The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 4 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.
President Trump has now imposed sweeping tariffs across imports from all over the globe, prompting the markets to crater and experts to warn of a possible recession or even a depression. Trump took a question about this on Thursday, shrugged about the cratering economy, then jetted off to a golf tournament in Florida. The tariffs themselves are bad enough, but what’s also bad is that his imposition of them is likely an enormous and grotesque abuse of power. Because of this, the prospects for stopping them via Congress or in the courts are actually not nonexistent. We think Democrats should proceed right now as if they can, in fact, be stopped. Today, we’re talking about all this with the person we always turn to when bewildering congressional procedural matters arise, veteran congressional scholar Norm Ornstein. Thanks for coming back on, Norm.
Norm Ornstein: Always a pleasure, Greg.
Sargent: Trump has imposed 10 percent tariffs on just about all global imported goods and, on top of that, a range of reciprocal tariffs on several of our leading trading partners. They’re not even reciprocal at all really, but let’s put that aside for now. It’s an enormously reckless move. We’ll throw the global economy into turmoil. Peter Tchir, head of macro strategy at Academy Securities, says the tariffs are “shockingly high” and “inexplicable” and “a disaster.” What do you think, Norm?
Ornstein: They’re inexplicably high and a disaster. I agree. And obviously not only do the markets agree, but so do many people in the business world. I saw that the CEO of Restoration Hardware, as he watched his stock plummet today, responded with a simple two-word phrase, “Oh, shit.” And my guess is that that’s been replicated, probably in even more colorful language, by business leaders, economists, and investors all across America and probably around the world.
Sargent: “Oh, shit” seems like a pretty good reaction, or at least an apt one. So Trump was asked about all this on Thursday. The reporter pointed out that the markets are way down, that they’ve had their worst day in years because of his tariffs. Then the reporter asked Trump, “How’s it going?” Here’s Trump’s answer.
Donald Trump (audio voiceover): I think it’s going very well. It was an operation, like when a patient gets operated on. And it’s a big thing. I said this would exactly be the way it is. We have $6 trillion or $7 trillion coming into our country, and we’ve never seen anything like it. The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom.
Sargent: Norm, he says the patient has been operated on, but the patient didn’t need this operation in the first place. And the patient is now bleeding out on the operating table with his anesthesia worn off. Your thoughts?
Ornstein: It’s almost like the old joke, “The operation was a success, but the patient died.” Also, Greg, I have to tell you: When he said that and then went on to say the markets are going to boom, we’ve never seen anything like the economic boom we’re going to have, it reminded me of his reaction to Covid, which was this will be nothing, we may get a handful of deaths, but everything is going to be just great. We know what happened. His presidential term the first time around led to probably 400,000 unnecessary deaths and many that followed afterward because of what he did or did not do. We could be facing the equivalent in economic terms with all of this. And he is not going to move away from that rosy scenario, as it were, until and unless he is blocked from doing it or enough Republicans basically just stand up and scream at him, saying, You cannot do this anymore.
Sargent: The core thing that happened here is that to do this, Trump had to declare a national emergency and then invoke the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which supposedly allows him to unilaterally impose tariffs. The national emergency he declared is that we’re suffering from trade deficits. This has never been done by a president until this year. And there’s just no plausible way to say that trade deficits, which aren’t necessarily bad, constitute a national emergency. Is there?
Ornstein: This defies logic entirely. And the reality is that we’ve had a very robust economy for a lot of years now, defying a lot of predictions about it. In the aftermath of Covid, it came back very, very strongly. To say that we are in the middle of an economic emergency is ridiculous, except that he’s now going to trigger an economic emergency with this. And a few things flow from it. (1) is how far off base can he be in simply declaring something that is blatantly false and still get away with it? And (2) is what are the means to be able to block this from causing the damage we know will follow if we don’t do something about it?
Sargent: Well, there are some things that can happen, and I’d like to bring those up. There are a couple things underway in Congress right now. I think we can expect Democratic senators to push something in the next day or so that would effectively cancel the national emergency that Trump used to impose the tariffs. That would end them. You’d need a few GOP senators to support this, but a few already supported a narrower anti-tariff measure that just passed the other day. Then after that, you’d need a discharge petition in the House moving the same thing, canceling the national emergency. You need a handful of Republicans in the House to support that, which is not impossible. It’s implausible, but not impossible. Norm, could you walk us through the details of how that would work?
