And Monica's in the UAW, right? Yeah. He was there on behalf of her.

Right. Right. We're talking about people whose union beliefs are really core to their identity core, to their work, or to their family and their family story here. And so when we asked her about it, like, why doesn't Biden get credit? Why don't Democrats get credit for kind of supporting you in that effort? She says like, For me, I took it, okay, cool.

He's supporting the union, the right to strike. Cool. As a union member, I was glad that he supported our right to strike. Yeah, sure. But he's not pulling back on his EV mandates, which is what we've been asking for. But it's not as if Biden being there really did anything about our bigger issue, which is that we're losing these jobs in a long-term sense. Trump comes in.

He did not go to a picket line. He went to a separate area. I did not go see him. And she was saying that when Trump came, yeah, he wasn't supporting a right to strike. But what kind of clicked it for me is he said exactly what I was thinking two weeks leading up to it. Doesn't matter how much you make if the cars aren't made here. Doesn't matter how much you make if the cars aren't made here. Doesn't matter how much you make if you don't have a job. He was saying none of this matters if y'all don't have a job. And she was saying she really agreed with that framing of the issue.

And honestly, she felt that only tariffs were being presented as the type of solution that could rectify the issue. This is really interesting. So even if tariffs aren't necessarily the right solution being done in exactly the right way, they are the only solution being offered in that 2024 campaign because Democrats aren't really talking about how to bring those jobs back. They're just showing up at a picket line and that is just clearly insufficient for her. It was.

And so all of this adds up to a real runway that Trump has to speak to that problem Because she feels as if she is confident that she cast her vote for at least the guy who's trying to do something And that all adds up to her to being much more powerful than the symbolic measures She felt the Democrats were giving now. What about the prospect? That Trump's tariffs actually backfire on the car industry? My sense is that to some degree that has started to happen, I think it was Stellantis who came out and said, because of these tariffs, we're going to have to take some people out of their jobs.

That would seem to impinge on a runway that Trump would have with autoworkers like Monica. Absolutely. I posed that direct question to her and she kind of shrugged it off. She believes that the reasons Nelantis laid those folks off is much more about a change in what car they were producing, not the tariffs. Our local president, Eric Graham, is the president of Local 140 and he had said that this shutdown at Warren Trucks specifically does not have to do with the tariffs. I don't know if I buy

that given the timing. We are being told that there is a problem with the engines being produced. And you know, I was surprised by that answer, but she was not creating a causal relationship between Trump's tariffs and those layoffs. But in the same way, she's not in confusion that this might be a little overly optimistic, the idea that her job would come back because of tariffs. She actually says she isn't sure if it's gonna work out. I would not blame Trump for the loss of my job. He's trying. He's doing something. And I have faith that should Harris had won, it wouldn't even be addressed at all. And she says that, you know, she wouldn't even blame Trump

if her job doesn't come back, or if these tariffs do cause kind of more job losses. That's a pretty fascinating thing to say. Yeah, and again, it goes back to that diagnosis of a problem. She thinks that a problem has been true for 15, 20 years. Folks haven't talked about it. And that at this point, Trump has so much leeway on this front because she feels as if no one was kind of taking up this cause. And so even if he fails, she's going to give him credit for trying. And you know, it

wasn't just Monica. Monica actually took us over to a Chrysler plant. How far are we? We are probably about three miles. Where she herself worked. Where she herself worked. Mom's spaghetti with mom's spaghetti. And of course, because this is Detroit, we were quite literally on eight mile road of M&M Fet.

Do you need to interpret that for the Daily Listeners? No, I mean, if you can't get that, it wasn't meant for you. And we were talking with workers who were getting off of their shift. Hey, how's it going? My name's Esteb. This is Adam from the New York Times. Asking them about the tariffs, about Trump's policy, about the prospect of inflation. And it was remarkable how we heard much of the same things that we heard from Monica. I think what Trump's doing is awesome. For people who supported Trump, who worked at that plan, they were saying that they

have a real runway for him because they really trust and hope he'll bring this job back. So if you read the book, The Art of the Deal, he goes in high. So he's asking her for a ridiculous tariff, like 30 percent. And when that country might be given 20 percent, all he's trying to do is start off high, end up in the middle. No big deal, we'll get through it. They were talking about that same problem diagnosis

as important. Terrorists are putting the overseas people in check. They're taking advantage of us for how many years? One guy told us he doesn't care prices go up. Terrorists make things more expensive, but I'll make money for the country. So how do you feel about it? Kind of 50-50? I survive. I adapt. I'm the kind of guy that if I'm starving I'll eat a rat. I'll eat cockroach. I'm a survivalist.

