Fox Host Grills Trump Treasury Sec. for Downplaying Recession Odds

A recession is all perspective, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The economic adviser attempted to convince Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo Wednesday that business executives she spoke with weren’t actually worried about the future under Donald Trump’s sweeping tariff plan, but rather had been lamenting about the past.

“I spoke with one CEO over the weekend; he said we are already in a recession,” Bartiromo said. “So how do you deal with that as you are trying to implement all these new policies, like deregulation, when you’ve got the market expecting a sharp slowdown in economic activity, Sir?”

“Well, Maria, I think what the CEO may have alluded to, and I said it in the past, that the manufacturing sector under the previous administration was in a recession,” Bessent said.

“So what we’re doing is what I call ‘reprivatizing’ the economy,” he continued. “We are also getting the deficit under control, rightsizing the federal workforce, and then on the other side we are going to re-lever the private sector through smart, safe, and sound bank deregulation. And then, as this CEO said, they can come out of recession because the—I expect that long-term interest rates should come down as we get the budget under control, inflation under control, energy prices come down, and then the private sector will have room to grow.”

But Republicans are not getting the deficit under control. Instead, their efforts to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan are expected to tack on an extra $5.5 trillion in debt, plus $1.3 trillion in interest.

And finance experts don’t predict good things should the White House push to further deregulate banks. Trump’s previous efforts to strip safeguards from regional banks during his first term created an environment that collapsed several regional banks in 2023, further consolidating assets under national umbrellas.

“The repercussions here will be wide-reaching, as the global financial system is tightly interconnected,” argued Florence School of Banking and Finance director Thorsten Beck in an op-ed for Politico Tuesday. “When Washington weakens its financial guardrails, others feel pressured to follow suit to stay ‘competitive.’ This sets off a ‘race to the bottom,’ which then risks unleashing the kind of instability last seen in 2008.”

But considering the fragile state of the current market—which is gripped by high volatility, struggling supply chains, conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, record levels of debt, and seemingly endless reciprocal tariffs that have pushed the U.S. economy to the brink of a recession—“this time, the fallout could be far worse,” according to Beck.

President Donald Trump counseled everyone to stay “cool” Wednesday following a disturbing escalation in his global trade war.

“BE COOL! Everything is going to work out well. The USA will be bigger and better than ever before!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Trump’s insipid optimism comes as the European Commission agreed to levy tariffs of up to 25 percent on cigarettes from Florida, beef from Kansas and Nebraska, chicken from Louisiana, car parts from Michigan, and most importantly, soybeans—of which the European Union bought $2.43 billion worth in 2024. The Chinese government also announced that it would raise tariffs on U.S. exports to 84 percent, in response to the U.S. hiking tariffs to a whopping 104 percent.

JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon warned Wednesday that a recession was a “likely outcome” of Trump’s “reciprocal tariff” policy. The stock market continued to roil Wednesday, and financial analysts fretted over a sudden selloff in U.S. Treasury bonds. The yield on a 10-year note spiked Wednesday, in the largest increase over a four-day period since the 2008 financial crisis.

But, Trump had his own spin on his decision to kneecap the global financial markets.

“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” Trump wrote in a separate Truth Social post.

If Donald Trump’s mass deportations weren’t already dystopian enough, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement says he wants to make them look like Amazon Prime.

Todd Lyons made the remarks at the 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix Tuesday, saying that he envisions lines of trucks arresting and detaining immigrants much like the retail website delivers orders across the U.S.

“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, adding that the detention process should be “like (Amazon) Prime, but with human beings.”

The arrests, detention, and transportation of immigrants seemed to be the whole theme of the conference, which hosted other Trump administration officials, including “border czar” Tom Homan and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The main reason for the expo, though, was to showcase the many companies who stand to profit from arrests and deportations to government agencies, as Homan pointed out in his keynote address.

“We need to buy more beds, we need more airplane flights, and I know a lot of you are here for that reason,” Homan said to the crowd. “Let the badge and guns do the badge and gun stuff, everything else, let’s contract out.”

