Former Trump Treasury Secretary Clearly Thinks Tariffs Are Stupid

Steven Mnuchin, the treasury secretary during Donald Trump’s first term, is worried about the president’s new tariffs and hoping to change them via the president’s favorite medium: television.

On CNBC Thursday morning, Mnuchin tried to delicately ask for carve-outs and concessions, attempting to explain that “there’s a transition period here that needs to be adjusted to.

“It’s the larger tariffs that are called the reciprocal tariffs. I’m hopeful that those will be negotiated down, that those will bring people to the table, that those will be negotiated down. For many businesses, it takes a while to move the manufacturing base,” Mnuchin said.

“I hope the president will consider giving people credits for those people who have made real commitments, not just announcements, but real commitments, to build in the U.S,” added the longtime investment banker.

Mnuchin is not on bad terms with Trump or the administration, but it’s telling that he’s willing to point out some of the obvious flaws in Trump’s half-baked economic plan. And only last month he said that “people are overreacting a bit” to the administration’s policy changes.

“I don’t think we’re going to have a recession. I don’t think the outlook looks like we’re going to have a recession. And Larry Summers saying there’s a 50 percent probability, I just don’t agree with that,” Mnuchin said on CNBC at the time, referring to comments from another former Treasury head. The interview is a window into the way Mnuchin, who was widely seen as one of the “adults in the room” during his first term, likely approached the president when he served as his treasury secretary: as a toddler.

While Mnuchin didn’t mention a recession in Thursday’s interview, it’s clear he’s now worried about Trump’s actions and is hoping that, from behind a TV screen, Trump might see some sense with a very mild recommendation. Maybe he should be overreacting now.

In the topsy-turvy world of the Trump administration, market panic and financial suffering are somehow good things.

The president unveiled his economic agenda on Wednesday, revealing steep tariff hikes on practically every country in the world—regardless of whether the U.S. is running a trade deficit or surplus there.

The news sent markets reeling. But by Thursday morning, Donald Trump was still celebrating his plan.

“THE OPERATION IS OVER! THE PATIENT LIVED, AND IS HEALING,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “THE PROGNOSIS IS THAT THE PATIENT WILL BE FAR STRONGER, BIGGER, BETTER, AND MORE RESILIENT THAN EVER BEFORE. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

But it’s unclear what metrics—if any—Trump used to measure his success.

In reality, American businesses were seriously disturbed. The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged by 1,500 points, about 3.5 percent, while the S&P 500 sank by 3.9 percent, setting both on pace for their worst day since the 2022 inflation crisis. The Nasdaq Composite tanked by more than 5 percent—bringing it down by 17 percent from its all-time high and down 13 percent year-to-date, the index’s worst performance since March 2020.

Stock futures similarly plummeted. The value of the U.S. dollar dropped, and the price for a troy ounce of gold skyrocketed.

Overnight, some of the country’s most competitive companies lost hundreds of billions of dollars. Nike and Lululemon, whose business models rely on international manufacturing deals in China and Vietnam, each lost more than 10 percent. Big-box stores also saw prominent losses: Best Buy, Target, and Home Depot lost 5 percent.

The tech industry was similarly shaken: Apple was down 9 percent (worth approximately $300 billion in market value), Alphabet by 4 percent, Amazon by 7 percent, Meta by 7 percent, Microsoft by 3 percent, and Nvidia by 6 percent.

Stores that rely heavily on imported goods saw their stocks tank too. Five Below lost 29 percent, Dollar Tree fell by 8 percent, and the Gap suffered a 22 percent loss.

“The macro does not make sense, but the level of chaos and uncertainty, coupled with revaluing highly overpriced stocks, is hitting hard,” assessed CNBC analyst Ron Insana on Thursday.

In a note to investors, JP Morgan said that Trump’s tariffs had a 40 percent chance of slingshotting the U.S. economy into a recession. JP Morgan underscored that the tariffs would cause a price surge—adding 2 percent to the consumer price index—and additionally raise taxes on Americans by $660 billion a year, “the largest tax increase in recent memory by a long shot,” reported CNN.

“The impact on inflation will be substantial,” the analysts said, according to CNN. “We view the full implementation of these policies as a substantial macroeconomic shock.”

A judge has ordered the Trump administration to release a man whom it wrongly detained and planned to deport to El Salvador.

In a brief one-page filing overnight Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Rolando Olvera ordered that the government not only release Adrian Gil Rojas but that it buy him a ticket from Brownsville, Texas, back to New York.

“The Court holds that the Petitioner is a Venezuelan national with a valid Temporary Protected Status and was wrongfully detained,” Olvera wrote.

