The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
After President Donald Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on most goods from Canada and Mexico and 10 percent tariffs on China, he unleashed some angry, ranting tweets about what he had just done, with his ire particularly focused on Canada. But Trump also admitted something important. There very well could be pain, but it will be worth it, he said. This comes amid new indications that many Republicans are suffering high “anxiety” about Trump’s presidency. So what are the prospects, at this point, for Trump’s allies in the GOP and the corporate world to step up and challenge this madness? Perversely, the very fact that he seems so unhinged and unshackled could lead them to muzzle themselves. Today, we’re talking about all this with Cathy Young, a staff writer at The Bulwark, who’s written very well recently about a number of issues related to all this. Thanks for coming on, Kathy.
Cathy Young: Thank you for having me.
Sargent: In these rants, Trump said, “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe ... but it will all be worth the price that must be paid.” Right now, it’s clear this will likely drive up prices for things like food, gas, autos, and so forth. His own voters are going to be hit pretty hard, we think. Cathy, you pointed out recently that all this puts Secretary of State Marco Rubio in a tough spot. Do you think Rubio and Senate Republicans who have a similar mindset to Rubio and are clearly panicked right now expected him to actually go through with this in quite this way?
Young: No, I’m quite sure they didn’t expect that. And I’ll tell you, I spoke before the election to conservative pundits who didn’t like a lot of the populist stuff. They didn’t like Biden. They didn’t like the higher corporate taxes and so on. And they were assuring me that No, no, no, the tariffs are not going to happen. All of this is just to repeal to the populist base, and it’s really just talk. So I think we’re at the “find out” stage of this.
Sargent: Yeah, I wonder if they’re rethinking their priors here.
Young: Some of them are, yeah.
Sargent: Well, that’s good to hear. Let’s hear from them. So Trump had a particularly angry deranged rant about Canada. He claimed that we pay hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize Canada, which seems to be a reference to our trade deficit with that country. That’s not a subsidy. But that aside, Trump added, without this subsidy, Canada will cease to exist as a viable country; therefore, Canada should become our fifty-first state. As you put it in one of your pieces, Trump is using economic pressure to coerce some form of U.S.–Canada unification. Can you talk about that dimension of this?
Young: Right. First of all, let me point out that Trump’s recent posts really reflect his essential mindset that we’re always being victimized, like we’re always the sucker for everybody else and everybody is beating up on us. It’s funny because conservatives have been trashing, in some cases rightly, the victim mentality on the left, and here is this quintessential victim mentality like we’re always getting taken advantage of. It’s a totally zero-sum view of trade, which is ridiculous. The coercion angle is also interesting because in terms of this much discussed subject of the similarities between Trump and Putin, which sometimes I think are exaggerated, it’s very common in Putin’s inner circle to talk about how Ukraine is in a real state and Ukraine wouldn’t really exist without support from the West. Here we have Trump using similar language about Canada. There is a certain... I’m not saying that he’s proposing to drive tanks into Canada, but the mindset is interesting in a very bad way.
Sargent: Trump really does seem to be saying to Canada that you will face tariffs unless you submit to our imperial dominance.
Young: What’s fascinating about and disturbing about this latest trade war, if you want to call it that, [is that] he doesn’t really seem to have any specific demands for what Canada can do. He’s made these nebulous statements about all of this fentanyl, all of these drugs that are supposedly coming in from Canada. And I’ve seen people who are trying to justify this and say, Yeah, there’s a lot of unregulated trucking that may be bringing drugs into the U.S.
As far as I can tell, there is really no evidence that all of this is going on. If there is, he hasn’t said anything specific like, Well, you you’ve got to institute better regulations for trucking and inspect the big trucks heading to the U.S. No, he’s not saying that. He’s just making these completely formless, unhinged statements about Canada being a major drug supplier—which I haven’t seen any evidence for, and he’s certainly not producing any evidence. It really looks like just bullying, really.
Sargent: Yes, the lack of any actual rationale combined with him saying things like, Well, if you want to avoid tariffs, become our fifty-first state, reminds me of the schoolyard bully says something like, What did you say about my mother? Unfortunately, here he’s the president of the United States talking about our relationships with other countries.
Young: Seriously, this is all very unhinged.
Sargent: Right. In all seriousness, the combination of the lack of a rationale with the explicit statement that if you want to avoid tariffs, submit to us seems alarming.
Young: Well, yes. It doesn’t just seem alarming, it is alarming. It’s certainly an attack on what we’ve called the rules-based international order. There’s a really overt mentality from the Trump camp, the MAGA camp, that the rules-based international order is complete fiction, and that it’s really all about might makes right. That is really what it’s about.
And it’s interesting, and I’m maybe going off on a little tangent here, that we had this bizarre statement a couple of days ago from JD Vance about how the leader of every country is supposed to look out for his country and this is what America First is all about. American interests should be primary, which in a certain sense no one would really dispute. Of course, if you’re the president of the U.S., the U.S. is the country that you’re supposed to be concerned about first and foremost. Thank you, Captain Obvious, right? But he then went on to say—he was being interviewed by Sean Hannity, who asked him something about Putin and Xi—Yeah, well, President Xi looks out for his country, for his people. Vladimir Putin looks out for his people, and Donald Trump looks out for Americans.