The audience was made up of countless security contractors with strong ties to the Trump administration, as well others such as private prison company Geo Group, whose stock has shot up since Trump’s election. Government agencies in attendance included Customs and Border Protection, the Army, local Arizona police, and countless more.

The fact that ICE and DHS’s deportation efforts have turned into flashy raids with right-wing influencers in tow, with agents dressed in ski masks and street clothes, make Lyons’s remarks all the more odious. The raids have even moved on to legal immigrants who are denied due process or arrest warrants over political opinions the Trump administration dislikes. And it seems there are several companies looking to profit from this destruction of civil liberties.

Some of Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters are expressing dread and alarm as the president’s tariff policy continues to throttle the stock market and hurt their own pockets. 

Last weekend, DOGE slasher in chief, Elon Musk, said that he preferred a “zero-tariff situation”—in other words, the exact opposite of what Trump is doing now. 

“I’m hopeful, for example, with the tariffs, that at the end of the day, I hope it is agreed that both Europe and the United States should move ideally, in my view, to a zero-tariff situation, effectively creating a free-trade zone between Europe and North America,” he said in a video interview on Saturday. “That’s what I hope occurs. And also, more freedom of people to move between Europe and North America if they wish to work in Europe, if they wish to work in America, they should be allowed to do so in my view. So that has certainly been my advice to the president.”

Barstool founder and manosphere B-teamer David Portnoy also complained he’d lost up to 15 percent of his net worth “in stocks and crypto” due to Trump’s retaliatory tariffs. 

“I’m down seven million bucks, in stocks and crypto. And it’s a tariff city. Trump has put his tariffs all over the place. I’ve been trying to understand ’em, I don’t,” Portnoy said last weekend on his livestream. “And everything’s in the shitter because of it.”

Senator Ted Cruz urged the president to make and take deals to lower tariffs, something the Trump administration has said it absolutely will not do. 

“Take the deal, make deals, and actually work to lower tariffs,” Cruz said. “President Trump has the opportunity for the most extraordinary economic win for the American people right now by making a deal.… And I do wanna give a word of warning: There are voices in the administration that, rather than take a deal, are saying, ‘We want to have tariffs as a permanent feature of the economy.’ I think that’d be a mistake.”

Legendary right-wing shill Ben Shapiro also voiced his disagreement with Trump’s so-called  “Liberation Day” tariffs, noting that the move was “probably” unconstitutional. “Trump’s reciprocal tariffs imposed hundreds of billions of dollars of new taxes on Americans. It’ll be the largest tax increase since the Revenue Act of 1968, one of the biggest tax increases on American consumers in the history of America. It’s gonna cost American consumers; it’s gonna cost American producers who use inputs from other countries,” Shapiro said on his podcast. “There are real world implications for this sort of stuff. Trade wars are in fact not good, and not easy to win, particularly if you don’t actually have a plan. It is predicated on a bad idea of how international trade works.” 

Perhaps the staunchest voice of opposition was billionaire Trump donor Bill Ackman. 

“By placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital,” he wrote on X. “If … we launch economic nuclear war on every country in the world, business investment will grind to a halt, consumers will close their wallets and pocket books, and we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.… We are heading for a self-induced economic nuclear winter, and we should start hunkering down. May cooler heads prevail.”

Everyone has started to feel the tariff pain.

In a town hall hosted by Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Tuesday, Senator John Kennedy said that he hopes Donald Trump “takes a deal” in order to reduce the reciprocal tariffs that are dampening business and driving costs around the globe.

Still, the plea came packaged with an effusive review of the White House’s economic agenda that has brought one of the most robust economies in U.S. history to the brink of a recession.

“I think most fair-minded people would agree with this: Other countries have used trade barriers to take advantage of the American people and American businesses,” Kennedy said.

“Number two, President Trump has said enough,” Kennedy continued, noting that dozens of countries around the world are attempting to negotiate with the president in order to lower their respective tariffs. “We would not be in this situation today had he not been a pitbull.”

