Trump Learned NOTHING from the “Liberation Day” Disaster

0:00Hey, everybody. Welcome to the bulwark. I am Andrew Egger. I am joined by our economics reporter Catherine Rampell to talk about the first anniversary of the most important economic day in US history according to the president of the United States Liberation Day. This is Liberation Day. April 2nd, 2025, a day that will go down in history. Again, according to the president, as the day America's Golden Age began, the fact the day that the economy basically took a nose dive from which we have yet to really recover, setting aside everything else that has happened since then. That was one year ago. Today, we're here to talk about it, Catherine. Can you just kind of roll back the clock for us? I mean, this is like the signature economic policy of Trump 2.0. We have had all kinds of twists and turns with this story in terms of the White House putting stuff on and taking it off. There's such been such a crazy tariff story over the past year. Can you just kind of walk us through the broad strokes of what happened a year ago today and how

1:02we got from there to here? I will do my best. But first, I would like to wish Liberation Day a very happy birthday. It's now a toddler, right? It's age one. Yeah, so what has happened in the past year? Trump declared that he was a tariff man, that he was going to renew the American economy, which was apparently in the dumps, was dead, all of these other horrible adjectives, and the way he was going to do that, the way he was going to revive manufacturing and other economic activity was through these tariffs. Instead, of course, we have seen lots of economic wreckage in the wake of Liberation Day. So Trump has done a bunch of different versions of tariffs. He's used different tariff authorities that are maybe allowed, allotted to him in the law. The Supreme Court says maybe not. But the biggest set of tariffs came exactly a year ago on April 2nd of 2025. And they were through this kind of bullshit formula that had the trappings of academia,

2:11like it was supposed to look like, oh, this is this is the reciprocal tariffs that we are putting in place on every country on earth. I folks may remember that. It was reciprocal, which was meant to imply fairness of some kind. Reciprocating in what sense was really unclear. They used some like fake math essentially to come up with some numbers, even for a place, these are supposed to be reciprocating allegedly the tariffs that other countries had put on us. But we were putting tariffs on places that were literally uninhabited by humans that were inhabited only by penguins, the herd, and MacDonald Islands. So the penguins, not tariffing us as it turns out. And a lot of these other countries, you know, it wasn't really clear what this math was supposed to be grounded in. So he announced these big tariffs ostensibly. He was supposed to have something, what was it, 90 deals and 90 days or something like the tariffs were kind of meant to raise revenue, kind of meant to bring back manufacturing here, also kind of meant as leverage in deal making

3:17with these other countries. Some of those objectives are at odds, like you're not going to raise that much revenue. If this is really only meant to be a temporary cudgel to get some other concessions out of other countries. But he put these tariffs in place. He said that he was going to use them to get deals. At one point, I think his administration claimed that they had had 200 deals already signed, but they were secret. They couldn't tell which countries they were with or what the deals were. In practice, as a result of the pain that was being reaked by these higher costs, the uncertainty at the very least, the administration ended up delaying or suspending or altogether killing the tariffs, depending on how Trump felt in a given day. Sometimes they would suspend tariffs because supposedly there was some big concession made by another country. Sometimes it was because representatives of the country showed up with a literal gold bar, as in the case of a Swiss entourage that came through gold bar and I believe a gold Rolex desk

4:23cloth. Surprise. More countries did not go that specific route. That's relatively cheap as far as your entire export import rates are concerned. It's a great ROI. However much that gold bar cost, I don't remember, a couple of $100,000 or something, maybe more. It was still worth it for whatever, I wouldn't say normalizing of trade flows, but to whatever extent it allowed more trade flows to so, anyway, so tariffs are on tariffs are off, tariffs are on tariffs are off, then the Supreme Court ends up hearing a legal challenge to these tariffs that had been working its way through the court system and ultimately determined that the tariffs under this authority were unconstitutional, that the law that the administration was using did not permit. Use of tariffs that in fact tariffs were the the purview of the legislative branch which has the authority to lay taxes

