On this episode of The Chuck ToddCast, Chuck reacts to President Donald Trump’s decision to pause his sweeping tariff regime — and explains why it reveals his continued responsiveness to the wealthy political donor class.He also reflects on how the O.J. Simpson trial forever changed the news media landscape, incentivizing networks to prioritize profits and ratings over journalistic value.Finally, Chuck answers listener questions in another edition of Ask Chuck.0:00 Trump rescinds the tariffs0:45 Trump blinked 2:15 First term personnel guardrails are gone4:00 Congress feeling heat from donor class6:15 Trump still cares what rich people think8:45 Trump should have passed tax cuts before tariffs 10:15 If tariffs come back, they’ll be more methodical11:30 Business leaders are preparing for worst case scenarios12:45 The OJ trial changed the media15:00 CNN chased ratings and changed TV journalism19:30 Trump tariffs could fracture GOP20:00 Colin Allred could beat Ken Paxton in Texas, Senate in play?22:12 Ask Chuck22:45 What can news consumers do to be the solution to partisanship?25:40 Did Obama not going after banks in 2008 lead to Trump?27:40 Do you think Bernie would have beaten Trump?30:30 Have voters shown they won’t elect a woman for president?(Timestamps may vary based on advertisements)
Chapter 1: What prompted Trump to rescind the tariffs?
Hello there. Happy Thursday. Welcome to another episode of the Chuck Todd cast today. A solo round of things, obviously a big development in the last 24 hours with president Trump's decision to rescind or pause the tariff regime, which had been in place for a couple of hours leading to another market meltdown and, uh,
Particularly, we think the thing that truly rattled the president was what was happening in the bond market. But I'm not here to play CNBC guy for you. There are plenty of smart financial guys. If you want to go down that road, you can go down that road.
I'm here to talk about the politics of this moment, what to learn from this moment and what it could mean and how to watch sort of reaction going forward. So what to take away from this? Well, bottom line is Donald Trump blinked. The blink. The question is, why did he blink?
And going into this, there was always a belief, almost like a security blanket belief among the business community, who towards the end of 2024 accelerated in their support generally of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. You know, and it was the basic reasoning being regulation, regulation, regulation.
Donald Trump was campaigning on doing all these tariffs and all of these sort of business leaders were kind of compartmentalizing, believing, oh, he's not as serious. The tariffs he did the first time weren't that damaging. If that's all he's going to do, we can handle it. Didn't necessarily believe that. that he was willing to go where he was going to go.
I think the biggest reason why there's been so many miscalculations about Donald Trump 2.0 versus Donald Trump 1.0 is simply the missing people that were very involved in putting together Trump's first administration. Mike Pence and Reince Priebus. Reince Priebus was the first chief of staff. He was chairman of the RNC when Donald Trump got elected president, and then he got named chief of staff.
and Mike Pence was the vice president, and Mike Pence was in charge of the transition. Well, we now know in hindsight, particularly after watching the first 80 days of Trump 2.0, that what Mike Pence and Reince Priebus did in stacking that administration in Trump 1.0
was to put in a whole slew of guardrails in the form of personnel, whether it was Gary Cohn, who worked on the White House economic team and literally snatched documents away from President Trump from getting rid of trade agreements with South Korea at one point, or Jared Kushner versus Donald Trump Jr.
Jared Kushner, very much a bit more of an internationalist, a bit more friendly to private equity. Donald Trump Jr., a bit more culturally conservative and pugilist. And he's the family member with the most influence on Donald Trump right now. The last time it was Jared Kushner who was the family member with that kind of influence. And I could go on and on, but I think it is pretty clear
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Chapter 2: How did the O.J. Simpson trial change media coverage?
It's why you had arguably for the first time, multiple elected Republicans going on the record, criticizing the tariffs. They were gentle about Donald Trump, the individual saying, well, I know what he wants to try to do, but I'm not sure these tariffs are gonna be, or the Tom Tillis quote, who do I choke if this doesn't work? But he was saying things like, if this doesn't work,
Ron Johnson clearly didn't like any of these tariffs, but he's been pretty supportive culturally of a lot of things of the MAGA movement, and he didn't want to sound anti-Trump in how he did it. But they were all speaking out. You had bills introduced in the House and the Senate. You had seven Republican senators ready to sign on to a bill that would essentially –
give the tariff power back to the legislative branch and take it away from the executive branch. So I think that this is times 100 with Donald Trump. Every major donor of Trump's has a cell phone because Donald Trump loves to get their calls. He loves to talk to them. And they all were talking to him and they were all trying to cajole him, convince him. They weren't yelling at him.
but they were all begging him. And then Donald Trump weirdly enjoys being seen as playing the role of savior. And there's no doubt in my mind that the best way to get him to act is you can really help the economy right here. You alone can make this happen. So there are all sorts of ways people have learned to play the Trump personality, to sort of, you know what you're gonna get.