Ornstein: Let me note as well the election results on Tuesday of two House seats in overwhelmingly Republican districts in Florida that Trump and the predecessors had won by 30 points or more. While Republicans won, the margin was cut in half in both instances to 15 percent or less. I mention that because that had to leave every House Republican who won by 15 percent or less quite nervous last night. They see the direction that things are going. So you’ve got pressure points with some of these Republicans.
Now, what happens is this. As you indicated, we’ve already seen a Senate resolution that passed with four Republican votes that countermands the 25 percent tariffs on Canada that Trump had already imposed, before these across-the-board huge ones that he announced just yesterday and today. That has to go through the House. Speaker Mike Johnson has already indicated he will not bring it up, so the venue to use is a discharge petition. This is a rule in the House that goes back well over a century, and was a way to get around an all-powerful speaker who could block anything from taking place. It says, under limited circumstances, a majority of the House—218 members in this case—signing a petition can force a bill to come to the floor and get an up-or-down vote. A resolution by House and Senate passing into law can countermand Donald Trump.
If Democrats are going to have any savvy at all in this case, they should not only bring up the resolution that passed the Senate to block the 25 percent tariffs on Canada. They should also introduce a broader one to block all of these outrageous tariffs and save the economy—and get Republicans on the record about whether they’re for it or against it.
Sargent: I want to be clear, Norm. The thing that already passed the Senate with a few Republicans only applied to tariffs on Canada. What we’re going to see in the next day or so from Democratic senators is a new resolution that terminates the national emergency that Trump is using to justify the across-the-board global tariffs, all of them. So presumably, maybe, let’s hope you could get three, four, five Senate Republicans to support that just as they supported the narrow margin on Canada. Then after, you would take that and try to do a discharge petition in the House on the broader thing—and you’d need around five House Republicans to cross over for that. It’s not impossible, right?
Ornstein: It’s not impossible. I’m frankly skeptical that we can get that happening in the next few days, or even the next week or two. Senate Republicans are weak when it comes to defying Donald Trump. And for something that’s just taken place, they may say, Let’s wait, we’ll see if he’s right, maybe it will be just a short period with pain. When we see the pain ratcheted up, there is no reason why Democrats can’t keep bringing this up for a vote and get an outcome that would be more favorable a little bit further down the road.
Sargent: The bottom line here is that all you need is four or five GOP senators and around five GOP House members so that Congress could pass something to terminate the fake national emergency and end the global tariffs, right?
Ornstein: That’s correct. And we can add that if this were able to be done by secret ballot vote—which it is not—the votes, I believe, would be overwhelming to block this. Most Republicans in Congress know that this is not just folly; it’s dangerous, destructive, and horrifying folly that could lead to a global depression. They know that. But it’s a cult, and they’re not going to go against it at this point without maximum pressure from Democrats in the House and the Senate to get them on record repeatedly endorsing this strategy until they can’t do it anymore.
Sargent: Well, I want to be clear that even if this did get through the Senate and House by the strategy we’re talking about here, if Trump vetoes it then you need two-thirds of each chamber to override that veto, correct?
Ornstein: Correct. And that’s not likely to happen, except that if Trump is rejected in this fashion by a Republican House and Senate, even if it’s only a relative handful of each of them doing it, it is a powerful message. It is a message that would have an impact on him and other things that he tried to do unilaterally, including economic warfare.
Sargent: I agree. And I’m going to say something really crazy. Given the cult-like qualities that you’re talking about in the Republican Party today, I think the chances of getting two-thirds of each chamber are not just slim to none; they are none to none. But I think Democrats should proceed as if it’s possible to get them. Push really hard, bludgeon the hell out of Republicans day in and day out in every conceivable forum, say over and over, Republicans are helping Trump cut taxes for the ultrawealthy and corporations because the “revenues” from tariffs will be paid by working-class and middle-class consumers, and that is what will be used to offset those tax cuts for the very rich. Say it over and over, Republicans and Trump are making your prices higher, much higher, to fund more tax cuts for the super rich. Act like Republicans can be pushed, and do it.
