The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Stopping Trump's Tariffs with A New Trade Act || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

It's hard to equate Trump's tariff policies to much of anything, but the movie "Unstoppable" where Denzel Washington needs to stop a runaway train might be the best I can come up with.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/a-new-trade-act

A.L. Peter Zine here coming to you from Colorado on a bright sunny, shiny, snowy morning. Anyway, taking a question from the Patreon crowd today, and it's with all this terra-funning games that's going on in Washington at the White House. Is there any institution, is there any person, is there anything in the United States that could make it stop and maybe unwind it so we aren't in a stagflationary environment so we don't face down a protracted recession and that we can actually keep the industrialization that we already have. It doesn't look great. We're at a time of political transition here in the United States where both of the political

parties have broken down. The Democrats basically collapsed in the last election, and it's reasonable to think that they won't come back. And the Republicans have been so subsumed in the cult of Trump that all of the business leaders and national security leaders and so on that used to be the bedrock of the Republican Party, how at best being called rhinos, at worst, are being called Democrats, or something else. Anyway, so the normal political things that could shape a presidential behavior are gone. In addition, Donald Trump is a non-standard president, and he's made sure that there is no one

in his circle who knows anything. His chief manufacturing trade advisor has never manufactured a thing in his life. His commerce secretary is Craven. And there is no one in the upper echelons of any of the departments that really knows anything about their purview because Trump fired everyone and replace them with political lackeys. So he only accepts into his circle the information he wants. And one of the few bodies that actually has access to that circle or the Russians, and anything that destroys American long-term economic vitality is something they're going to be enthusiastic about. So you can expect a steady drip of that sort of misinformation going right to the top. As for the other lovers of government, the judiciary never touches trade,

or at least only obliquely. So there's no one you can sue in order to get a court ruling that might make this better. The only body that matters, the only body that has really ever mattered when it comes to hemming in a president who's gone off the rails is the Senate. And I'm not talking here about impeachment, although that is obviously something that they are famous slash infamous for based on your politics. But the Constitution very, very clearly lays out that interstate, intrastate, and tariff policy is a congressional purview, not one of the executive branch. The executive has no native powers to regulate international trade at all. What happened is we had something called

the Trade Act back in 1974 that gave the president tariff authority. So this is power that has been granted to the president decades ago, a half century ago. And so if Trump is going to be stopped or reined in or mollified or something, it has to come from the Senate basically initiating a repeal of that act. And that process has begun. Something. called the Trade Act of 2025, which a couple of senators, one Republican and one Democrat have co-sponsored, and it's starting to get traction. If it were to pass, however, it would still then have to pass the president's desk, and he would undoubtedly veto it, so it would have to pass by a veto-proof majority. We're nowhere near the political forces that be shifting in that sort

of direction. We will have to have a more severe economic downturn than just a stock market crash, like we've seen in the last few days. We're talking about something that puts a lot of people out of work and a lot of red states. Keep in mind that Republicans have 53 of the 100 Senate seats. You would need at least 67 senators

to vote against the president for this to work. And even then, we're just at the start of the process. Then we have to unwind a lot of stuff. Anyway, the person to watch is the senator from my home state, Iowa, Chuck Grassley.

He's the senior member of the Senate now, I believe. He's like 185,000 years old, almost as old as Biden and Trump. Anyway, he's been in the Senate for 35, 40, 60 century since the U.S. was founded years, long time. Anyway, what Chuck Grassley is known for more than anything else is he's a rule of law fanatic. And while he has gone along with Donald Trump's plans on pretty much everything, he's done so with a wince the whole way. Because he knows that these are not conservative values. These are not good for the United States.

but the party has shifted, and he feels he has to shift with it. But he was one of the co-sponsors for this bill that would repeal presidential tariff authority. Basically, if, if, if the bill in its current form were to become law, after 60 days, you have to convince the Senate that the tariff is a good idea, otherwise it goes away. So you can use it as a negotiating ploy, but it doesn't make it into policy. Whether that's good or bad or indifferent is really not the point. The point is that the champion of rural law in the Senate has been a rule of law.

roused and things are starting to move. Nowhere close to a resolution, but the process has started.