How do you use it? Can you control it? Certainly over the last few days, there was some doubt creeping into my head a little bit and some doubt creeping into the head of others that maybe this is a different Trump. Maybe he so believes in tariffs that he is not going to let outside forces influence him and show him what reality looks like. But that wasn't the case.
So I think the big takeaway is he is still... He still cares what rich people think. And it was the wealthiest people on Wall Street that were screaming the loudest, including many people that had become important supporters and advocates of him.
Bill Ackman, who's become a very polarizing figure in the finance community, but certainly is somebody very loudly in favor of Trump and then very loudly complaining about the terrorists. You had Elon Musk complaining with Peter Navarro. So the point is, I think the lesson to take away here is that pressure still works with Trump.
He may not have the Thelma and Louise gene that I thought perhaps we were all staring at here, that, boy, he was willing to drive off that cliff no matter the evidence, no matter what people were saying. That is not what happened. The question is whether he's already done a lot of damage. He showed some weakness. Now he's showing a bit of indecisiveness, right?
Sometimes indecisiveness can be just as damaging as being sort of wrong and strong, right? So... I'm not saying he's politically out of the woods. I don't think he's going to recover, but clearly he saw that his own political ratings were going upside down.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Trump's indecisiveness on tariffs?
Like in the last episode, I talked about sort of my take on what's wrong with the current state of media and journalism. And I sort of told you, I said, well, I have this whole thing about OJ Simpson. I said, well, I'm going to put a pin in there and get back to you. Well, I'm pulling the pin back out.
So I'm going to start my sort of cleanup section of this, of this episode of the Todd cast with sort of, uh, finishing my analysis there about the OJ Simpson angle to this. So when you think about sort of how the media became what it has been, very narrative driven, right? Everything seems to be about narrative rather than about policy in the moment or about the facts in the moment.
I think one of the great sort of mistakes big mistakes that big media has made in my lifetime. I go back to 1994, and I know for some of you listening to this, you're like, hey, that's before I was born. What do I give a shit about that? Well, here's what happened in 1994. 1994, at the time, we had one cable news channel at the time, CNN. There were not three yet. There was just one.
And in 1994, we had arguably the most famous crime of the 20th century. One of the most famous people in America was accused of double murder. OJ Simpson was a football star and a TV star, actually, and frankly, a movie star. And everybody loved OJ. Now, if you look up O.J., you think, oh, he's this. Before 1994, people just loved O.J. Simpson. He was just a football hero. O.J.
Simpson being accused of double murder was the equivalent of Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Derek Jeter, somebody like that. That's how beloved O.J. was. It was beloved the way a Peyton Manning's beloved or a Tom Brady. You'd be like, well, there's no way that guy would do that because he was in our living rooms all the time. So it was a big deal. Don't get me wrong. It was a big deal.
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Chapter 4: How did CNN's coverage of the O.J. trial affect news media?
But it was entertainment. Big deal. Not hard news. Big deal. But CNN made an interesting decision. Before that, CNN had a reputation of being, boy, they were covering the first Iraq war better than any news organization had ever covered a war. It had really looked like they'd sort of redefined what 24-hour news meant. So they were writing the rule book.
There really wasn't 24-hour news organizations before there was CNN. And it was really seen as sort of a high pillar of journalism, big J journalism, if you will. And they made a ratings decision. It was the first time they made a decision. They saw that we had something called Court TV at the time, and they were taking advantage of cameras in the courtroom. And Court TV...
was covering all the preliminary hearings. And CNN had never worried about ratings before, noticed Court TV was outrating them. And they were like, whoa, maybe we ought to cover the OJ trial. Well, cover the OJ trial they did. And CNN made so much money covering the OJ trial, dedicating hours every day just to the trial with occasional interruptions of other news happening around the world.
that both NBC and Fox decided they too were gonna start cable news channels. They didn't start cable news channels because they thought the public wants more news. They started cable news channels because they saw, look what CNN did at the big event and how much money they made. We're not gonna leave that kind of money on the table.
And from then on, what it did, and what I believe the sort of the bad gene that this planted in the media business was this. Before OJ Simpson, news divisions that were owned by big media companies, as long as they didn't lose money, they were fine. After OJ Simpson, media executives and the bean counters said, oh, well, you can make money on news if you make it interesting.