5:26and that's close to where we are now with the exception of the fact that the Trump administration is refusing to refund all of the tariffs that have been deemed unconstitutional and they are trying to reconstitute versions of those tariffs using other legal authorities and so they're in the process of that now. It's such a weird moment in time right now because I mean you'd think a big anniversary like this, you know, the White House would be doing like a full court press of PR and public pressure around its own tariffs and things like that. I think the fact that they are not is, I mean, you can obviously obviously see why there's a lot of other stuff going on. The President had a big address on his ongoing excursion, his war in Iran last night. He's busy firing his Attorney General Pambondi today, but this is kind of emblematic of the whole thing, right? I mean, like this was this was one of their cornerstone projects last year, right? They spent an enormous amount of time and energy, you know, all last year trying to kind of prop these things up and now we're at this strange moment where like even though they're trying to backfill a lot of these things economically, the sort of like Omni Crisis that has developed has pushed it all to the back burner

6:32a little bit. Well, I mean, yes and no in that they are yes, they're not like celebrating liberation day. They're not throwing at a big birthday party, but the administration is still very actively working on raising tariffs in other dimensions, like just as an example you mentioned the Omni Crisis or the Poly Crisis. So aluminum smelters across the Middle East are being shut down right now because of the war. Some of them are getting bombs, some of them are just, you know, like precautionary whatever they're shutting down and that is potentially effectuating like an aluminum crisis because that there's a huge amount of, you know, a huge share of global aluminum supply. I guess comes from the region. What is Trump's remedy for this? He is actually raising tariffs right now on goods made from aluminum. There was some reporting that kind of went under the radar a couple of days ago about that. So like at exactly the same time that the administration might think, oh, like we should we should try to be doing things to reduce costs for people because they're so

7:34mad at us about this war raising costs. Instead, they are doubling down on the tariffs and they're actually raising taxes on the things that are in in many ways juiced in terms of higher prices by this war. I wanted to go back just two a year ago today. This day maybe as much as any other day in the first term really stands out in my memory. Like I can remember the various beats of it, you know, like I can remember Trump getting up in the Rose Garden and making his speech. I can remember, you know, watching the markets collapse in real time as he is, as he's, you know, pointing out these various new rates they're going to be on. So 67%. So we're going to be charging a discounted reciprocal tariff of 34%. I think another is a charge us. We charge them. We charge them less. So how can anybody be upset? I remember watching people kind of puzzle out what this formula meant. You mentioned to the sort of like Matthew looking formula that kind of like suggested a certain amount of economic thought which people sort of within a few minutes had sort of picked apart on Twitter

8:37and realized that actually it was literally just sort of like a mathematical representation of the trade deficit that we had with these various countries right exports minus imports over imports. And what the tariffs were not reciprocal in any way. Yeah, I was going to say I spent like days trying to figure out who was to blame for this embarrassment. And everybody was like not me, you know, people on the CEA were like, oh, it was Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro was like, no, it was, you know, Treasury or whatever. And Treasury was like, no, it was CEA. So nobody wanted to take credit for this thing that very well may have been created by Claude for all we know. But yes, like it was not in any way an actual representation of reciprocity. It was just, you know, like a very dumb back of the envelope way of saying like, how could we close the trade deficit entirely assuming no behavioral change? And this is what you get. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's just take a quick quick trip down memory lane here. Let's hit a couple of a couple of the promises that Donald Trump himself was making again one year ago today as he was rolling all these things out about what the

9:40actual consequences were going to be. So let's let's hear from the president. Let's hear from the president in the Rose Garden, which existed a year ago as well. My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn. The day America's destiny was reclaimed. And the day that we began to make America wealthy again, going to make it wealthy, good and wealthy. Man, is it just be like, this is a little off topic, but he looks, he looks pretty good there. He looks a little younger. He looks a little more energetic. Am I wrong? Am I crazy? I don't know. I mean, he did look pretty tired during his whatever that speech was last night. So maybe if that's what's fresh in your mind, I guess he seemed a little more energetic than he's been beaten down. I could be wrong, but like I was a little struck. I had not watched that clip until we watched it just now. I just