“The Court further holds that Respondents produced no evidence that Petitioner is a danger to the public,” he added.

The government had argued that it should be allowed to detain and deport Gil Rojas because his TPS was set to expire on April 2, but his lawyer insisted that he was in the process of reopening his immigration case and that there was reason to believe that the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal TPS would fail.

The lawyer was right: On Monday, a San Francisco judge blocked the government from revoking the protected status of about 350,000 Venezuelans. Judge Edward Chen slammed Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem for making “sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries.”

“Acting on the basis of a negative group stereotype and generalizing such stereotype to the entire group is the classic example of racism,” Chen said in his order.

Gil Rojas, who said that he was arrested in New York last month, had been one of dozens of Venezuelan nationals detained by ICE who were sneakily moved closer and closer to an airfield in Harlingen, Texas, where the government staged a mass deportation to a notorious torture prison in El Salvador.

On March 14, the plane that was supposed to take Gil Rojas suffered a mechanical issue and was rescheduled for the following day, giving his lawyer enough time to get Olvera to issue an order blocking his immediate removal. Gil Rojas was spared, unlike the dozens of others for whom due process was suspended under Donald Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law he has reappropriated to aid in his mass deportation efforts.

Olvera said that when Gil Rojas was returned to New York, he should be released on his own recognizance, and recommended that he wear an ankle monitor while his immigration case was pending.

Earlier this week, the Trump administration admitted that it had wrongly deported Kilmer Armado Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national who had been granted protected status from being sent back to El Salvador. The government blamed an “administrative error,” and a judge ruled that the man could not be returned to the U.S. because the court lacked jurisdiction now that he was out of U.S. custody.

Evidence that the government expedited the deportation of individuals who, as Olvera put it, were not a “danger to the public” only continues to mount. The government revealed that it had heavily relied on the tattoos to identify members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang the U.S. government has deemed a terrorist group, for deportation. But experts on the gang say that there are no tattoos that signify TdA affiliation.

When Democrats attacked the Trump administration for the gargantuan price of eggs, the administration responded by importing vast quantities from Turkey and South Korea—two countries that were hit hard by the tariffs imposed on Wednesday. 

When asked about the issue, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins had no definitive answer on whether those imported eggs would be tariffed, reinforcing the multiple contradictions at the center of Trump’s isolationist trade war in the process. 

“President Trump yesterday gave you much praise talking about the job you’ve done in the last month and a half. I wanna talk about what you’ve done with eggs,” Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo asked Rollins on Thursday. “National egg prices have declined 9 percent from last week, now averaging $3 a dozen, according to the USDA. Secretary … are eggs gonna be tariffed?” 

“Well, so, yeah let’s pivot to eggs.… Listen, we rolled out a very bold plan about a month ago.… Obviously it’s his vision we’re effectuating. The market reacted very favorably to it, [it] included some short-term imports but also included helping our poultry farmers in America,” Rollins answered, avoiding the question. “So as we repopulate our chicken farms and our egg-laying farms, I think we’ll see the price coming down even more.… Only good news on the egg front, and hopefully it will hold.”

“So where are the eggs coming from that you’re importing?” Bartiromo asked. 

“Well, we’re importing from Turkey, we’re importing from South Korea, to a few other countries right now,” Rollins responded. “But again, at the end of the day. once our farms are repopulated … then we’ll go back to pretty much using all American-lain eggs.”

“So then that means that eggs will be tariffed, if you’re taking them from Turkey, right? That’s part of the tariff plan,” Bartiromo pushed. There will be a 10 percent tariff on Turkey, according to Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement.  

“Well, yes, all to be determined,” Rollins replied, refusing to commit. ‘We’re all at negotiations, but yes, that’s a possibility.” 

Lower grocery prices—and lower prices in general—were a central theme of Trump’s campaign. Trump himself riffed on it at his “Liberation Day” announcement. But the new tariffs go directly against those promises, and even his inner circle are struggling to find a way to explain themselves.

Got a problem with the Trump administration? Good luck.

Recently laid-off employees from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were told to contact Anita Pinder, the former director at the agency’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, with any complaints. A notice informed severed workers that they had 45 calendar days to contact Pinder following their termination date, listing Pinder’s name, email, and phone number.

But those who knew Pinder said the directive came as a “gut punch,” according to The Washington Post, since Pinder died last year.

“They couldn’t have run it past the people at CMS that were at the funeral and knew she died,” Karen Shields, one of Pinder’s former co-workers, told the Post. “This is a lack of communication. There is just a better way to do this.”

