Ariana Aspuru

When President Trump was elected and it became clear that he planned on implementing tariffs, what were you hearing from responsible economists about what was going to happen to the American economy?

Yeah.

And it wasn't just your guests, because I remember covering Liberation Day last year and it was something close to hysteria.

It was like, oh, my God, the American economy is in so much trouble.

And then we were all sitting and waiting for the really big trouble for the economy to tank.

And we heard in the first half of our show from a small business owner whose business actually faced a ton of trouble.

But broadly, the American economy did not tank.

What did happen?

Why was there not the retaliation we expected?

If the economy didn't tank, and I feel like this is a question worth asking, does that mean that the tariffs worked?

Whether the Supreme Court says they're constitutional or not, did they work?

We can sit here and say all day long that the American economy did not do badly last year or over the last 12 months.

But we do know that Americans feel differently about the tariffs.

Many of them say they don't feel like the economy is working well.

Do we trace that back to the tariffs raising prices on certain goods or do we trace that to something bigger going wrong?

One of the pieces of credit that we might give President Trump is that his chaotic nature sometimes illuminates things that we were unaware of.

So in his first term, he puts tariffs on China and people say, actually, China in some some segments of the economy was proving to be a problem for the United States.

And so the Biden administration actually leaves those tariffs on and everybody gets a little bit of a lesson about, hey, you know, the last 20 years were not entirely what we thought there were.

Come on, man.

Did we learn any lessons about the American economy from the Liberation Day tariffs, the past 12 months of tariffs, RIP?