What A Day - Trump's Plan To Make Us Pay More

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump made a lot of questionable promises on the campaign trail. But one of the biggest ones was his promise to improve the economy by imposing at least a 10 percent tariff on all imported goods. For goods from China, he wants a minimum 60 percent tariff. Never mind that some economists say these tariffs, if imposed, could cost the average U.S. household an extra $2,600 a year. Stacey Vanek Smith, senior story editor at Bloomberg Audio, helps us break down what Trump’s tariff plans could mean for all of us.And in headlines: Trump confirms in an early morning retweet that he will try to use the military to mass deport millions of immigrants, momentum builds around the potential release of a House Ethics Committee report about former Rep. Matt Gaetz, and a new report finds 20 percent of Americans get their news from social media influencers.Show Notes:Check out Stacey's work – www.staceyvaneksmith.com/audioSubscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/3kk4nyz8What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcastFollow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/For a transcript of this episode, please visit crooked.com/whataday

It's Tuesday, November 19th. I'm Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that is pouring one out for the mother of MAGA, Sarah Palin. Okay. Mother of MAGA is what someone on the internet called her, and then she shared it to complain about how she hasn't gotten nominated to any cabinet positions. But if it helps, Sarah, I also haven't gotten nominated to any cabinet positions. I also haven't gotten nominated to any cabinet positions. On today's show, Trump makes a critical policy decision at 4 a.m., maybe, and TikTok.

Will we still have it in 2025? Let's get into it. If you don't make your product here, then you will have to pay a tariff, a very substantial tariff, when you send your product into the United States. If you paid any attention at all to President-elect Donald Trump, you know how much he talked about tariffs on the campaign trail. The word tariff, properly used, is a beautiful word. One of the most beautiful words I've ever heard.

It's music to my ears. But it turns out, like overdone steak, diet coke, cheating on your wife, and other things Trump enjoys, the widespread use of tariffs will not be good for us. Trump has promised to tax every single imported good from China at 60 to 100 percent. And according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, tariffs will cost the average U.S. household $2,600 a year. That is not very beautiful. Even Speaker Mike Johnson isn't willing to buy into the tariff plan.

Or at least, he wasn't, when Jake Tapper asked him Sunday about Trump's promise to put at least a 10% tariff on all imported goods. Like from anywhere. Well, just like with immigration policy, I'm not going to put the cart before the horse. The president and I have talked about this as recently as yesterday The use of tariffs in the economy and how that might be done It will be a balancing act as it always is but he has some Ideas aggressive ideas to grow this economy again

But if you ask universally respected economist to Hulk Hogan what he thinks everything will be fine here. He is on Fox News But when it comes down to business, he's a businessman. You know, like that economic forum where he schooled that guy who didn't know a thing about tariffs. For the record, he did not school Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Mickelthwaite, who does know a thing about tariffs. Republican Representative Troy Nels from Texas is also all for these universal tariffs, for very good reasons. If Donald Trump says tariffs work, tariffs work. Period. Because Donald Trump is really never wrong. Spoken like someone who definitely knows what a tariff is and definitely isn't part of a

cult of personality. To help me try to understand what any of this means, I call it up Stacey Vaneksmith. She's a senior story editor at Bloomberg Audio Audio and I think after two appearances on the show can officially be called a friend of the pod. Stacey Vanek Smith, welcome to What A Day. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. Okay, let's start really simple.

