The Madness of Trump’s Tariffs (w/ John Ganz)
Added 2025-04-15 15:16:24 +0000 UTCSpeaking in the Rose Garden on April 2, or as he called it, "Liberation Day," President Trump unveiled his plans to impose a new minimum tariff on nearly every country in the world, along with country-specific "reciprocal" tariffs for those nations Trump deemed to be engaging in unfair trade practices. He called it "one of the most important days in American history" and claimed it was "our declaration of economic independence." But rather than liberation, Trump's tariffs have unleashed chaos in the stock market and thrown the role of the United States in the world economy into doubt, not least because of the administration's ever shifting justifications for their actions and the constantly changing details of the tariffs themselves. To make sense of the ongoing fallout, we yet again turn to our friend John Ganz — who just finished reading and reviewing Trump's first three books for The Nation — to understand the deeper motivations (if they can be found) behind Trump's trade war. It's a good conversation, ranging from the bond markets to the right's bizarre psycho-sexual fantasies about tariffs to "mimetic" competition with China, and beyond!
Sources:
John Ganz, "Dog Eat Dog: The Books of Donald Trump," The Nation, April 7, 2025
— "Apocalypse Delayed? What Happened in the Bond Markets and What's Next," Unpopular Front, April 10, 2025
Paul Blumenthal, "Trump's Rationales for His Tariffs Are Incoherent and Contradict Each Other," Huffington Post, April 7, 2025
Comments
This episode is basically the perversity, futility, and jeopardy case against tariffs
Roman Drake
2025-04-24 02:15:21 +0000 UTCI noticed that the women in the Australian woman video clip that was played where repeating hip hop lyrics. Chapo also talked about this video. The lyrics basically translate to AAVE terms for being "loose and/or independent women" to the ears of a conservative. I know that the AAVE is part of their obsession with the video. Another argument I here bubbling on my part of the Internet is the fight over AAVE being sanitized as just Internet speak. More young conservatives are claiming that speech patterns on the Internet were just naturally developed into its own thing and not stolen from the well documented AAVE or less documented Black youth slang. I say all this to ask about the historical conversation of conservatives as more Afro-culture where folded in to American culture. I know it been mostly protested at first but what about the stuff that they grow to cherish like Jazz and Rock in another time?
Devin Grigsby
2025-04-21 14:44:22 +0000 UTCThe real preview to Trump II was the Obama administration quietly keeping the Bush policy of rendition alive after the 2008 election, with special carve outs for "partner nations" like Turkmenistan, Turkey, and Pakistan. This is a domestication of a policy that is 20 years old and has bipartisan support.
Leonardo Restrepo
2025-04-18 15:16:12 +0000 UTCLori Wallach, from Rethink Trade and American Economic Liberties Project is the expert you need to discuss tariffs.
J Kepler
2025-04-18 04:58:05 +0000 UTCCould you please point me to some of your episodes where you elaborate on your (possible?) beef with “Sleepy Joe”? Thanks!
Big Honkin’ AG Fanboy
2025-04-17 17:38:13 +0000 UTCCame on this to say something similar. I like Ganz fine but why not get someone with actual expertise in finance to do this?
joey vdN
2025-04-17 16:23:43 +0000 UTCPlease do an episode on what is happening with the UAW right now !
Cameron Fink
2025-04-17 11:15:16 +0000 UTCI love Ganz, and was excited to see him on this episode. But, I having a worked in finance, he’s not the right guest for this topic. I think a Trash Future collab on tariffs/macro would be wonderful. Just a suggestion from another Central PA escapee.
Christopher Martin
2025-04-17 03:13:19 +0000 UTCHis recent steampunk identification with the President who crushed the Populists, McKinley (probably prescribed by one of his goons), is a masks-off that should make it definitively clear he never had an authentically populist agenda, if it wasn’t already obvious enough why this person would be on the side of the robber barons and John Galts of the world against the poor. The Bannonite reference to Andrew Jackson, scary as it was in its own right, made a bit more sense from a populist perspective, if Trump had ever been serious about re-enfranchising his more downgraded voters. This is why he is not a fascist in the 1930s sense, given Fascism did actually manage to negotiate a true compromise between contradictory class interests (at the cost of tremendous violence and tyranny). A lot of average Germans or Italians had real buy-in with the fascist project, which unlike MAGAism, actually was a fleshed-out plan, albeit a sinister one. And even during the Reagan era, enough people made real money to give Reaganism some kind of widespread mandate (won in a landslide Trump will never actually achieve). Reaganism had beneficiaries beyond a portion of the upper class and a corrupt inner circle. Trump voters on the other hand remembered COVID checks with the boss’s signature on it, but all they will get in the end is the Trump memecoin, inflation, and austerity. They wanted Jackson and they got McKinley, but a Mickey Mouse version, who unlike the economic nationalists of that time, does not have any consistent plan. They dreamt of building the American retro-futuristic counterpart of Communist China, and they got 1990s Russia instead. In other words, the realization that the GOP is a mirror image of the Democratic Party, and a symptom of the same decadence, only much more destructive in its disappointing absence of vision. Nothing to offer other than mafioso bullying and cheap culture war, a cacophonic “remix” of America’s greatest hits serving as PR for pure rapacious corruption.
