Ryan Knutson and Molly Ball unpack the administration’s onslaught of new tariffs and break down what election results in Florida and Wisconsin mean for each party. Plus, they speak with WSJ’s Michelle Hackman about Trump’s aggressive immigration efforts including student deportations. Further Listening: -Trump’s Tariffs Force a New Era in Global Trade -Trump 2.0: Group Chat Fallout -Three Federal Workers Hit by DOGE Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What are President Trump's new trade tariffs?
Right. That's what the fireworks were. Investors' heads exploding over this news. We are, of course, talking about President Trump's announcement to impose massive tariffs on virtually every country in the world. something that he's been calling Liberation Day. And while the economy didn't quite blow up, Wall Street was not celebrating.
Markets went down a lot, and a lot of business leaders are kind of freaking out right now.
That's right. It was really, I mean, I feel like we've used the phrase shock and awe a lot on this show. But they really did decide to go big. And it's interesting because he really went as far as he has ever threatened to go. And, you know, there was this idea that he could do something across the board. He could do something, quote unquote, reciprocal. He decided not. D, all of the above.
He did a version of an across-the-board tariff combined with what he called a reciprocal tariff, but one that was not based on tariff rates, but on trade imbalances. And so, yeah, they really went for it.
From The Journal, this is Trump 2.0. I'm Ryan Knudson.
And I'm Molly Ball.
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Chapter 2: How are Trump's tariffs affecting the economy?
It's Friday, April 4th. Coming up, we'll talk about the fallout from Trump's tariff plan, go over some election results, and dive deep on Trump's deportation efforts. Stay with us. So, Molly, the business world is reacting very negatively to Trump's tariff plan. The stock market is down. Many economists are now saying a recession is much more likely.
How might this affect Trump politically if the economy is headed in the way most economists seem to expect?
So, Ryan, this is the penetrating political insight that you pay me the big bucks for. If the economy goes into a recession or depression, that would not be good politically for Trump or the Republicans.
No kidding. I thought that everything bounced off Trump, no matter what it possibly is.
and leaves him with his perpetual sub-50% approval rating. Now, Trump, as far as we know, can't run for re-election, despite some noises he's made in that direction. So the follow-up for this is really on Republicans.
Senator Rand Paul, Republican senator from Kentucky who is not a fan of tariffs, pointed out on Thursday that when the Smoot-Hawley tariffs went into effect in the 1930s, Republicans lost the House and Senate for 60 years. So... You do have Republicans pointing out that they think this would not be good for them politically. What the administration says is this is temporary.
These are essentially growing pains for the restructuring of the American economy. You had the Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on television on Thursday saying, give it six months and we're going to come out the other side and everything's going to be better. And we're going to have an America where we're We make things where people have better jobs, where things are less expensive.
So they're saying this is a little bit of an adjustment period and maybe the markets just don't get it. But in the end, everybody's going to be better off.
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Chapter 3: What are the political implications of Trump's economic policies?
How much time do you think Americans will give Trump for things to turn around before they say, no, this is not working for us?
The signals that we are seeing is that people are already losing patience with this approach to the economy. Generally, when the economy goes south, the voters inflict a very swift and decisive verdict on whoever is in power, and they are not very interested in explanations about why it's somebody else's fault or why this is better for everyone in the long run.
America spent much of the last century trying to set up this global free trade system. Trump has now undone that in a very short period of time. Is there any going back from this? Do you think that this is going to be just a sort of the bookmark end of free trade as we know it?
Or do you think that in a democratic administration or any administration that comes after Trump, unless he is successful in getting that third term that he's been talking so much about, where these tariffs could be rolled back and we could go back to the way things were beforehand?
Well, you know, I try never to predict what Trump is going to do. And I do think we should point out that even today, most of the tariffs still have not gone into effect. So there's always a chance they take it back at the last second. Obviously, there's a very intensive lobbying effort on the part of multiple governments and multiple industries to try to create carve-outs and get exceptions.
