Today, Explained - The deal with Trump's deals

Episode Date: August 5, 2025

Trump's been cutting trade deals left and right, saying they're the key to unlocking an era of economic prosperity. New data does not back him up. This episode was produced by Rebeca Ibarra, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. President Donald Trump shouting answers to questions from reporters from the roof of the White House. Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was just under a month ago in July 2025 that we here today explained brought you an episode titled I Was Told There Would Be Deals. The gist of the thing was Trump promised trade deals, but we weren't really getting them. You know how it goes taco, Trump always chickens out, etc. And Trump is calling that a deal, but it's not really anything that looks like a free trade deal, as everyone else understands it. But to be fair, since we made that show, the president of the United States has had a busy month out on the I never had the privilege of going to his island. Okay, so he never made it to the island, but he did spend some time in Europe and he walked

away with the deal. He's actually got deals with some of our most important trade partners around the world, and that's why today's show is titled The Deal with Trump's deals. We're going to take a look at what he's been up to. He's bringing in revenue, but long term, is it going to be good for the United States? Be careful if you suggest it won't be, though, because that might get you fired. She's just a girl and she's fired. Support for this show comes from Robin Hood.

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Newburgh Newsroom in London, England. It seems like a long time ago, but it started around April 2nd. Thank you very much. And that was the Great Liberation Day, the announcement in the Rose Garden of the White House. The day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. President laid out his plan for reshaping the global economy on a giant poster board. Very simple. Can't get any simpler than that. with a bunch of tariff rates that freaked Wall Street out.

President Trump's tariffs sparking a huge sell-off today, sending all three major markets plunging the trading day. There you're hearing the bell ringing. What's stunning, though, is that we are also seeing declines in U.S. government bonds and the U.S. dollar, all at the same time. And the White House had to quickly scramble and back out of those plans. So then the deadline became August 1st, and the White House couldn't get all of its paperwork together to make that happen.

So now we're staring down another deadline for this Thursday of all of these tariffs taking effect. And Wall Street is recalibrating how this is going to affect the global economy going forward now. And so how much of the world has gotten their deals in under deadline? Who's still on the outs? What's the sort of general picture here? So we've got about eight or ten of the U.S.'s largest trading partners that have announced deals. The European Union is the biggest.

The European Union accounts for about almost 20% of all U.S. goods trade. So that is 27 nations that the U.S. has had pretty much free trade with over the past several decades. U.S. President Donald Trump and European Union Chief Ursula von der Leyen have reached a trade deal due in talks in Scotland. Agreed to set a 15% tariff on most goods. Well, Mr. Trump said the EU would boost its investment in the US by $600 billion, including a vast investment in American military equipment. While US cars and agricultural products, he said, will be more widely available in EU markets.

There have been a couple of other, of the larger trading partners that have done deals, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom was really the first one. Under the deal, Japanese goods will now be facing tariffs of some 15%. The deal is that South Korea will give to the United States $350 billion for investments owned and controlled by the United States. Washington will lower tariffs on many UK goods. That includes a 10% levy on cars compared with the 25% imposed on other nations. And then you have some other deals that have been announced, but haven't really been confirmed on the other side.

Vietnam was one of those ones. The president posted on True Social that he had a deal with Vietnam. Truth Social. I just made a trade deal with Vietnam. Details to follow! So you've got a few announcements, and then you've got some squishier things that haven't really produced many details. And so it's hard to tell what exactly the economic impact is going to be. And how do all of these closer trading partners of ours, Japan, EU, South Korea, UK,

I guess Vietnam hasn't said anything yet. How do they feel about these deals? Are they sounding positive? I think the main reaction is just reluctance, acceptance of this is how it has to be if you want to avoid a trade war with President Trump. He has threatened to essentially cripple these economies and their export industries if they don't go along with this. So a lot of them feel like this is the least worst deal we could get, and it's better to have the certainty of this now than this ongoing uncertainty of the really high tariffs that many of them would have faced. 15% is a high tariff.

And if you were looking at this compared to a year ago, but he has threatened countries with 30 and 40%, which would essentially destroy a lot of those industries that depend on an American consumer. It feels like a lot of the world leaders who are signing deals are also trying to sort of heap praise on Donald Trump. You know, the prime minister of the United Kingdom brought him a letter from King Charles, I think,

is what he's going by now. Is that normal? It seems to be the new normal. We also heard European Commission President Ursa von der Leyen say, yes, Mr. President, this is the biggest deal of them all. It's a huge deal with tough negotiations. And she said some pretty interesting things about how we're going along with this because trade needs rebalancing.

And rebalancing is exactly the phrase that, that Trump administrations would say needs to happen in a trading relationship like the European Union or China or others. So a lot of world leaders giving Trump the win, so to speak, who's resisting? Who's fighting back? Well, there have been only two countries that have technically retaliated with tariffs of their own, and that's Canada and China. China announced this morning that from next week, they will be imposing 35. percent tariffs on all U.S. goods from April 10th. Canada's retaliatory tariffs on nearly $30 billion of U.S. goods are in effect as of today. And that has aggravated the situation with Canada, especially if you look at how President Trump

has, he just granted Mexico a 90-day extension, but he's slapping a 35 percent tariff on Canadian goods that aren't subject to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. So antagonism seems to only bring more pain in this arena from President Trump. It also feels like things are tense with Brazil and India. Are they worth talking about here? Yeah, absolutely. For different reasons, really, because President Trump has brought non-trade issues into these two relationships, first with Brazil.