What is a tariff? A tariff is it's just a tax on something that comes in from another country. So it can be like a lamp or a car or a space heater or pork chops or anything that comes in from another country. It's just a tax that the government can put on that product. And there are already lots of tariffs. Even before Donald Trump, there were tariffs on things that we might not know that much about. So let's get into that because Trump has obviously talked a huge game about tariffs. This is his thing, yeah. It's a

big thing, a thing he's very enthusiastic about. What is it that he is trying to do and how would it affect your normal everyday American consumer like me if he succeeds? Yes, okay. This is this it's like you're right, it's his whole thing and so the appeal of tariffs, the reason that Trump likes them is there's this idea that it encourages people to buy American goods. And it's true that they do do that. So if you think about like, let's say you're buying, I don't know, I've been shopping for space heaters

because it's freezing in my apartment right now. So I've been looking at space heaters and if there's a space heater that's made in the US, that space heater company is having to pay US wages, US rent, US environmental regulation, all that stuff. So they have to charge a certain amount in order to turn a profit on their space heater. Well, if you make the same product in China, the average worker makes way less than the average worker here. So when these space heaters go on the market,

the Chinese company has a huge cost advantage. If you and I are looking at space heaters, we're going to buy the $30 space heater, not the $50 space heater. So tariffs are meant to get rid of that cost advantage. So let's say you put a big tariff on the space heater, and now the Chinese company has to charge $55 to turn a profit, we're probably going to buy the US space heater, but also suddenly we're paying $50 for a space heater. That's where the higher prices come in and that's how it impacts us.

When the American company also be purchasing items to make the space heaters that might come from overseas and might also face taxes. So they would be paying more and then they would make the space heater more expensive. So everything would just get more expensive. Yes, that is such a great point because we've really had like a movement towards free trade ever since the end of World War II. Part of the reason they put free trade in place was to prevent war from happening because they thought if you're trading with people, you're not going to be fighting with them. And so now that we're sort of looking at all these tariffs, everything's become so interconnected. I mean, iPhones make parts in like dozens of different countries.

All the things that we use have parts and minerals and products from all over the world. And you're absolutely right. Tariffs are going to affect all those things. So we're probably going to make you pay more like 60 or $70 for our space heater now. That sounds terrible for our space heater. It's so bad. Get a sweater. For cold people like us, it's going to be a tough time.

This question is quickly becoming a major theme on the show. Can he actually do all of this? Can he do 100% tariffs on goods from China? And I think more importantly, does he really want to or is this like time for some game theory kind of nonsense? Can he do it? Yes, absolutely. We saw him put a lot of tariffs in place in 2016. That

was a very different moment in our economy. Inflation wasn't a problem. And so that was just a very different situation. This time, though, it's interesting. You make a great point. He's kind of painted himself into a corner here, I think, because if he puts tariffs like that in place, which he can absolutely do, everything is gonna get a lot more expensive. And one of the reasons people think that he won the election was because people are so upset about rising prices. So the way around it would be to have much more targeted tariffs.

A lot of leaders around the world will pick like enemy countries and they'll put big tariffs on some specialty products or luxury products is a really common thing to do. But Trump is talking about totally across the board tariffs, I think 60 to 100% on goods from China, 10 to 20% on goods from everywhere else. If he does that, prices are going to go way up. His response to that has been that companies will move their operations here, but that's

going to mean they're paying American wages and rent again. There's no way around the higher prices if he puts these tariffs in place. I don't know how he's going to do that. I think the way around it for Trump, the game theory, would be to pick and choose and make big splashy announcements around the tariffs he's putting in place while not actually putting that many tariffs in place. It seems like this is less a battle between left and right because we know that Biden kept some of the tariffs that Trump had put into place. some of the tariffs that Trump had put into place. Yeah.

And so it seems like I understand that this is an effort to, you know, boost American manufacturing. But if American manufacturing is also reliant on products with tariffs, it just seems like this is all just a very bad idea. Am I right? Is this just a very bad idea? It's bad for. Yes. I mean, I think so. This is my personal opinion.