“He’s like the pitbull, though, who caught the car,” the Louisiana Republican said. “I don’t know what the president’s going to do next.… I hope he takes a deal. I hope he and (Treasury Secretary) Scott Bessent go to every one of those countries and reduce those tariffs and trade barriers down to zero and let American businesses compete with those foreign businesses. Competition makes us better.”

In the week since he announced his sweeping tariff plan, Trump has cost American businesses upward of a trillion dollars. The ensuing reciprocal tariffs from America’s longtime trade partners have further destabilized the stock market.

On Wednesday, China—one of the country’s biggest trading partners—announced that it would raise the reciprocal tariff rate on U.S. goods to 84 percent. The move came as a retaliatory act after Trump hiked import duties on Chinese goods to 104 percent.

President Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs were never anything more than a power trip.

During a speech Tuesday night at the National Republican Congressional Committee Dinner in Washington, Trump bragged about getting to be a dealmaker, amid rising concerns that he’s triggered an economic recession.

“I am telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass,” Trump ranted.

“They are, they are dying to make a deal. ‘Please, please sir, make a deal. I’ll do anything sir!’” Trump said, imitating a desperate foreign leader.

Foreign leaders from the United Kingdom and Philippines said they had received no reply to their requests to broker deals with the Trump administration, and the White House has not clarified what concessions countries must make to resolve negotiations, according to Politico.

But not everyone’s looking to make a deal. Trump’s outrageous 104 percent tariffs on Chinese goods went into effect Wednesday, and China responded by raising tariffs U.S. products to 84 percent. Beijing also released a statement saying they were ready to “fight to the end.”

It seems that Trump is content to bask a little longer in his newfound power, and is in no rush to make any deals, as the stock market sinks and U.S. Treasury yields climb.

The European Union has responded to Trump’s trade war with tariffs of their own that deliberately target red states.

The European Commission on Wednesday greenlit tariffs of up to 25 percent on cigarettes from Florida, beef from Kansas and Nebraska, chicken from Louisiana, car parts from Michigan, and most importantly, soybeans.

The United States is the second-largest grower and exporter of soybeans in the world, and a whopping 82.5 percent of the soybeans that the EU gets from the U.S. come from Speaker Mike Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

“Farmers are frustrated. Tariffs are not something to take lightly and ‘have fun’ with. Not only do they hit our family businesses squarely in the wallet, but they rock a core tenet on which our trading relationships are built, and that is reliability,” said Caleb Ragland, Kentucky soybean farmer and American Soybean Association president. “Soybean farmers still have not fully recovered market volumes from the damaging impacts of the 2018 trade war, and this will further exacerbate economic hardship on our farmers.”

Expect more and more domestic exporters to start sounding like Ragland. China’s, Canada’s, and the EU’s retaliatory tariffs will impact about $90 billion of American exports.

This is the direct human impact of Trump treating the global economy like it’s a video game you can infinitely restart back at the same checkpoint. Now our biggest allies have met spite with spite, and American exporters and consumers will suffer.

China has announced that it will retaliate against Donald Trump’s tariffs by raising its own tariffs on U.S. goods from 34 percent to 84 percent, in response to Trump’s own tariff hike on China.

Beijing’s Commerce Ministry wrote in a policy paper Wednesday morning that the U.S. escalation is counterproductive, saying that the Chinese government “has the firm will and abundant means to take necessary countermeasures and fight to the end.”

“History and facts have proven that the United States’ increase in tariffs will not solve its own problems,” the paper said. “Instead, it will trigger sharp fluctuations in financial markets, push up US inflation pressure, weaken the US industrial base and increase the risk of a US economic recession, which will ultimately only backfire on itself.”

Trump raised U.S. tariffs against China to a staggering 104 percent on Monday following China’s initial import tax, escalating the self-inflicted trade war. China claims, contrary to Trump’s assertions, that the trade relationship between the two countries is “roughly balanced.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent called China’s move “unfortunate.”

“I think it’s unfortunate that the Chinese actually don’t want to come and negotiate, because they are the worst offenders in the international trading system,” Bessent told Fox Business Wednesday morning, and said potentially kicking Chinese companies off of the American stock exchanges was on the table.