10:42read it and the vibrancy, the youth, the life. Okay. Anyway, so that's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to get the golden age. Let's hear a couple more. Just one more one more snatch of the president's address right here. But even more importantly, they will give us growth. These tariffs are going to give us growth like you haven't seen before. And it'll be something very special to watch. I am so looking forward to Brian. It's going to happen even faster than you said. You know, you might, you might say, but it's already started. It's already started. And just a couple more things on top of that. He said, you know, we were going to get these trillions and billions in revenue. We're going to pay down the national debt. We were going to have jobs and factories roaring back into the country faster than ever seen. He said, you've seen it happening already. I mean, I don't know, Catherine. Can you give us kind of a broad stroke assessment of some of these claims? Have any of these things planned out? No, none of these things have materialized. In fact, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we had a year ago, according to the most recent data. We have not had a manufacturing renaissance. Again, we haven't had, I guess, the cataclysmic price increases that a lot of people

11:48had feared when he announced these tariffs, right? Because they were going to lead to like the highest average tariff rates in over a century. And we haven't seen, you know, a huge resurgence of inflation inflation actually has ticked up. Like if you look at the chart for inflation, it was kind of like slowly ticking down and then you hit April and then it slowly starts ticking up. So it, you know, it does seem like the tariffs had an effect. It didn't have quite the cataclysmic effect. And I think that's due to a combination of companies front running the tariffs, you know, like building up a lot of inventory before liberation day because the new tariffs were coming. And so they tried to buy stuff when it was still duty free or low duty or whatever. And we should say too, I mean, you gestured this at this earlier, but just to put a finer point on it, it was about one week after this that Trump first started to kind of walk back. I mean, he had announced all of these rates were going to go into effect very shortly. Then literally one week later, he said, we're going to delay implementation of basically all of them

12:52for a couple of months. And then they trickled, you know, they trickled out with further delays and further delays after that. So some of these were implemented, but those rates that were first announced on April 2nd that we've been talking about and everything like that, nothing even close to that ever went into effect, which is another reason why some of these predictions are the predictions of what would happen if they'd gone into effect, never materialized because the tariffs themselves never quite materialized at that level. Yeah, I mean, tariffs are higher than they were before Liberation Day, but they're not as high as Trump had advertised them to be. So it's still unhelpful. And I think, again, you've seen some increase in prices that you can connect to the tariffs if you look at like specific categories, like appliances or whatever that we know are where the tariffs are binding. So they have had some effect not, you know, as much of an effect, and that's partly because companies were trying to frontrun them. It's partly because the tariffs a lot of them got suspended or delayed or or watered down. And it's also partly that a lot of companies were anticipating that they would be struck down by the courts. And so even if they

13:53were paying the tariffs in the interim, they were assuming that they would get that money back. So they were like really trying to absorb as much of the cost themselves rather than pass it onto consumers and like piss off their customers. Because they figured, well, if we just hold out a little longer, we'll get the money back. And of course, like that hasn't happened yet. So we'll see how long they're able to absorb that cost. Yeah. Can I just ask a little bit on that on that front? I mean, you mentioned earlier that the White House is trying hard not to pay back these tariff revenues that were brought in last year, even though as the court has ruled, those revenues were illegally collected. They were they should they never should have been collected in the first place. That's the upshot of their ruling. Can you just, I mean, have there been any development since scotuses, you know, ruling there? Yeah, there are a bunch of lawsuits that companies have filed. Some of them had filed before the Supreme Court ruled like in anticipation of this happening, but there are a bunch of lawsuits where they're trying to get the money back. The last I had seen and there may have been development since then, basically the administration was like initially arguing that they didn't have to and then they were saying that they couldn't,