Shields told the newspaper that it “pained” her to see Pinder’s name used in the reduction-in-force notices.

“She would have been someone, even though her job would have been on the chopping block, she would have helped,” Shields said.

The negligent error is just one recent instance in which the “shock and awe” of the Trump administration’s federal makeover has resulted in dud details and mass confusion.

At the Food and Drug Administration, fired staffers were instructed to contact an Office of Equal Employment Opportunity employee that had left the agency more than a month ago, the Post reported.

So far, the Trump administration—directed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency—has fired more than 100,000 federal employees. But tens of thousands more government jobs are expected to be on the chopping block as Trump pursues a second round of “voluntary” buyouts.

More than 10,000 jobs are expected to be cut at the Department of Health and Human Services, which encompasses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed downsizing the agency’s 82,000-person workforce by nearly a quarter.

A new Gallup poll shows that Americans are much more worried about Social Security and the economy.

The poll, which measured opinions from March 3 to March 16, said that concern about the Social Security system is at a 15-year high, with 52 percent of Americans worried about it a “great deal.” Also ranking high were the economy at 60 percent, health care costs at 59 percent, and inflation at 56 percent.

The worries reflect the Trump administration’s actions over the past few months, with cuts made to the Social Security Administration and the whiplash over the president’s bizarre tariff decisions. Those fears may get worse, as Trump went ahead with instituting aggressive tariffs against countries across the world on Wednesday, calling it “Liberation Day.” Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who is overseeing much of the administration’s policy, has called Social Security “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

Markets have already plummeted Thursday, and criticism of the tariffs have even come within the Republican Party. Cuts to the Social Security Administration threaten to cause interruptions to benefits for 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans. Last month, Martin O’Malley, who headed the SSA under President Biden, warned that the cuts could result in the agency missing payments for the first time in its 80-year history.

It’s no surprise that the last time worries about Social Security were this high, the country was in the midst of a recession brought about by the financial crisis of 2008. The difference between now and then is that these worries are brought about by self-inflicted crises. Neither the SSA or the economy were in trouble prior to Trump’s inauguration. If the president continues on its current course, these worries could evolve into full-blown panic over losing Social Security and an even worse recession.

The Trump administration is urging nervous voters to “trust” it in response to the impending economic fallout from the President’s tariffs on virtually all foreign imports.

“To anyone on Wall Street this morning I would say trust in President Trump,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on CNN Thursday morning. “This is a president who is doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first time. We saw a wages increase, we saw inflation come down. We had a Trump energy boom, we had the largest tax cuts in history, and that’s exactly what the president intends to do.… The United States of America is no longer going to be cheated by foreign nations around the world.”

The trade war that the president announced on Wednesday as “Liberation Day” has already tanked the stock market. The country is lurching into a recession, and there is little indication that things will improve anytime soon. Indeed, the tariffs announced on Wednesday are little more than a spiteful policy intended to stick it to friend and foe alike, ostensibly for the purpose of reinvigorating American manufacturing. This is virtually impossible, as these aggressive reciprocal tariffs will most certainly drive up prices for manufacturers and consumers across the country. But the administration would rather have you believe that the economic impact won’t be that bad, or even noticeable.

“What can you tell the American people that—they just can’t afford an extra $3 here and there—about the government making up the difference from them?” Lawrence Jones asked Vice President JD Vance on Thursday morning. “Will costs go up at some point, will this just be temporary? Are we talkin’ three months or six months?”

“We know a lot of Americans are worried. So we are working very hard to bring prices down,” Vance said. “What I ask folks to appreciate here is that we are not gonna fix things overnight.… We know people are struggling, we’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us. But it’s not gonna happen immediately. But we really do believe that if we pursue the right deregulation, we pursue those energy cost-reducing policies, yes people are gonna see it in their pocketbook, they’re also gonna benefit from the fact that foreign countries can’t take advantage of us anymore, that means their jobs are gonna be more secure.”

Neither Vance nor Leavitt actually explain how actions like hitting China with a 34 percent tariff will bring prices down for the everyday American, or how this country will be a self-sufficient producer in just a few years. This backtracking and gaslighting is a far cry from Trump’s promise to “immediately bring prices down, starting on day one.”

In the scores of countries hit by Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs announced Wednesday, one was mysteriously—but not surprisingly—absent: Russia.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Axios Wednesday that Moscow had been spared from Trump’s tariffs because U.S. sanctions already “preclude any meaningful trade.”

Similarly, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News that it wasn’t necessary to place tariffs on Russia because after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, trade between the U.S. and Russia had effectively dried up.