That was a level of thinking about like partisan kinship among the Republicans. But even when we were talking to people who seemed more middle of the road, or even some people who were Democrats or voted against Donald Trump, they weren't acting as if the sky is falling. When we was going through bankruptcy, you knew exactly what was going on. This, I don't know how this is going to play out yet. I got to give it a little bit. And I keep going back to this thing about the diagnosing an issue

Because I think about this one guy we talked to who was a Democrat who voted for Kamala Harris said he hated Donald Trump And even he was saying to me he can't ignore the fact that Democrats put Workers like him in this position Both of them did get off the subject of what was on, what was the real thing that was on the pro- supposed to be talking about. They skipped everything. They ended up- Both sides were not talking about the things that were mostly-

They were mostly just fighting them on themselves. Nobody's really talking about what we needed to talk about. Who's going to make it- who's going to bring out the guns? Who's going to bring us new jobs and everything? Who's doing that? Nobody really got- And so he was saying that even as he was upset with Donald Trump and the prospect of tariffs and the uncertainty that it caused, he was acknowledging though that same kind of problem

diagnosis that led Monica to vote for. Being at the plant and hearing that kind of range of voices really just reminded me about the kind of shrapnel from this kind of political bomb, you know, and the ways And by bomb you mean the Trump bomb. Yes, the Trump bomb. And I'm like, you know, obviously it puts Republicans in a difficult position because he's doing something fairly unpopular and it has splintered their coalition. But it also reminds me how Trump's disruption, particularly on something like the economy and manufacturing,

can put Democrats in a difficult position also. Because the voters I spoke to, they were a huge part of the traditional Democratic coalition. They made up the type of working class base that bolstered the party in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, electorally important places. But now the Democrats have kind of changed, become more cosmopolitan, become more college educated, become more overtly liberal. I think they have to ask themselves,

do they still care to calibrate their message to the language of their traditional working class base? Or have they changed? We'll be right back. Instead, I want to talk about the bind that these tariffs seem to be putting the Democratic Party in. Because I think a lot of people might assume that if you're a Democrat, the obvious thing to do would be to condemn these tariffs for a lot of reasons. First, the fact that they come from Trump and that they were rolled out pretty haphazardly. And also, the fact that they are roiling the markets, that economists predict they might lead to inflation, possibly even a recession. But as you just pointed

out, it's not that simple, especially if, as a Democratic party, you're trying not to alienate a block of voters that at least used to make up your coalition in some very crucial swing states. So if you're the Democratic party, what do you do? Well, I think it's been interesting to see how different parts of the party are responding to this issue, and they've taken a couple different options. Listen, I just want to for myself tell you a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation of the Trump tariffs.

A few of them—I'm thinking about folks like Senator Cory Booker—have done a universal condemnation of tariffs, saying there's no equivocation, tariffs are bad. But most Democrats have tried to find a middle road option. The White House's tariff shuffle here didn't have anything to do with manufacturing like they claimed. It was about manipulating the markets. There have been people who say that maybe Republicans profited or there were things like insider trading that's been happening in the stock market

Mm-hmm. We've also seen people like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut If you're a company that can donate money to Donald Trump, you don't have tariff supplied to you anymore But if you're an industry that doesn't have political power or isn't paying off Donald Trump the tariffs still apply saying that Donald Trump is gonna pass along the tax to regular people as the rich get exempted. Right. And then there's been the other piece, which I think is embodied by folks like Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan.

I'm not against tariffs outright, but it is a blunt tool. You can't just pull out the tariff hammer to swing at every problem without a clear, defined end goal. This kind of middle-of-the-road approach that acknowledged tariffs can be something that Americans should use more, but just saying that Trump is not using them correctly. I've also seen this from Senator Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts. Tariffs can be an important tool in the toolbox when used in targeted ways, but right now what we've got is chaos and corruption. That's complicated, right?

Terrorists might be good, but Trump's tariffs are bad. That runs the risk of kind of validating what Trump is doing, but being critical of it at the same time, it sounds very mealy-mouthed. It does, and I think that, you know, the easier thing to do would be that universal condemnation. But as you're saying, that would immediately put them at odds, maybe not with working-class Americans all across the board, but certainly working-class Americans in Michigan, right?

A deeply important electoral state. Other states, we know Ohio, Pennsylvania, have gone through some of this stuff too. And so because the impacts of this are specifically felt in these states that have this vital importance, it's put the national party at a place where it can't really do that easily understood universal rejection.

And they've left themselves with this sort of, maybe tariffs are okay, but Trump's doing, or imposing it wrong, or maybe there's a piece of this we should highlight, but it's not been a cohesive message. And so, I think that that is the reason why I call it an important window into that identity crisis, because you're getting splintered messages rather than one universal one. Mm-hmm. I mean, what you're really getting at is a party that is in between and therefore not

coming out very clearly in favor of tariffs and not coming out all that clearly against them that does seem to bring you back to the challenge that you talked about in the first half of our conversation, which is that Trump's message, among all the things you can say about it, it's fundamentally clear. Yeah. The Democratic message, as you have just established, muddled again.

