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)
Full Episode
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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