14:54that it was too complicated. It was really easy for them to collect the tariffs on the front end, but it's very difficult somehow for them to return the tariffs. And I'm sure it is complex to some degree, you know, there's like, you know, gazillions of dollars of goods that are coming through our ports and everything. But they've had they've had plenty of time to prepare for this possibility. And it's clear that the administration did not care. I mean, like, just to give you a sense of how little they cared about preparations. At various points, Trump was changing tariffs, you know, through the the liberation day, tariff bucket of things, like for a minute to minute, depending on how he felt he was tweeting them out. So, you know, truth, social posting them out. And there are all these stories about like if you go to the ports, you know, the CBP officers don't even know what the tariff rate is at any given time because Trump just like tweets it out. And it hasn't gone through the whole process necessary to like help people figure out, okay,

15:56if it's this good, then it's this amount. And if it's this good from this country, it's that amount, so it's all complicated. So like they didn't really do a lot of preparation on the front end to put the tariffs in place, which they were clearly much more interested in doing. So you can imagine how little preparation they did for the eventuality that they did not want to happen. So it's complicated right now. It's still going through the courts. I'm sure businesses are pretty ticked off that they don't have that money in hand when the Supreme Court says that they are supposed to. Now, the Supreme Court didn't do them any favors because the Supreme Court said that the tariffs were unconstitutional, but did not actually say like what's supposed to happen next. So that's why you have this ongoing litigation. It's almost like impossible to overstate just how like much chaos. I mean, like if you were not actively following this stuff, especially in the weeks and months immediately following Liberation Day, when it was just a blizzard of changes all the time on all these different countries going up and down. And I mean, the fact that we spent all of last year

16:59with like massive AI expenditures and valuations and stuff in the stock market kept things basically moving up and to the right in terms of the stock market, in terms of economic growth and things like that. But when you take all of that out and look at the sort of non-AI picture of the economy last year, what you really see is the tariffs taking an economy that had been chugging along pretty well coming out of the pandemic and everything and just shaking it, shaking the economy like a ragdoll with all sorts of chaotic effects. And I think like to me, the most depressing thing, again, just sort of speaking a year on from when all this started. It was not like, I mean, Donald Trump, this was not the first time he ever decided he was going to be a tariff guy, right? He'd done a lot of tariffs in his first term. He loves tariffs for decades. He's talked about how much he loves tariffs. But this was the moment he was like, I'm done going small. I'm done letting anybody talk me out of things. We're going to do this the way I want to do it. We're going to go. We're just going to do it in B legends and he did and he tried and he immediately walked it back and then he spent

18:00months and months trying to rebalance all of this stuff. But like a normal mind could in theory have tried that, have looked at that, have learned a few lessons from that, could have said, well, you know, actually when you introduce this much chaos and this much uncertainty into the economy, there are going to be some negative externalities from that. There's going to be some bad side effects. And maybe a person should not run the economy at this sort of macro level in this sort of insane way. And yet today, we're not even hardly talking about the tariffs, even though as you say, they're still going in the background. But this is exactly the sort of economic thinking that is running the president's approach to Iran and the state of Hormuz and oil markets and all of these things where he's essentially saying like it's maybe we're going to reopen it. Maybe we're not. Maybe somebody else is going to go in and reopen it. Maybe they're not. If they, if we do, that's great. But if we don't, that's great too because, you know, the ROI is going to open itself up. And yeah, and like we'll make a lot of money. And it's just the same exact kind of magical thinking, the same exact kind of like complete disregard for the inefficiencies

