Where in the world is Trump taking us? | TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. April 29th, 2025 marked U.S. President Donald Trump's 100th day in office since he began his second term. To reflect on the recent past and to look towards the future, we're bringing you a special conversation from our series, TED Explains the World. Political scientist Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, sits down with TED's head of media and curation, Helen Walters, to discuss everything that's happened since January 20th and to consider what's to come.
Hello, everyone. Welcome, and thank you for joining. I am Helen Walters. I am head of media and curation at TED. I am so happy to be here on April the 29th, 2025, the 100th day of the Trump presidency. Now, the White House is touting this as the most productive and consequential start to any presidency. Others have a different take, with a series of new polls indicating that the president's approval rating has dropped precipitously. conflicting interpretations how very 2025 so who else but ian bremer to help us make sense of it all he's the founder and president of eurasia group ian helps us to process signal from noise ian thank you so much for being here and hello helen wonderful to be with you all right so we're going to think of this as some form of evaluation of the first 100 days of this administration and a look forward to what we should be expecting next now
We asked our community to share their burning questions that they want you to make sense of. And far and away, the topic that they want to understand better is about the economy. So Trump's so-called Liberation Day happened on April the 2nd. The president described it as one of the most important days in American history. What's your verdict? What are we watching? What should we be looking for?
Well, let's first go back to your introduction for one second when you said that Trump is saying that this is the most consequential first hundred days of any president in modern history. Fair enough. Enormously consequential. And his policies are by and large popular. but the implementation of those policies has been shambolic. And nowhere is that more true than in the economy, where Trump was elected, expected to do better on the economy than Kamala Harris. He was polling well on that issue consistently. The US economy was performing pretty well, but a lot of Americans didn't think it was going well for them. And a big piece of that was free trade. didn't support free trade. Democrats didn't, Republicans didn't, because they saw cheap goods from all over the world, but they also saw a hollowing out of the middle and working class in the US.
And fair trade was Trump's willingness to try to address that. So wants to ensure that if the United States is getting high tariffs from other countries, that US is going to put equivalent tariffs on those countries, Or the U.S. is going to use a stronger position economically and in terms of power more broadly to get other countries to capitulate, to open their markets more to the United States. That was the theory. That has not been proven. The implementation hasn't been the implementation because they're picking fights with literally everyone, whether the U.S. is in trade surplus with those countries or running a trade deficit, irrespective of the reason for the trade deficit. For many countries, it's because they're very poor and they can't afford American goods and Americans want to buy a lot of cheap commodities, for example.
from those countries. Also picking a massive fight with China and the Chinese have been willing to hit the Americans back hard. And of course, that's leading to very significant costs that are only beginning to be borne by the average American and by the global economy. So as a consequence, Helen, We're 100 days in. We're only a few weeks in to post-liberation day, but the markets have taken a hit and consumer confidence has taken an even bigger hit and Trump's approval ratings have taken a big hit too.
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