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.