And that is one endpoint for this, is that it just becomes a sort of massive lobbying spree where people are able to get individual or country-based exemptions, and it actually ends up being far less than meets the eye at the end of the day. That being said, this reminds me very much of our discussion previously about the Transatlantic Alliance and the global security picture of
where once you have blown it up, because it is based on trust, because it is based on long-term stability, it's very difficult to reconstruct because the trust is gone. Even if you could go back and recreate all the same agreements, You would not have that feeling that this is a lasting structure, this is an institution that has the durable backing of parties across the political spectrum.
So I would say it's very hard to recreate an institution like that once you've destroyed it.
All right, I guess we'll have to wait and see if Trump is right and this ushers in a new golden age, or if all those economists are right and this ushers in a period of economic hardship. Meanwhile, I want to turn to something else, which is these two special congressional elections in Florida.
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Chapter 4: What recent election results are significant for both parties?
And one of the people who put in a lot of money was Elon Musk.
That's right. The other really significant point to make about this Wisconsin judicial election is that both sides really turned it into a referendum, not only on Trump, but on Elon Musk. Elon Musk spent about $25 million trying to get the conservative justice elected. The Democrats made him the centerpiece of their messaging campaign.
in all of the ads that they were running, in all of the things that the justice in question was talking about. They were talking about Musk trying to buy the election. They were pointing at the things that Elon is doing with Doge in Washington, really tapping into voter anger specifically at Musk.
And of course, Musk helped them by hyping his role in all of this, by going to Wisconsin on the eve of the election and putting on a cheese head and jumping around on stage and giving a big speech about the things that he believes in. And while Democrats were believed to have a slight edge, they overperformed. The liberal candidate won by a 10-point margin.
And that really shows you that as much as we knew that there was a backlash to Trump and Musk brewing out there in America, as much as we knew that Democrats were energized and more likely to turn out... They exceeded expectations in this case, and that, I think, does tell you that there is some political juice behind the Democrats right now.
Musk did say on X that this is basically all part of his chess game, saying, quote, I expected to lose, but there is value to losing a piece for a positional gain. All right, we are going to take a short break, and when we come back, we'll talk about immigration, deportations, and the border. Okay, so let's turn our focus to immigration.
This is something Trump made a really big deal about on the campaign trail. And sure enough, the Trump administration has made a big push on deportations during the first two months of his presidency, but not necessarily in the way people expected. In the last week or so, we've had tourists detained at the border, foreign students with green cards or visas detained.
basically snatched off the street, and even a Venezuelan immigrant with protected status that the administration admitted it sent to a prison in El Salvador by mistake. To help break down where things stand on immigration, we brought in our colleague, immigration expert Michelle Hackman. Hi, Michelle.
Hi.
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Chapter 5: How did the Wisconsin Supreme Court election impact the political landscape?
Yeah, so Trump on the campaign really emphasized not just that he was going to do deportations, but he talked about numbers. He was going to do the largest mass deportation in American history when he would promise he was going to get rid of 15 million, 20 million people And, you know, it's hard to say like what we would expect the beginnings of a mass deportation to even look like.
But I seriously doubt that this is it. I mean, in the first six weeks or so of the Trump administration, deportations are actually down from the last year of the Biden administration. That's not a statistic that they want anyone to know.
I want to ask about the border, Michelle. Crossings at the border are down under Trump. Is there anything specific that the Trump administration is doing to prevent people from trying to cross the border illegally, other than just to sort of send a signal that this is not a friendly place for immigrants to come anymore?
You're right. He has really slowed down things at the border. They had already really dramatically slowed in the final year of the Biden administration. I would say the really big thing they did was that they ended a Biden program that didn't really have a catchy name. People called it CBP1 after the app that people used.
So Biden actually already said, if you cross the border illegally, you're not going to qualify for asylum. We're just going to shut you out. Trump said, even if you come to a port of entry, even if you come like legally and ask for asylum, we're still not going to consider you. And so it's really shut down basically any avenue people have.
And that's sort of acted as more of a deterrent, at least for now. And so a long-term question is, are people going to be deterred forever from coming to the border? Or is this deterrence-only strategy is going to at some point fail?
Getting back to deportations, they seem to be happening at a smaller scale, but it seems like it's happening at a more high-profile scale because we're seeing these students right now, specifically on college campuses, people who have visas or in some cases green cards, who are being picked up and deported. So can you explain the strategy here and sort of what the legal basis is for that? Sure.