Yeah. And I wanna say it's important to me, like I don't really hold them accountable for not having a singular message right now, right? Like the time after the election is identity crisis, right? This is gonna play out for years in the party and will not be really solved until a 2027-8 primary. Right?

But I do think it's important to know that like when we use terms like, you know, working class realignment or the party needed to get back in touch with its base, these are the type of issues we're talking about. And these are the type of conflicts it can create. Democrats have a unique challenge with the diversity of their voters, right? Republicans are much more monolithic.

So Democrats have more classes, more races, more demographics, and finding an issue that cuts across all those groups is legitimately harder. If they say they want to get closer to their working class base, that might put them at odds with another portion of the base. I mean, if you could imagine a Democratic Party message that somehow cuts across all those groups, I wonder what exactly it sounds like in this moment. My experience would say it sounds somewhat like Donald Trump, honestly. Hmm.

It sounds like disruption. It sounds like change. It sounds like making political systems work better, right? The thing I think Donald Trump challenges, with Democrats specifically, is the disruption of the institutions that he is intentionally doing right now, have, I think, created an instinct among some Democrats to just protect. But among the people we talk to, those institutions are unpopular. And there's a sense that they have already failed.

So what I find is the important distinction for Democrats is are they gonna be protector or improver of these things? And protector just means Donald Trump is bad. What he's doing right here is bad. Improver means independent of him, here's what we're gonna do to make that better. And I think that cuts across a lot of issues. Economy, doge, immigration.

I think it's basically the same challenge is asking themselves, is it just opposition? Which can work, right? They can be a vessel of discontent and that works for them the same way it worked for Donald Trump a couple years ago. Or are they going to have a competing vision? And I think when it comes to things like this, that's what we're hearing from voters is they feel like they don't know what the democratic vision is to improve their lives, specifically

economically and bring back manufacturing jobs, right? That, to me, is the choice they have in their hands. You and I are flying at a somewhat high altitude here politically in this conversation. There may very well come a moment in the next, let's call it three, six, nine months where these tariffs, especially against China, if they remain in place, start to materially influence the price of everything. And then, suddenly, the facts on the ground might change that runway that you discovered with those voters in Michigan.

And the Democratic Party's mealy-mouthness might open up a considerable amount of space to say to voters, we might not be the party that offered an alternative vision, but we're not the party that tanked the economy. 100%. I mean, we don't have to overcomplicate this. The single worst thing I think this White House could do politically is what they are doing. Creating a causal relationship between their signature economic policy and prices going up. And so if the forecast is real and these tariffs stay in place and we do see that inflation

or we do have a recession or all of those kind of things that have been swirling, it is very clear to me, and that this is also true in the numbers and polling, that people don't talk about Biden's economy anymore, right? They're talking about Trump's economy. And so if that materially gets worse, I think this White House will be blamed for that. And that creates the perfect conditions

for Democrats to have a good midterms and feel good about 2028. And that has nothing to conditions for Democrats to have a good midterms and feel good about 2028. And that has nothing to do with their own vision. So I'm saying, that is totally plausible. And so there's some ways you can think about vision, and I think it's going to become important, and things like the primary things going on,

or you can see different parts of the party and coalition. But I'm like, all of that will be meaningless if we have a Donald Trump induced recession. And I think even our discussions with these people, that's their threshold too. Right now, it seems like the chaos they're kind of used to, Donald Trump up against his usual enemies. And I think there is some leeway for either the deal, negotiation, things like that. But the guy who says he'll either rat for Donald Trump is the exception.

If those prices increase, the only person who will be blamed for that is the president. And if you're a Democrat, that's the best thing that could happen for the prospect of the party returning the power. Right. Folks might love the idea of Trump as the dealmaker, but that is contingent upon the deal actually working for them Right If we see the inflation we'll see the backlash Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. For the second time in less than a year, a federal judge has ruled that Google has operated an illegal monopoly. In the latest ruling handed down on Thursday, a judge found that Google had broken the law as it built its dominance in online advertising. The ruling could eventually lead the Justice Department to seek a forced sale of Google's

advertising products. And President Trump is lashing out at the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, for warning that Trump's tariffs might raise inflation. Writing on social media, Trump said that Powell's firing, quote, cannot happen fast enough. Under the law, the Federal Reserve is independent of the White House, and Powell has said that he will not step down, even if Trump asks him to. I don't think he's doing the job. He's too late, always too late, a little slow, and I'm not happy with him. But during a news conference in the Oval Office,

Trump claimed that he could, in fact, force Powell out of his job. If I want him out, he'll be out of there real fast, believe me. Today's episode was produced by Anna Foley and Caitlin O'Keefe with help from Will Reed. It was edited by Devon Taylor, contains original music by Marian Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Babauro.

See you on Monday.