There is now a full-blown trade war between China and the U.S., and it’s already sending markets reeling around the world, with Dow Futures plunging more than 600 points. It’s an entirely predictable result for a self-made disaster based on terrible math, with no clear end in sight.

The Trump administration is desperately trying to save its image as the president’s reciprocal tariff scheme tanks global markets and sparks fear of a recession.

“Everybody in Washington, whether they want to admit it or not, knows that this president is right when it comes to tariffs and when it comes to trade,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Tuesday.

That’s not true. Even Republicans are turning on Donald Trump over his global tariffs, which are already devastating small businesses and spurring economic chaos in the United States and abroad. 

On “Liberation Day,” the president implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, which he claimed will end the trade deficit between the U.S. and other countries.

Seven Republican senators, including the Senate’s president pro tempore Chuck Grassley, signed onto a bipartisan bill Monday that would require Congress to sign off on new tariffs on U.S. trading partners. 

Other members of the GOP have publicly denounced the tariffs for being unconstitutional.

“Our Constitution was very specific that taxes—tariffs are a tax—taxes originate in the House, come to the Senate, and then go to the president,” Senator Paul Rand told reporters last week. “They don’t just go to the president and no one else. What kind of system would it be if all of our taxes and laws were passed by one person?”

House Democrats, meanwhile, have moved quickly to try to mitigate further damage. On Tuesday, they introduced a House disapproval resolution that would end the emergency authority Trump used to enact the tariff scheme and force the GOP to vote on the president’s reckless economic decisions. 

“Republicans can’t keep ducking the vote on these taxes. It is time they take a vote and show their constituents whether or not they support the ‘economic pain’ President Trump is inflicting on American families,” Representatives Gregory Meeks, Richard Neal, and Rick Larsen said while introducing the resolution. 

Apparently bipartisan moves to protect the country from “economic pain” and unconstitutional  taxes aren’t enough to convince the White House that no, not everybody in Washington thinks this president is right when it comes to tariffs and trade. 

Small-business owners are already feeling the effects of Donald Trump’s tariff scheme that he claims will boost American manufacturing and bring jobs back to the United States.

Many have flocked to Reddit to share their struggles, desperately searching for advice amid fears of losing their livelihoods.

“Any other small shops trying to figure out what to do? I’ve single handedly created and ran my small business for almost three years. I sell bamboo clothing and bedding, and now with this tariff I’ll likely have to close,” one user posted on the r/smallbusiness board.

On “Liberation Day,” Trump implemented tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 60 percent on imports from about 90 countries, which he claims will eliminate the trade deficit between the U.S. and other countries (economic experts have scoffed at the far-fetched assertion). China will see the worst of it all; the country faces a new 34 percent reciprocal tariff, along with a previously announced 20 percent tariff. On Monday, Trump threatened to increase the rate to 104 percent if China did not rescind its retaliatory tariffs.  

One Reddit user received an email from their Chinese distributor informing them that it will no longer distribute their products in the United States. “I planned for so many different things over the past few months which should allow us to weather the storm for the next year or so, but I didn’t expect our largest supplier to back out of the U.S. market entirely,” the user wrote.

“Not sure what to do at this point. This completely guts our business and leaves us with no alternatives or hopes for alternatives.… Sigh. We’re cooked.”

Another wrote they ordered over $3,000 worth of aluminum parts from China and had to pay nearly $2,500 in import duty fees. 

The one consistent piece of advice on r/smallbusiness? Raise your prices, and let your customers know it’s Trump’s fault. 

One user wrote that they were going to add a “Trump tariff surcharge” of 37 percent on their invoices and receipts. 

“Raise the cost and be sure to tell your customers why,” another posted. 

“And let people know it’s tariffs that are at fault for your higher prices. If it’s true, it passes some of the blame from you to the administration, which can help change things,” one user wrote, offering a shred of hope to their fellow small-business owners. “A lot of people don’t watch the news, and they should know that it’s directly affecting them.”