I think that's somewhat by design. They want to really make a big splash. And so they've started sort of taking on these high profile cases. And one of them is the students who, you know, they claim have participated in pro-Palestine protests. They claim that these people are supporters of Hamas in different ways.
And this is a battle that they really think they can win because they think most Americans are sick of the college protests, that most Americans are more supportive of Israel than they are of Hamas. And so that they're not going to be so upset if they go after an international student who, for example, wrote an op-ed in her school newspaper expressing support for the Palestinian people.
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Chapter 6: What changes has Trump made to immigration and deportation policies?
And so it's hard to go after those people. We've seen an uptick in people, you know, who are here illegally, but who sort of have no criminal record whatsoever, who have lives in the U.S., who have U.S. citizen spouses and children. Those are the types of people that we're seeing being targeted more. But it's a good question. You know, why are they not being deported in bigger numbers?
I think we just don't have enough bodies, like, to do the arresting.
And that's something that Tom Homan, the head of ICE, has talked about, right? He has said that Congress needs to give him more money so that he can accomplish more of this agenda.
Yeah, he's kind of the only one in the administration who came in from the get-go saying, I'm not sure how mass this deportation is going to be. I need to see what resources we have. And now that's sort of pivoting well because Congress is negotiating this huge spending package. And so Tom Homan is trying to put pressure on them to put in as much money as possible for ICE.
Politically, Molly, how do you think that this is playing for the Trump administration? Because on the one hand, a lot of Americans really want the government and Trump to be tough, tough, tough.
But then on the other hand, when you see these videos of like that tough student being picked up by these agents with masks on, there's also a lot of reaction from people, I mean, primarily on the left, but not entirely. People saying that this is dystopian, this is terrifying to just be picked up and swept away like this.
The politics of this are very interesting. So far, Trump's approach to immigration is more popular than his approach to most other issues. It is a slight majority in most polls I've seen prove of the way that Trump is handling immigration so far. It was, as you mentioned, a very central premise of his campaign, more important, he believes, than the economy in motivating people to
So people do seem to like that he seems to be taking control of a border that they felt was out of control. I do think there is a chance that it becomes less popular as these incidents pile up.
I do wonder if it does start to go into politically dangerous territory as more of these sort of sympathetic victims come out, as more and more people who appear not to have done anything to deserve it are being singled out and deported.
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Chapter 7: How has the border situation evolved under Trump's administration?
It's such a good question, Molly. And I think maybe part of the problem is that everyone in this administration has a slightly different endgame.
You know, for someone like Stephen Miller, he ultimately wants to really, really significantly reduce immigration so that we're only getting small numbers of people and they're sort of the best of the best from wealthy countries so that they won't ever end up on our welfare. And sort of that's why things are seeming to head in that direction.
But for other people, you know, for example, Kristi Noem, she's the Homeland Security Secretary. When she was in Congress and when she was governor of South Dakota, she took a much more sort of rosy look at immigrants because they were really critical to running industries like agriculture in her state. And so I think she's thinking we've got to get this illegal activity totally under control.
And at some point, that's going to lead us to a conversation where we can actually change the immigration laws.
Speaking of the immigration laws, we have a question from a listener, Doug Hunt from Colorado Springs, who is wondering about this very thing.
Hi, Molly and Ryan. Now that the Republican Party is the party of working class Americans of every color and creed, it seems short sighted to deport 11 million migrants who fill much needed working class positions across American industries and agriculture.
Why wouldn't the Republicans use their control of government to secure the border and reform immigration policy to create a pathway to citizenship for these law-abiding migrant workers who might someday become loyal Republican voters? Thanks.
That's a good question. I think there are probably two reasons. One is that a lot of Republicans don't see these migrants who are working in similar jobs as them as their friends. They see them as competitors. You know, these people are taking a job that then I can't have. And so helping them out feels sort of directly antithetical to their own interests.
I would say the other thing is a lot of Republicans I've spoken to, and this is kind of unscientific, but just from years of interviewing people, is that they're really driven by this sense of fairness. And they can't get over to the fact that many, not all, but many of these people broke the law when they entered the country. And so why should they just be forgiven for that?
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