19:05that the chaos that you create in these markets introduces. And it's just, it really does make me kind of grind my teeth to see the very, very most basic lesson from a year of this tariff policy have gone completely unlearned as we barrel into this other second crisis. So that's just my, my rant on the, on the top. So I can tell you really like the tariffs. One point I would also make. So you mentioned AI, like kind of propping up the economy part of the reason why AI has been able to flourish or inflate whatever verb you want to use is that we have carved the inputs, you know, that go into data centers and other AI capital expenditures out of the tariff regime. So those things have escaped this boot that Donald Trump has put on the neck of the rest of the economy because they are carved out of tariffs. And they have been allowed to, you know, people who want to build data centers have been allowed to buy their inputs without having

20:08this additional tax, which is something that the administration like constantly ignores because they're really excited about, you know, stock market growth and things like that. But that market growth is largely related to investment in AI. I mean, we have like historical, historically high, I think, concentration in the market in AI linked companies. You know, the magnificent seven, I think now, or maybe it's the top 10 companies, I forget what it is, represent like 40% of the value of the S&P 500 at this point. And it's not clear that even that bright spot in the economy is going to persist because of other dumb things that the administration has done, including this war. It all comes together again. It's all the poly crisis. So how does the war affect all of that? Among other things, to manufacture semiconductors, you need helium. A lot of helium comes from the Middle East and cannot be transported now because the Strait of Hormuz is closed. It comes from, in part from processing of natural gas. So you have like the one thing that was

21:17protected from Trump's tariffs. It's now being undermined by Trump's other bad ideas, you know, disrupting supply chains. And so it's like he just, he can't get out of his own way. Every like one little bit of optimism that you can find within the U.S. economy right now, Trump has found a way to squelch it out. And, you know, I'm sorry to be like a Debbie Downer here, but I'm very worried about what the legacy of all of the Trump agenda, the economic agenda from Trump has been in this past year since liberation day, not just the higher costs, but the uncertainty and the recklessness with which this administration goes headlong into major, major decisions that not only put lives on the line, but also have huge consequences in terms of their damage that they can wreak on the economy. And the thing that voters presumably care about, perhaps more than

22:22loss of life and limb, unfortunately, going into the midterm. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a, I mean, you said it, the deaths overseas of U.S. service members are historically the sort of thing that voters seem not to, not to get their hackles up quite as much about, you know, as they go into these, into these midterms as the price of gas they put in their car every day. And you can and food and whatever kind of oral judgments you want about that, but that's kind of the political fact on the ground and it's something that Donald Trump's going to need to be grappling with. On that extremely positive note, you know what, I think we're both just, we're negative Nancy's about this and we're panicking. We're not trusting the plan. We don't know that right around the corner, you know, they're going to reopen the straight. The tariff revenue is going to come in. The second American golden age is going to begin all the factories and the investments going to pour in the trillions and dollars, the trillions of dollars in investment that have been committed are going to, are going to hit the U.S. economy and we're going to go to the moon and won't we, Catherine look silly when all that happens. I, you know, I, I hope that the outcomes

23:28are better than the ones that I fear are headed our way. Me too. I would, I would be so glad to be so owned, but unfortunately I am, I'm not, I'm not super confident of that. But anyway, we'll keep tracking it and we'll let you know if we are, you know, we'd, we'd be happy to come on and eat some crow if a year from now everything's great economically. We would, we would, I would actually be very, very glad to, you know, we can, we can do a, we can come back, we can look back on this video and we can make fun of ourselves as much as we are looking back on April 2nd of last year and making fun of the president again. Not, I'm not counting on it, but, you know, it could happen. It won't happen, but it could happen. And if it does, we'll be happy about it. Anyway, thanks, Catherine for coming on and, and chewing over all this stuff with me. Thanks to you all out there for watching, for subscribing. We hope you will, you know, subscribe to our feet on YouTube, on sub-stack wherever you have to be watching this. Go subscribe to Catherine's newsletter, go subscribe to my newsletter. If you like to read things, if you're, if you're that kind of a, you know, weirdo, in this economy, reading things in this economy. Anyway, thanks a lot everybody and we'll see you all next time.