Paul Lemaire
2025-04-16 21:44:38 +0000 UTCAbout MAGA’s incoherent nostalgias and longing for post-war manufacturing’s blue collar middle class, there is another contradiction baked into the “Make America Great Again” motto itself: it is a recycled slogan borrowed from Reagan’s 1980 campaign, and we know what key role Reagan played in embracing neoliberalism, financialization, globalization, de-industrialization (and union busting). Incidentally, it just so happens that is precisely when Trump made his name as a businessman. This is the economy he is a product of, despite his longstanding Buchananite complaints.
Paul Lemaire
2025-04-16 21:42:43 +0000 UTCI hate to say it but I think Jeremy Strong is destined to keep losing to Kieran Culkin forever
Tim Combes
2025-04-16 19:58:32 +0000 UTCGreat episode gentlemen, but Jesus would it kill you guys to talk about the tariffs re: threats of annexing Canada?! We’re having an election right now where this is 1000% the overriding ballot question. Trump’s 51st state shit is bringing a Liberal Party that was all but dead and buried in January back to the brink of power. Canadians feel like the 19th C “ripe fruit” doctrine that drove the colonies of British North America to confederation in the first place is menacing us once again.
Dónal Gill
2025-04-16 19:24:17 +0000 UTCThe Schmuck to Piece of Shit Pipeline needs to be ended
mark muoio
2025-04-16 18:08:22 +0000 UTCGreat episode. If you ever do need someone with lots of economics expertise who explains all of the macro implications of economic policy well, let me recommend Julia Coronado.
Chris Schreck
2025-04-16 17:25:35 +0000 UTCCan never get enough Ganz! Love hearing you guys talk
Peter Carlen
2025-04-16 15:54:55 +0000 UTCI'm a welder in a factory in Cleveland and the idea that bringing back this type of work at a large scale, if it is even possible, is going to solve some kind of "masculinity crisis" just seems incredibly bizarre. I can only speak for myself but at best I find it usually very dull and alienating and worst it's backbreaking and dangerous. To be fair I don't quite know exactly what I would rather do (podcasting obviously), but this shit isn't it lol.
Henry Martyn
2025-04-16 14:18:22 +0000 UTCEnlightening episode. Thank you. Can you do an episode about how and why Democrats are being so lame / such push overs? It seems the all they can muster is meaningless performative gestures... Like Booker's marathon speech that didn't do a single thing to stop votes / slow down Trump? Why did Schumer capitulate on the CR? What gives?
Karen
2025-04-16 12:28:01 +0000 UTCTrump is so ignorant of economics. If he would watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, it would increase his knowledge of economics by about 500%.
Chad Bailey
2025-04-16 00:01:40 +0000 UTCGanz episode, best episode
Evan Nordgren
2025-04-15 23:16:58 +0000 UTCGreat episode. Needed this. Thanks gents!
Joel
2025-04-15 21:10:53 +0000 UTCDon't say that. He reads these!! -Sam
Know Your Enemy
2025-04-15 21:02:07 +0000 UTC‘The forms of nostalgia are incompatible’ is a perfect description of the overall political environment right now. Well said, Sam.
Matt McCabe
2025-04-15 20:57:29 +0000 UTCAs a dues paying member of the UAW, a reminder that not all of us are auto workers. I'm a preschool teacher, and I'm sure many people know there are a lot of grad students and higher ed workers in the UAW, so the tariffs aren't the easy boon to all membership. I'm pissed that Fain wants to offer rhetorical support (I get that he needs to fight for gains for his membership, not play some counter-admin role to simply boost the Dems), but you can do that without pretending starting a trade war is cool cause, hey, at least some of your members will get something out of it.
