The President's Daily Brief
PDB Situation Report | April 19th, 2025: How Long Can The Tariff War Last & A Ground Campaign Coming In Yemen?
19 Apr 2025
In this episode of The PDB Situation Report: Fallout from the U.S.-China tariff war intensifies. Chinese factories are idling, export orders are drying up, and both sides are starting to feel the strain. Preston Brashers from the Heritage Foundation joins us to break down the economic impact—and what might come next. Then we turn to Yemen, where strikes on Houthi rebels are threatening to reignite the country’s long-running civil war. Government forces are reportedly preparing a major ground offensive. Bill Roggio of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies weighs in on what this could mean for the region. To listen to the show ad-free, become a premium member of The President’s Daily Brief by visiting PDBPremium.com. Please remember to subscribe if you enjoyed this episode of The President's Daily Brief. YouTube: youtube.com/@presidentsdailybrief Beam: Visit https://ShopBeam.com/MIKE and use code MIKE for up to 40% off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
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Welcome to the PDB Situation Report. I'm Mike Baker. Your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. We'll start things off with new fallout in the U.S.-China tariff war. Perhaps you've heard about this. Factories are idling, orders are vanishing, and the pressure is mounting on both sides. Now, how much longer, you ask, can both sides endure the pain?
Heritage Foundation's Preston Brashers joins us to break it down. Later in the show, we'll turn to the Middle East, where the ongoing strikes against the Houthi rebels appear to be reigniting Yemen's decade-long civil war, with government forces reportedly planning a ground offensive against the wounded terror group. Bill Roggio of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies gives his insight.
But first, today's PDB Spotlight. The pressure from President Trump's sweeping tariffs is starting to hit home in China. At export hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen, factories are going quiet. Orders from U.S. buyers are being canceled, inventory is piling up, and workers are bracing for layoffs. One export manager told local media he's never seen this kind of slowdown in 20 years.
Meanwhile, ports are jammed and uncertainty is seeping into every corner of China's manufacturing base. This all sounds very dire, doesn't it? The question now, how long can China absorb this slowdown? And how much longer can Washington keep turning up the pressure without feeling a major impact here in the U.S. ? Joining us now to break it all down is Preston Brashers.
He's a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Preston, thanks very much for joining us here on the Situation Report. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, Mike. What we're hoping to do is to approach the talk about the trade war with China from an economics perspective.
And let's look at it from that direction, as opposed to what I think a lot of the conversation has been, which is, okay, how is this impacting China on the home front? Let's start with sort of a layman's explanation for tariffs in general, and then we can start drilling down towards a specific battle between the US and China.
Yeah. So, I mean, tariffs are a form of tax, but they're tax on products that are crossing into the United States from other countries. And so, this has been part of the The way that the United States has raised revenues from the outset, it used to be a much larger part of the US revenues back before we had an income tax.
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