President Trump, in the latest of a series of new letters to talk, of new letters to trading partners has threatened a 50% tariff on Brazil. The measures are largely due to Trump's anger at the prosecution of his ally, former President Jair Bolsonaro, on charges of plotting to overthrow the election of Lula in early 2023. With regards to India, President Trump has also brought geopolitics into the equation and said to India, if you don't stop buying Russian energy, then there'll be penalties for you. So that's sort of bringing the Russia war in Ukraine into the picture and really using tariffs as a leverage point for foreign policy,

not just economic policy. But lately it feels like there are more deals than, you know, fights. Does it feel like he's winning right now? He's definitely winning in the public relations department. If you can announce a deal with the European Union or with Japan and South Korea, these big U.S. trading partners that have been doing lots of trade with the U.S. for decades, that does sound like a win. But it's a little like you and your partner going to your parents and your future in-laws

and saying, hey, we're getting married. And they look at you and they go, well, where's the ring? When's the date? And where's the city? and you don't have answers, they start to question whether you're really serious. So what we don't have right now are specifics that show both sides in all of these are serious about it. And whether are these just promises to get Trump off your back in the short term, or are they actual long-term economic agreements that are going to change the trading relationship in a way that Trump wants,

and that's to have a smaller trade deficit with these countries individually. It doesn't seem like Americans are freaking out the way they did back in April. How come? Well, it's hard to see how the tariffs are flowing through into consumer spending or behavior.

But if you go to Federal Reserve surveys of businesses and all the Federal Reserve districts do these surveys of manufacturers, And you read the notes in there that these manufacturers relay to the Federal Reserve. They say the tariffs are killing us. The uncertainty is killing us. I can't pay my bills this month because suddenly it's a 30% more expensive. So the anecdotal evidence that we can see is pretty conclusive that these tariffs are hurting businesses, profit margins.

And economists would tell you it's just a matter of time before that fee. through to consumers. And the other thing we have is the job numbers. And that has turned into its own fight. Yeah, exactly. So the jobs figures were a surprise. And of course, those numbers and all the revisions tied to them led to the firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics person who's in charge of those.

On Friday, Trump fired the former commissioner after a weaker than expected jobs report. Now, the president claimed that that report was rigged. A little bit of background on McIntyre for, yes, she was appointed to this position by President Biden in January 2024, but she's also a labor economist who served over 20 years in the federal government. On the monthly jobs report, going forward, why should anyone trust the numbers? And if you're right, no, you're right, why should anybody trust numbers? What was in those numbers as it relates to tariffs, though, was

another decline in manufacturing employment. President Trump will tell you, and he says regularly, that he's not in this to help Wall Street. He's in this to help grow the manufacturing base into this global age of a renaissance of American factory might. And what we've seen is three straight months of declines in manufacturing employment. So that is working against his arguments that tariffs are good.

Tariffs will help bring jobs home, resure this employment that's gone overseas under previous presidents. But he's got a real problem on his hands if that manufacturing employment number doesn't turn around and turn around soon. Brandon Murray, Global Trade Editor Bloomberg.com, firing people over facts when today explained is back. Support for today's show comes from VIII. Vanta. If your mind can be blown by compliance automation, let Vanta blow your mind, says Vanta. Vanta is a trust management platform that says they help businesses automate security and compliance. Demonstrating trust to customers and prospects is critical to closing deal. I wouldn't

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You can go to upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to post your job for free and connect with top talent, ready to help your business grow. That's upw-o-o-rk.com. Upwork.com. Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today's playing being named the best news show? Wow. I didn't know that. I just, you're telling me now for the first time.

Hey, I'm Kimberly Adams. I'm the senior Washington correspondent from Marketplace and also the host of the Marketplace podcast, Make Me Smart. The president fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the labor statistics. We need accurate jobs, numbers. I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate. They can't be manipulated for political purposes.

Why did the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics make up the statistics? The head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics did not make up the labor statistics. It's literally shooting the messenger. The president of the United States was complaining on truth, social, and elsewhere, that the reason for firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics has to do with the number and the scale of revisions. And if you remember, just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers. on Biden's economy, phenomenal numbers. And then right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong.