Ornstein: And I would go beyond that, Greg. I think we need to see even more town halls in Republican districts, with Democrats doing their own hearings in some of these areas, and field hearings outside plants that are being closed. We had the parent company of Dodge and Chrysler announced today they were laying off 900 workers and shuttering one of their plants. We’re going to see more of that. We’re going to see a lot of prices go up as a consequence of these tariffs, including domestic prices.
I was just doing an interchange with somebody....Howard Lutnick, who I called Nutlick on a previous show, said, Well, this will get Americans to buy Poland Springs water instead of one of the imported waters like Evian and, of course, they’ll be able to do it so much cheaper. And I thought, Well, let’s see, if I own Poland Springs and everybody else’s prices go up substantially, what am I going to do? I’m going to raise my prices so that they’re still a little bit lower than others but higher than they were before—because why wouldn’t I? I’m a capitalist. So it’s a lack of understanding of economics. When we see those prices go up because of tariffs, Democrats ought to be in red states and in red areas pointing out to those voters that their own representatives and senators have refused to do anything about this.
Sargent: I agree. Again, I want to stress, I think Democrats need to act as if Republicans can be won over, and just beat the absolute hell out of them day in and day out with Trump did this to you, Republicans are cheering it, etc.
Ornstein: That’s got to be the way in which Democrats respond to this. And we have to do this not only because it’s the right politics, but because we face an unprecedented threat—not just our economy but to our way of life and to our democracy. If we treat this as just at the outer bounds of normality, the press corps will continue to treat it that way, and we are much less likely to be able to get out of it with at least the tatters of our political system and our economy intact.
Sargent: There’s also a way to do this through the courts as well, by the way. Ilya Somin, a law professor, is looking for potential plaintiffs, such as businesses who are forced to pay the new tariffs on imports. Then they would sue, arguing that Trump’s tariffs, particularly the invocation of the fake national emergency to justify them, are an abuse of power. What do you think the prospects for that working are, Norm?
Ornstein: I’m a little more skeptical at this point. It is quite striking that Ilya Somin, who is not anywhere near the left wing in most of what he does and is very much over there on the libertarian right, is leading this effort and trying to use the courts for this purpose. I think they have more traction even than what Somin is talking about because the rationale for the amounts in these tariffs was based on a complete lie about what tariffs other countries impose. Instead of a 2- or 3- or 5-percent tariff which is on many of these goods, Trump was claiming using utterly bogus numbers that their tariffs were 50, 60, 100, or 200 percent. It’s based on a false premise, and you’ve got that to add to any legal briefs that you do.
But I’m a little skeptical that the courts will intervene here. One reason, Greg, is that for better or worse, and mostly for worse, Congress has given more leeway to a president to do trade deals than they should have—with the expectation that presidents would actually be more mindful of avoiding protectionist traps than many in Congress would and avoiding just what he is now doing. Courts may in this instance give him a little more deference than they are giving him to his utterly lawless acts, along with DOGE and Elon Musk, of trying to shut down departments, firing people, sending innocent people to hellhole prisons and the like.
Sargent: It does seem to me though that there’s a pretty big legal vulnerability with this particular use of the emergency power, given the extraordinary gale-force bad faith that is behind declaring trade deficits a national economic emergency.
Ornstein: Yeah, it’s a sham excuse for a bizarre economic theory that a trade deficit means we’re being robbed and bilked that Trump has held since he was a student at Wharton, which surely should have taken away his degree before now. But it’s also part of Trump’s persona of shaking down anybody he can to get something of value. So I have little doubt that in return for what might be money or other benefits going to his family or his companies or opportunities to gain more leverage for the other things that he’s trying to do at home, he will use these as a bludgeon to get people to go along. But along the way, it’s the average American and the average person in countries of our allies and others who will suffer for what is a gangland shakedown scheme.
Sargent: That’s exactly what it is. Norm Ornstein, thanks so much for coming on. It’s always a great pleasure to talk to you.
Ornstein: Anytime. Let’s hope the next time we have something more positive to say. Not likely, but let’s hope.
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.