Transcript: As Trump Tariff Fiasco Worsens, Even Fox News Is Noticing
Sargent: No, no, I think the story is slow boat to recession, right? Isn’t that the story? Let me ask you this, though: Isn’t the big story ultimately that none of this has to be happening? Right? So Donald Trump came in, he inherited an economy that was in decent shape. There were some flaws, right? And people really were sour on it in many ways. And there’s a whole big argument over whether that’s justified or not. Putting that aside, it’s clear that the current situation—all these uncertainties, all the signs that we are on a slow boat to recession—[is] created by Donald Trump’s policies. Is that the deal?
Edwards: Yes. And you know because I host a podcast called Optimist Economy; we always talk about, in every show, what there is to feel good about in the economy. And for the most part, it always comes down to our potential and the economy we could have if we chose to, of the policies we could pursue, of the fixes we could make. And we can dwell in how poor of a manager Trump is for as long as we want, but we should remember that we have … The U.S. economy has everything going for it. We have a massive economy that bounces back from recessions pretty quickly, an unemployment rate that does climb but also falls. We’re almost always producing jobs. Even in the extent of the turmoil in economic policy right now, the fact that we’re still producing jobs is testimony to just how incredible this economy is. You’ve got 170 million people employed from the ages of 14 to 95 from every level of education in every sector and occupation imaginable. We are sitting on top of a gold mine. It is not being well managed by people from the congressional or executive branch necessarily, but we can rest in the fact that we have probably one of the best brain trusts of central banks—of any central bank in the world. If we were able to make better choices from public policy, we could really ride this to an era of prosperity.
That’s never going to come from Trump, because he’s stuck in the past and trying endlessly to recreate something that’s been gone for decades. And he lies about how to get there, and you can’t build a future based on lies. You can’t recreate a past that is gone, but we can build a better future and we have everything we need to do so. So I am eternally optimistic about the U.S. economy—not that that means that nothing bad will ever happen, but that we will continue to have the strongest and best economy in the world. Maybe we just have to get some stuff off our chest, like terribly destructive policy that people kind of like but are going to learn is terrible like these tariffs.