It’s just the underlying contempt for any pretense that this is about we value freedom, we value democracy. He’s citing two dictators as role models, basically. To say that Vladimir Putin looks after his people—whom he’s currently sending to die in huge numbers in a completely pointless war where they’re losing like 500 people to take one half a square mile of Ukrainian land—is completely ridiculous. He’s wrecking the economy and so on. It’s fascinating that there really is this underlying authoritarian mentality, that it’s all about the rule of the strong or the perceived rule of the strong. It is quite scary, and I think a lot of Republicans.... I would love to have a heart-to-heart chat with Marco Rubio and find out what he really thinks about all this, but I don’t think he’s going to tell me or anyone else.
Sargent: To your point, we really are getting a very clear look at what America First actually means. It is almost like a Putinesque attitude where looking out for your country, as JD Vance put it, means you don’t have any obligations to the international order of any kind. Now we have business leaders and business groups being really quiet about the impact all this could have.
You wrote recently that Trump is already using the state as a weapon of censorship. It seems like corporate leaders are going to be watching that closely, and are very aware that Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg and threatened the broadcasting rights of media companies that displease him. Do you fear that that will make them reluctant to speak out now? And what does that mean?
Young: Well, we’ll see. It’s certainly a factor. We saw that Zuckerberg just agreed to a $25 million settlement to Trump in a lawsuit over Trump being banned from Facebook after the January 6 events. It’s certainly a sign that the intimidation works, certainly when you have bullying by litigation. The chilling of speech by litigation is certainly a thing that’s been going on for some time, and when you combine that with the power of the presidency, it really does become doubly concerning, to say the least.
And in terms of what effect is it going to have on other media, interestingly enough, the one publication that we’ve seen so far being really harshly critical of the tariffs is The Wall Street Journal, which has been, in its editorial positions, though it didn’t endorse Trump, definitely leaned in a pro-Trump direction if you look at the editorial page. And now they just had a really, really tough editorial saying that these tariffs are terrible, it’s just a bad idea all around. So that’s interesting, and we’ll see, I guess, how that will impact other media’s willingness to go after Trump on this.
Sargent: Yes. You’re right to underscore the Wall Street Journal’s reaction to the tariffs as being an important thing. Trump himself erupted about precisely that in one of his tweets, saying that The Wall Street Journal is “globalist.”
Young: I was going to say.... I haven’t seen that tweet, but I was going to say, Did he call them globalists?
Sargent: Of course he did. He absolutely did. To talk about Republicans as well, because the degree to which they are intimidated is a little bit missing from the discussion, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently reported that many Republican lawmakers she talks to are “beside themselves with anxiety” about where everything is going. I’ve got think that corporate leaders are going to be on the phone with GOP senators privately saying, You’ve got do something about this. Even if those corporate leaders won’t say anything publicly, they’re going to want Republican senators and lawmakers to step up a little bit here. You guys at The Bulwark closely track the GOP’s capitulation to Trump, where do you see this element of it going?
Young: I guess we’ll see; we don’t know yet. I think you’re right that they probably are getting pressured by their constituents in the business community, so there is a countervailing pressure. I’m sure there are a lot of big donors who are involved. And for some lawmakers, this may be the nudge that they need to start standing up to Trump. What an amazing idea. Because I will tell you, by the way, during the campaign, I really did not expect the GOP to cave out completely.
I was rereading just yesterday that piece that I did about the prospective Trump cabinet. This was, I think, back in September. I mentioned Kash Patel and I said, Well, it’s probably very unlikely that he could actually get confirmed as director of the FBI or CIA, and Well, maybe he’ll get one of these acting director things. Right now, it looks like he is going to be confirmed. The capitulation has been far more complete and far more disgraceful than I expected. I guess we’ll see what will happen with Tulsi Gabbard because that may be another line in the sand.
The tariffs, I think, are going to be an interesting moment of truth for a lot of people because not only is there pressure from the business community but really this has been something that the GOP, the Reagan GOP, was extremely opposed to. Is there any of that identity still left? We’ll see.
Sargent: That’s a really good question. With Trump openly and explicitly saying there is very likely to be “pain,” you’re going to also see major GOP constituencies who potentially take a big hit here, like farmers, for instance. Where do you see that going? The last time around, in the first administration, Trump essentially bought out farmers with aid programs after they started to take a hit from the tariffs. This looks like it could get a lot worse, right?
Young: Yeah. Also you really have to wonder what’s going to be the reaction from the Oh my God, eggs are so expensive voter, because that was such a major thing. We’ve seen articles after the election saying that the Democrats really underestimated the psychological pain inflicted by inflation because even if it’s offset by other things like higher wages, people still just get the sticker shock of going to the supermarket and seeing that suddenly a dozen of eggs is $6 instead of $3.
And I guess we’ll see because we do get a lot of food from Canada and Mexico. I just looked at the strawberries I got delivered from Wegmans yesterday and they’re from Mexico. So we’ll see how that goes because I think a lot of people really do not realize what’s about to happen. As I said, we’re at the find out stage.
Sargent: You want to tell people what you really mean when you say we’re at the find out stage?
Young: Can I say the other F-word? Yeah, well there’s the “fuck around and find out” line, FAFO. I guess now this is the find out part. And of course, the unfortunate thing is that those of us who didn’t fuck around are also about to find out what happens when our fellow citizens fuck around. Such is life.
Sargent: Very well put. Cathy Young, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Young: Thank you.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.