But the claim that the U.S. doesn’t trade with Russia isn’t remotely true. In 2024, the U.S. imported $3 billion worth of goods from Russia, which was down from $4.6 billion the year before.

While this number may be small in comparison to key trading partners such as Canada, which imported a whopping $412.7 billion worth of American goods in 2024, it is still significantly more trade than with other countries that Trump levied steep tariffs against.

For example, Saint Pierre et Miquelon, a small French island territory off the coast of Canada, was hit with a whopping 50 percent tariff on imports to the U.S. The island, which has a population of roughly 5,000 people, imported only $100,000 worth of U.S. goods in 2024 and exported roughly $3.4 million worth of goods back.

If that’s not low enough, Trump even listed several uninhabited islands as receiving a 10 percent tariff on imports to the United States: Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, an Australian territory that is listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site for its “complete absence of alien plants and animals, as well as human impact.”

Clearly, a lack of trade was not an actual consideration in the Trump administration’s decision to levy tariffs, though Leavitt claimed that existing sanctions were also why Cuba, Belarus, and North Korea were not included on the list.

With Leavitt’s excuse falling flat, it seems increasingly likely that Trump has attempted to carve out a back door for Russian President Vladimir Putin to continue to do business with the U.S. as it makes an economic enemy out of every other country in the world.

Canada and Mexico were also absent from the list because Trump had already hit them with 25 percent tariffs on all U.S. imports, according to Leavitt.

The Trump administration seems to have destroyed global economies overnight while misunderstanding basic economics.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s tariff announcement Wednesday, former New Yorker financial writer James Surowiecki pointed out that a column on Trump’s tariff sheet labeled “tariffs charged to the U.S.A.” was likely founded on bad math.

“They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us,” Surowiecki argued. “So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64 percent, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us.”

“What extraordinary nonsense this is,” he added.

That would mean that the Trump administration imposed earth-shattering tariff hikes on the rest of the world without looking at the whole picture. Mainly, that the administration calculated the tariffs charged by other countries by only looking at goods provided, rather than the combined value of goods and services—something that “most economists seem to think is an odd way to calculate tariffs,” according to BBC Verify’s Shayan Sardarizadeh.

The White House initially refuted the tariff theory. White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai posted on X that “we literally calculated tariff and non tariff barriers.” But in an attempt to prove his point, Desai grabbed a formula from the US Treasury website that actually proved Surowiecki’s.

Sardarizadeh broke it down. “∆τᵢ = (x-m) / (ε x φ x m),” he shared. “The formula includes ‘x’ for exports and ‘m’ for imports.”

“But it also has ‘ε’ for ‘price elasticity of import demand’, set at 4 by the Treasury; multiplied by ‘φ’ for ‘elasticity of import prices’, set at 0.25 by the Treasury, which means they basically cancel out each other as 4 x 0.25 = 1,” Sardarizadeh continued. “So, in effect, all you’re left with in the formula is exports - imports / imports, which is what X users and journalists had accurately pointed out all along.”

But the administration’s bad math only matters so much to the tariff-heavy agenda. Even in countries where the trade deficit was less than 10 percent, or even in countries where there was a surplus, Trump still tacked on a 10 percent tariff.

Donald Trump announced a range of tariffs on nearly every country in the world—including, inexplicably, some practically uninhabited islands, one of which is home to a U.S. military base.

The British Indian Ocean Territory, a small cluster of islands in the South Indian Ocean, was hit with 10 percent tariffs on U.S. imports from the Trump administration Wednesday as part of its Liberation Day announcement.

The islands are mostly uninhabited, save for approximately 3,000 U.S. and U.K. military personnel who are stationed at a joint Navy Support Facility on the island Diego Garcia. Trump’s tariffs would mostly affect the service members there. Another roughly 1,200 people live on the country’s Chagos Archipelago.

As one might expect from the name, the territory is owned by the United Kingdom, which Trump hit with a 10 percent tariff, relatively low compared to other countries.

Trump also announced 10 percent tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory that was listed as a Unesco World Heritage site for its “complete absence of alien plants and animals, as well as human impact.” Australia was saddled with a 10 percent tariff, as well.

It’s unclear whether the tariffs on these territories would compound to 20 percent. Crucially, it’s unclear that anyone thought about this at all.

Online, some speculated that the tariffs were doled out according to internet domains, and that because the Heart Island and McDonald Islands use a different domain (.hm) than Australia, (.au) they were considered different countries. That seemed to be the only explanation for levying a tariff on a territory that has no economy to speak of.