Corey Spaley
2025-04-15 20:46:34 +0000 UTC@Sam But you also say in the episode that Fain's critical support represents an "alliance" with the Trump administration, and you then critique UAW's strategy as short-sighted because of the Trump admin's broader hostility to labor. But the jump from "critical support for one policy" to "alliance with Trump" is too big, and only makes sense from a partisan perspective that sees organized labor as an appendage of the Democratic Party. Fain is trying to stake out a more independent role for labor. I think the left should welcome efforts to make labor more independent from the Democrats, especially when it's done in Fain's way and not O'Brien's way (ie. attacking trans people).
Andrew Blinkinsop
2025-04-15 19:16:09 +0000 UTCI believe I said “critical support” for the tariffs. Which is accurate. Supporting the concept, criticizing the implementation. I hope my comments were clear. (FWIW, as the son of a UAW lawyer, I also take these matters seriously.) - Sam
Know Your Enemy
2025-04-15 17:38:58 +0000 UTCTo say that Shawn Fein and the UAW are providing critical support to Trump is disingenuous. Fein is both critical of Trump's policy and offering a different vision on how to use tariffs to protect American workers. The left needs a counter vision that isn't just temu makes us cheap shit and that's how we deal with wage stagnation. The loss of the auto industry is an existential crisis that has been ongoing for decades. Auto manufacturing work has been a key driver towards the middle class for working class people for several generations. I say this as someone who used her father's UAW college grant benefit to help pay for college while he continued to work at factories that would close throughout the 90s and 00s.
Julia
2025-04-15 17:17:30 +0000 UTCEspecially insane part of the fantasy around manufacturing is how recently mass industry was on the other side of that equation. Like how many decades of essays and novels and films and songs about the loss of craft labor did we have to go through just for these freaks to now hold up mass production manufacturing as the vital, meaningful kind of work?
Andrés Emil González
2025-04-15 17:04:18 +0000 UTCwe get there - Sam
Know Your Enemy
2025-04-15 16:29:41 +0000 UTCAnother horny handed Stakhanovite listener here, looking forward to listening while dodging molten globs of puddling iron!
JDF
2025-04-15 16:21:07 +0000 UTCYep already listened and I felt awe yet also emotional free floating joy while feeling said wonder. How Hannah Zeavin shows new insights to material I have read before yet did not notice specific details, and how she does it with kindness and grace showing the non intentional double binds. As a metaphor, it is like watching Serena Williams play tennis, I follow every movement yet my brain can barely keep up with what may happen next even if she goes at a pace I am totally following at the same time.
Matthew Theisen
2025-04-15 16:16:12 +0000 UTCWe want more Ganz 🗣️
Addison
2025-04-15 16:09:08 +0000 UTCas you may know, Hannah Zeavin is the featured guest in the current episode of the "Ordinary Unhappiness" podcast. I'm looking forward to her book as well.
David in Brooklyn
2025-04-15 16:01:20 +0000 UTCJohn Ganz’s already said a word that I been *ruminating* on for two months now in the preview, and Sam just repeated a variant of it in the intro. (Sorry Matt I am going Freud and Early Child Development Theory), the word is deluded and delusion but I am focusing on its earlier form of it. • the verb deludere, with “ludere” as in to play plus the prefix “de-” like to move something down, like to mock or jape or try a new combination. We also use that ludere word part … for other words like ludricious, delusion, deluded, illusion, *collusion*, prelude and so on. • It is all a game of fort da to borrow a story about a 1 year old child. And when it does not go according to plan / the game, you find someone to blame like mother or a scapegoat. Somehow the world is not generating my treats and thus it is the bad form of gender, I am mad and that is the good form of gender. God I am tired and thus the rumination on words and what they mean. (last thought I am **so** looking forward to Hannah Zeavin‘s book on Mothers and Immediacy / Mediation that comes out in 2 weeks.)
Matthew Theisen
2025-04-15 15:52:37 +0000 UTCEvery episode with Ganz is a treat
vincent st-gelais
2025-04-15 15:49:52 +0000 UTCHaven’t finished the episode, so forgive me if you’ve already covered it, but there was a piece by Jennifer Burns on the rationale for the tariff regime. I suppose it could be read as a corollary of the first rationale you identify, to usher in a manufacturing renaissance. But Burns makes the case that devaluation of the dollar is the point long term. The predicate delusion being that we’re economically disadvantaged by the dollar’s premium status in global trade.
Zach
2025-04-15 15:48:55 +0000 UTC
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