Today on The Editors, Rich asks Phil and Charlie if Trump’s tariff stance is working for him.
According to Charlie, “There is not, in fact, a debate happening over tariffs. . . . Partly because there’s not a debate happening over anything right now. This election is about nothing.” On top of that, “nobody believes that Trump is going to do tariffs on the scale that he says he is. And insofar as the Democrats would want to critique his tariffs, when they do so, they have to acknowledge that Biden kept most of them.”
“The Democrats,” says Charlie, “are not actually against tariffs in the way that, say, Dominic Pino is and would be really thrilled to argue. The Democrats are against Donald Trump. And there is a difference between those two things. Joe Biden does not have a problem with the vast majority of the tariffs that were imposed by Trump.”
Charlie wonders where this debate is coming from, and says it’s not from Kamala Harris or Democrats overall, “and it’s not coming from the political class. . . . But it’s not substantive, because it never gets beyond that first maximalist position.
“And so what you have is Donald Trump saying, ‘I’m going to put a tariff on literally everything. I’m going to put tariffs on your face and your elbows and your knees. You will wake up in the morning covered in tariffs like leeches in the medieval inn.’ And then the other side says, ‘Tariffs are the worst things that ever existed. My mother was killed by tariffs yesterday. Actually, they came right in and killed her.’ And then we all move on to something else because we’re not actually having any policy debate.”
Phil agrees with Charlie and says “that on the economic substance, I think he’s losing. If you’re just looking at it as a pure political play, I think it’s murkier because people who aren’t studying international trade policy are looking at this and saying, ‘Why is everything I order on Amazon made in China? Why don’t we make anything in America anymore?’ I think that there’s a lot of people [who] have time for that sentiment.”
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