And tariffs can be really good. Like tariffs aren't always bad. It can protect industries. It can have some good effects. But what it does do is make things more expensive, which brings everybody's quality of life down because that just means you and I can afford less stuff. So we are having to pinch pennies a lot more. And this has happened. I mean, Argentina put really big sweeping tariffs in place like a few decades ago, and it completely destroyed their economy. They said everything had to be made inside of Argentina, including like smartphones and BlackBerry started trying to make phones in the country, and iPhone left completely, and

prices went up and quality went down and they're still trying to pull their way out of that and all the inflation that it contributed to. That sounds bad. So what would be, I mean, I feel like it seems like adding to rising prices will not make the electorate happy. So Stacey, what imported goods should we start stockpiling? Oh, I mean, for me personally, coffee.

Yeah, it's already gotten so expensive, coffee, which I like to drink. Like, I like strong coffee. So that is, of course, the first thing that comes into my mind. We import so many things. I don't even know what wouldn't be more expensive. Because even like a quote unquote American product, like an iPhone, like you said, every component in that iPhone almost is from another place.

So it's going to get a lot more expensive. Stockpile, eggs, chocolate, coffee, space heaters. Absolutely. Great, great. Okay, I will, my closet full of chocolate, coffee and space heaters is gonna raise some questions, but in two years, everyone's gonna be saying, I wish I had been stockpiling.

You were so smart. Exactly. Coffee, chocolate and space heaters. Stacey, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely, thank you. That was my conversation with Stacey, thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely. Thank you. That was my conversation with Stacey Vanek-Smith, Senior Story Editor at Bloomberg Audio. We'll get to more of the news in a moment,

but if you like the show, make sure to subscribe, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share with your friends. More to come after some ads. And now the news. She arrived at the party. She had sex with Representative Gates within minutes of her arrival. Later on, when she was walking out to the pool area, she observed to her right,

Representative Gates having sex with her friend who was 17 at the time. That's Florida attorney Joel Leppard speaking with CBS News' Major Garrett in an interview that aired Monday. Leppard represents two women who told the House Ethics Committee that they were paid to have sex

with former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. The attorney says that one of his clients also witnessed Gaetz having sex with a third woman who says she was 17 at the time. Ew. Gaetz is denied all wrongdoing, but the misconduct allegations have followed him for years and led to investigations by both the Justice Department and the House Ethics Committee. The DOJ concluded its investigation without bringing any charges, but the ethics committee kept going. It's scheduled to meet Wednesday and could vote on whether to release its report on Gates. House Speaker Mike Johnson said late last week he thinks the report should

be kept under wraps, because it turns out the alleged sexual abuse of young women is just not a big deal anymore. On CNN, he explained his view on releasing the report. Matt Gates resigned from Congress. He is no longer a member. There's a very important protocol and tradition and rule that we maintain that the House Ethics Committee's jurisdiction does not extend to non-members of Congress. I think that would be a Pandora's box. But if Gaetz is to become the next Attorney General, he'll almost certainly need to be

confirmed by the Senate. And many senators, even some Republicans, have expressed interest in the report's contents. Donald Trump declared Monday that he would, in fact, try to use the military as part of his plans to mass deport millions of immigrants. Well, technically, at 4.03 a.m. Eastern Time, he re-truths someone else saying that he would declare a national emergency and use the military to deport immigrants and then wrote, quote, true. But what this actually means is unclear. As in, will Donald Trump mass deport 11 million people after interning them in camps, which the American Immigration Council estimates would cost $300 billion and be absolutely insane?

Because no matter how many times Trump says he wants to deport millions of people, his closest allies keep saying he doesn't actually mean that. Or maybe he does. Here's speaker Mike Johnson telling Jake Tapper on Sunday that the administration would focus on dangerous individuals. I think what the president's talking about is beginning with the dangerous persons that we know are here. There are criminals, known criminals.

There are known terrorists in the country. There are some who have been apprehended for committing violent crimes after they come across the border illegally. And here's Representative Tony Gonzalez of Texas telling ABC's Martha Raddatz that deporting someone's grandma just isn't going to work. If the message is, we're here to deport your abuelita, that's not going to work well. But then Representative Chip Roy, a Republican immigration hawk, said that actually the U.S. should be deporting grandma and a lot of other people. They all need to be deported and they need to be deported almost on day one.

