Catherine Rampell
speaker
759 appearances
7 recordings
4 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 12 Jun
Catherine Rampell’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I forget what the number was, but it was some large amount of money in their border and, you know, increasing the tech or something like that. And so, like, they just offered up these things that were either existing plans or fake. And Trump was like, victory! And, you know, he's really good at repackaging the status quo as a victory.
Although, in this case, the status quo before all of this was arguably much better because Canada didn't hate us before. But whatever. They didn't actually have to do anything, but they came up with something that... kind of sort of had the veneer of scratching the itch that like appeased Trump, the things that he was complaining about.
But now Trump has done this on virtual, you know, imposed tariffs on virtually every country around the world. Are they also going to create fake fentanyl czars? I don't know. Clearly, reducing tariff rates is not actually what they're looking for. What is it that he wants from them that they can offer? And if he won't take their calls...
It's very funny to me, as an aside, that, like, all he cares about is people calling him. Like, how lonely is this guy? He's like, oh, they're calling me all the time. But, you know, they're calling him because they want to know what the... F their – you know, like what is it that he's looking for so that he doesn't drag the world into another global recession or depression? And they don't know.
They're not calling because they want to be his friend.
There is no hope there. Whatever outcome he is trying to achieve, and again, it is unclear what that outcome is, whether it's revenue or a manufacturing renaissance or whatever, more fentanyl czars. It's not clear that any of this will happen. Meanwhile, Congress is according to the Constitution, is supposed to be regulating commerce with foreign nations. Really?
They are supposed to be in charge of trade.
Nothing. That's the problem.
There are a few different ways that Congress could intervene here, right? There's this one piece of legislation that says, basically, the president has to give 48 hours notice before he imposes tariffs. Whoop-dee-doo. It tells you how much notice they got this time around. And that I believe the tariffs can only last 60 days, and then Congress...
has to renew them, otherwise they lapse, something like that, which, to be honest, seems like a pretty mild restraint on Trump's current, you know, insanity. So they could do that, even if they get enough Republicans to go along with it in the Senate.
It seems very unlikely that that legislation will even come for a vote on the House floor, given things that Speaker Mike Johnson has said about, like, Trump's making great deals. We have to be patient. He knows what he's doing. OK, based on what evidence? No clue.
These are all girlfriends in Canada.
Yeah, this is not encouraging. There are so many... so many ways that Congress could intervene. So they could do the thing that I was talking about before where they say any of these tariffs lapse unless we renew them. They could just say there is not an emergency right now because the power that Trump is using is
to impose these global tariffs is by declaring an emergency because there's this law, IEPA, I forget what it stands for, but one of the E's must stand for emergency. And it basically says the president has some wiggle room to impose tariffs if there's an emergency. And they could just say there isn't one. That's it. And then we're done. And they won't even do that. It's bizarre. It's
Before they then do anything to curb the president's emergency powers. He is the one single handedly causing this catastrophe. And whatever the founding fathers thought about Congress controlling power of the purse and regulating trade with foreign nations, etc.,
they clearly thought that having Congress and the president be separate branches would, would be sufficient to impose checks and balances on each other and the judiciary for that matter. And that's, that's not what happened. You know, now we have, it doesn't feel like we have multiple branches. We have multiple parties and we,
one of which is basically a cult at this point, so they're just too afraid to go against him. They know it's bad. They absolutely know it's bad. They will say so privately. Some of them will say that publicly, but they know it is making their constituents poorer, not just by tanking stock markets, but by... Raising prices, right?
If it's going to raise prices, that means their dollar goes less far. Their constituents' dollars go less far. They get poorer. If we have a recession and there are layoffs, their constituents lose their jobs, get poorer. All of these things are pointing in the same direction. Bad news. And at some point...
one would imagine those constituents, those voters are going to fight back and say, throw these bums out. They've screwed up my life. But they just, for whatever reason, they're not willing to face that right now.
Yeah.
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