And that's what they did the other day. So it's a scam, in my opinion. So the jobs numbers are one thing that they came in lower than expected last week, and they indicate that there's not the same kind of robust labor market that we thought we'd had over the last couple more. months, but what drew even more attention were the revisions to the numbers from previous months. And they were pretty drastic revisions that shocked a lot of people. And these revisions tell us that the labor market we thought we had the last few months that seemed to be okay,

seemed to be pretty resilient against the tariffs and some of the other changes President Trump and his administration were making in the economy. It wasn't actually as resilient as we thought. stunning government report showed hiring had slowed down significantly over the past three months, with the U.S. adding just 73,000 new jobs in July. May and June were revised downward by over 250,000. Asked if there was evidence the numbers were rigged, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said the revisions are the evidence. I should say, labor market numbers get revised all the time. GDP numbers get revised all the time. To pick whatever economic indicator you want. But these revisions in particular were A, really large, and B, just fundamentally

changed the story of what the labor market looked like over the last couple of months. So not only did they tell us that there was less hiring than we thought there was, it also told us that the labor market itself kind of shrank, that there was a lower labor force participation rate. And a lot of people are blaming that on the crackdown on immigration. And it also told us that in the main area where there was a lot of job growth, which is like health care, for example, if not for that sort of tariff and economically resilient sector of the health care sector and all the job growth there, we would have had almost no job growth at all. But now that Donald Trump has fired the commissioner in charge of these job report numbers, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it'll all be okay again by the next job support in September? We all win? I imagine that may be what the president wants to believe, that that will give numbers that are a bit more appealing. Most of the slash the vast majority slash almost all of the economists I talk to say that as. absolutely not the case. They say there's no reason whatsoever to believe that the Bureau of Labor

Statistics Commissioner, much less the Bureau of Labor Statistics itself is manipulating the numbers or that the numbers are rigged, as the President said. There's been a huge backlash from the community of people that follow this stuff very closely about this firing. I don't think there's any grounds at all for this for this firing, and it really hurts the statistical system. It undermines credibility in BLS, suppose. This is banana republic stuff. This is I wrote about it. I called it Caracas on the Potomac. This is the kind of thing we only see in authoritarian regimes. It's outrageous, but it's not surprising. It is consistent with a practice of hating the truth. And to the contrary of what the president might want by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and potentially putting in someone who might be a little bit more amenable to the president's

narrative around economic data, that has the potential to actually undermine economic data in the United States and make it less trustworthy, both for businesses here in the U.S., as well as in sort of the global economy. And why does that matter? I mean, for people who don't pay attention to these numbers, why does trustworthy data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics matter to this country and to the world? Because lots of different businesses and countries and even individuals use this data to make decisions about how they're going to manage their own money, how they're going to manage their own businesses, and how they are going to plan for the future. So, for example, if you know that the unemployment rate is 4.2%, which is what the numbers came in at last week, you can say that's a pretty low unemployment rate.

and that means that most of the people out there who want jobs, have jobs, and if we're going to hire, we're going to need to position ourselves well in the market to compete with the relatively few workers who are out there looking for a job. This gets into one of the main reasons that this is on the agenda for a lot of folks, which is the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve has two mandates, full employment and stable prices. Full employment basically means as near as you can get to it, low unemployment rates. Stable prices relatively equates to a more or less 2% inflation rate. We are still trending a little bit above 2% inflation, but when the Fed met last week, which was before these jobs numbers came out, the unemployment situation looked pretty good. So they didn't have much of an incentive to do anything about interest rates

because inflation was still running a bit high. Unemployment looked fine, so no big deal. So let's leave interest rates alone until inflation cools down a bit more. If the Fed had the information on Wednesday that they ended up getting on Friday, would that have changed their decision? Maybe.

You know, the last time you were on this show, Kimberly, you'll recall that you were here to talk about the Fed. I know. with the Fed, the most exciting thing in the world. It sounded for weeks now like Trump has been itching to fire Jerome Powell, the head of the Fed. Of course, they had that cute little... Who he hired. Who he hired, thank you.

Of course, they had that cute little photo op where they got to wear hard hats, but Tim Scott didn't. Nice to take these off every once in a while when we're not under too much danger. So, any questions? He didn't end up firing Powell, but then he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor. So are these economists you're talking to afraid now that this might not be the end of Trump getting rid of people who seem to disagree with his imaginary vision of what the numbers should be? You're absolutely right. This is definitely creating an environment where folks are worried that even if people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics or any of these other federal statistical agencies are still putting their heads down, doing the work, churning out the data without fear or favor, that kind of hanging over their head that if they release a report the president doesn't like that they might lose their job, even if they still do

the work, other people and other entities might look at it and say, well, can it really be true with that hanging over their head? You can look at a country like China, which releases economic data about the performance of its economy all the time, and you'll always hear folks say, well, take it with a grain of salt because the Chinese Communist Party likes to mess with the numbers and this, that and the other. And so that means lots of folks have to jump through all of these additional hoops to try to figure out what's actually going on in the Chinese economy. This is one of the biggest economies in the world, right? So what happens if we end up in the same boat?

Kimberly Adams, as mentioned, she's got her own show called Make Me Smart. She also talks about this there, go listen. Thanks to Rebecca Ibarra for making the show. Thanks to Jolie Myers for editing. Thanks to Laura Bullard for fact-checking. Thanks to Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christen's doctor for mixing. Thanks to Rachel Wolfe at the Wall Street Journal and thank you for listening to Today Explained. You can do so at free by going to vox.com slash members and dropping five bucks a month. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you.