We need plans in place. It's no wonder then that the ACLU filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking more details on, to put it bluntly, what the hell Donald Trump actually plans to do. Election day was two weeks ago, but the votes are still being counted and the concession speeches are still coming in. On Monday, Republican Eric Hovey conceded to Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin in the Wisconsin Senaries. He did it in a video on Twitter. A request for a recount would serve no purpose because you will just be recounting the same ballots regardless of their integrity. As a result, and my desire to not add to political strife through a contentious recount, I've decided to concede the election.

The Associated Press called the race for Baldwin the day after the election. The latest vote tally shows for beating Hovde by little less than a point. But in the era of Republican election denialism, Hovde refused to concede for weeks, citing debunked claims about voting irregularities in Milwaukee. Over in Pennsylvania, the state is getting ready for a recount of ballots in the Senate race between Democratic incumbent Bob Casey and his Republican challenger, Dave McCormack. On Monday, the state's Supreme Court handed Republicans a win. It told all county election officials not to count mail-in ballots with date errors.

The court made the same ruling ahead of the election. And in the House, five races still haven't been called. Two were in California, where ballots are still being counted. Two others, in Iowa and Ohio, are too close to call. The final uncalled race is in Alaska, which uses rank choice voting if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote. A new report released on Monday found that 20% of Americans get their news from social media influencers, mostly on Twitter, the platform I refused call X.

The Pew Research Center reviewed posts made by social media users across the political spectrum with at least 100,000 followers. Basically, all of those progressive and conservative giants were posting those viral clips of campaign rallies, press conferences, and newscasts you see every morning. Researchers were specifically looking at popular content from this past summer, a high traffic time for posting around the election. And they found that young people, lower-income adults, and people of color were more likely to get their news from influencers.

Folks who were surveyed said that popular accounts like these help them better understand current events. And look, there's nothing wrong with getting your news on social media if it helps keep you on the know amid all the chaos. But support journalism too! Click those links that take you off the app to great reporting and analysis from folks like us. Please. And that's the news.

One more thing. Remember that whole crusade lawmakers launched against TikTok, citing concerns about the app's Chinese parent company, ByteDance? How Democrats and Republicans joined forces, claiming that their ties to China posed a threat to national security and the American way of life, and probably Apple Pie too? There was that whole congressional hearing about it where lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO. Dozens of Republican-led states moved to ban the app from government-issued devices. And it all came to a head in April when President Biden signed a federal law that gave TikTok an ultimatum. Cut ties with ByteDance by January or say bye-bye to their U.S. market. But Trump could actually get in the way of that when he assumes office. He said on the campaign trail that he would reverse a ban on TikTok.

I personally would like to know if my favorite makeup influencers will be taken away from me, leaving me bereft and without contour. So I called up our TikTok aficionado, Priyanka Erebindi. Priyanka, welcome back to What a Day! Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be back. So I remember, because it was like 10 seconds ago, when Trump wanted to ban TikTok during his first presidency. And now he's saying he's against banning it. He promised to save the app in September. What's the latest there?

What do we know about his plans for the app at this moment, given that he is very mercurial? It's very much concepts of a plan at this point, not really clear what he's going to do to save TikTok, just that he has said it. But when we take a step back, he originally was on Congress's side here. For the same exact reasons, he thought that the Chinese government's potential access to American user information posed a national security threat. He wanted to force a sale to an American company. But his change of heart very coincidentally happened right around the same time he met

with a Republican mega donor who just happened to own a huge chunk of ByteDance. He says that they- Crazy. It's crazy how that happens. He says that they didn't talk about TikTok at all, but I don't know, call her me a little bit skeptical. So, as you mentioned, President Biden signed a federal law earlier this year, ordering TikTok to cut ties with ByteDance by mid-January.