And from then on, I argue that the television news business, and frankly, the news business in general, truly started to figure out how do we package this to make it more interesting, to make more clicks and eyeballs and all this stuff. And of course, social media comes along, algorithms comes along, and all of this ends up on steroids.
But whenever I'm asked the question is, how did we get to where we got with this current state of media and journalism? I do think one of the sort of the core mistakes, the initial mistakes that was made was a decision that the single most important news event in America for a six month period was when a news organization decided that trial of a celebrity accused of murder
is more important than war in Central Europe or the battle over whether there should be national health care for everybody. These were some of the stories that were taking place at the time. The advent of the Internet, all these other news stories that would have normally gotten coverage but didn't because of OJ. So anyway, I...
I do think we sometimes forget that our business made some mistakes that created the conditions that sort of created this media circus that we all now find ourselves participants and viewers of these days. So there's that. A few other things that I want to point out. Tuesday was an election day. An incumbent mayor lost in St. Louis. Why am I making a big deal of this? Because...
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Chapter 5: What lessons can be learned from Trump's tariff regime?
Chapter 6: How can news consumers combat partisanship?
He's also a guy trying to get Congress to do a very difficult budget proposal that will give him his big tax cut. It's not an easy vote for some of these members of Congress. So here he was creating this horrible political environment for the Republican Party, a shaky economy, and he was cajoling these people to vote for a budget that may or may not be very popular with the public.
That was a lot to ask. And I think that he had a big vote in Congress that he needed to get through. This goes back to the criticism I'd leveled earlier. Forget whether you think it's a good policy. Let's assume you accept the premise that the policy Donald Trump is pursuing is a good idea, which is figure out how to use tariffs in order to sort of get manufacturing back in America.
Well, then he didn't order his agenda very well. He should have been focused on the tax cut and his budget first, doing Doge and the budget, doing all of that in the first six months. And then if you read Owen Cass, who is basically a big defender ideologically of what Donald Trump is trying to do, in the New York Times, he laid out a more rational way he could have done this.
Chapter 7: Did Obama's decisions in 2008 influence Trump’s rise?
Chapter 8: Will the GOP fracture over Trump's tariff policies?
He may not have the Thelma and Louise gene that I thought perhaps we were all staring at here, that, boy, he was willing to drive off that cliff no matter the evidence, no matter what people were saying. That is not what happened. The question is whether he's already done a lot of damage. He showed some weakness. Now he's showing a bit of indecisiveness, right?
Sometimes indecisiveness can be just as damaging as being sort of wrong and strong, right? So... I'm not saying he's politically out of the woods. I don't think he's going to recover, but clearly he saw that his own political ratings were going upside down.
He was 10 points in the negative on one poll I saw earlier today, earlier on Wednesday, excuse me, that had his numbers upside down on the economy. His numbers in the economy looked like what Joe Biden's numbers on the economy looked like at the end of 2024. Needless to say, that's not a good look.
He's also a guy trying to get Congress to do a very difficult budget proposal that will give him his big tax cut. It's not an easy vote for some of these members of Congress. So here he was creating this horrible political environment for the Republican Party, a shaky economy, and he was cajoling these people to vote for a budget that may or may not be very popular with the public.
That was a lot to ask. And I think that he had a big vote in Congress that he needed to get through. This goes back to the criticism I'd leveled earlier. Forget whether you think it's a good policy. Let's assume you accept the premise that the policy Donald Trump is pursuing is a good idea, which is figure out how to use tariffs in order to sort of get manufacturing back in America.
Well, then he didn't order his agenda very well. He should have been focused on the tax cut and his budget first, doing Doge and the budget, doing all of that in the first six months. And then if you read Owen Cass, who is basically a big defender ideologically of what Donald Trump is trying to do, in the New York Times, he laid out a more rational way he could have done this.
And ironically, he even talked about creating 90-day windows. Well, here we are with a 90-day window. It does appear as if I think what we're likely to see is these tariffs will come back, but it's probably going to be a bit more methodical.
My guess is Peter Navarro has been shoved back into the line a little bit of advisors, but it doesn't mean Donald Trump's belief in tariffs is going to go away overnight, even if Peter Navarro is not in the room or sitting as close to Trump in his ear as everybody else.
And it is clear that Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, another big advocate of this tariff policy, is also wearing out his welcome with some staff and with some key supporters. So I do think the most polarizing figures behind this policy, Peter Navarro and Howard Lutnick, you're going to see them sort of be pushed aside a little bit.
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