But TikTok, along with a bunch of content creators on the app, filed a federal lawsuit earlier this year, claiming the law is unconstitutional. What's their argument here? Yeah, so their argument hinges entirely on the First Amendment. They claim that shutting down TikTok violates users' First Amendment rights. It would be akin to basically not letting Americans publish content on foreign-owned media outlets. And they also say that because this user race is so broad, 170 million Americans, this supposed violation would be really widespread.

And they also, in this this lawsuit go on to say that it wouldn't be possible for ByteDance to divest without this technology, TikTok wouldn't work the same way. And they've repeatedly tried to reiterate that TikTok does not share this US user info with the Chinese government. What happens if TikTok loses this case? Is the app just gonna disappear from our phones?

Who would it be sold to? What would happen? Whoever loses that case is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court. So this is not the end of this because this is so widespread. 170 million American users and a First Amendment case. The Supreme Court, very likely to take this up. As for what a potential ban would actually look like, it's actually targeting app stores. So you wouldn't be able to update your app, you wouldn't be able to get the app anymore

on your app store. If you have drafts, I don't know, I would save them. It's not necessarily that you would be fined or something if you had TikTok. It's mainly service providers wouldn't be able to allow US users to access it, and these app stores wouldn't allow US users to download it, and these app stores wouldn't allow US users to download

it anymore. As for who could potentially buy TikTok, a little unclear. Previously there were talks about former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin kind of like rallying this group of rich investors who might want to do something here. There's been talks about some private equity firms kind of banding together and maybe trying to pursue this, but very unclear. We are running up to that date, January 19th. That is one day before Trump's scheduled inauguration.

So a lot to be seen here. What could Trump do to reverse the ban? Could he quote unquote save TikTok? I mean, he could try to issue an executive order to reverse the ban? Could he quote unquote save TikTok? I mean, he could try to issue an executive order to reverse the ban. Most experts say that this wouldn't work. Most experts say that to get rid of the ban, you would need Congress to act on it. Could ask Congress to repeal the law. Unclear how that'll go because this had bipartisan support. He could ask his new attorney general, potentially Matt Gaetz, to not enforce this law. He could also, as part of this law, grant a one-time 90-day extension to bite dance

and TikTok. If they're in the process of a legitimate sale, if the president determines that this is in progress, he could give them some more time to do it. Unclear how he might be able to finagle that if something isn't actually in the works. The Trump team has not said anything about this, but we will all be watching. I personally will be. What am I going to scroll on without TikTok? You'll have to go back to Instagram Reels. It's going to be very sad. No, no. It's going to be very sad. Horrid. Priyanka, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me.

Priyanka, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for having me. That was my conversation with crooked correspondent Priyanka Aurobindi. Before we go, let's face it. This election proves that we're living in two completely different Internets. Algorithms trap us in echo chambers, shaping what we see and believe, while Elon Musk holds more power over democracy than most politicians. Each week on Offline, Max Fisher and Jon Favreau break free from those bubbles to better understand

the far right and MAGA movements, while diving into the wild world of digital politics. This week, they tackle the interminable, who is the liberal Joe Rogan debate? Because yes, it's still a thing. Tune into Offline, now with its own YouTube channel. Search Offline wherever you get your podcasts. That's all for today.

If you liked the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, remember the time that Republicans desperately wanted Sarah Palin to run for president? And tell your friends to listen. And if you're into reading, and not just about how to stock up on fine leather goods and coffee and chocolate like we're the goddamn East India Company, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Coston and seriously, I do not like tariffs. I don't want to spend more money. What a Day is a production of Crooked Media.

It's recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Raven Yamamoto. Our producer is Michelle Eloy. We need production help today from Tyler Hill, Johanna Case, Joseph Dutra, Greg Walters, and Julia Clare. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison, our executive producer is Adrienne Hill. Our theme music is by Colin Gillyard and Kashaka.