The Rachel Maddow Show
Trump caves on tariffs: One economic indicator made even Trump realize he'd gone too far
Thu, 10 Apr 2025
Even with new polling showing significant disapproval among Americans of Donald Trump's handling of the economy, Trump's indifference to tanking the stock market did not waver. But when his ill-considered tariff scheme began to affect the bond market, even Trump knew it was time to dial back his one-man global trade war.
Chapter 1: What were the nationwide protests against Trump's policies about?
Following this weekend's big protests, more than 1,400 protests in all 50 states, some of them in big cities like Chicago and New York and Washington, D.C., each of those topping 100,000 people. at simultaneous protests. It was crazy.
After that big, big show of resistance to Donald Trump's presidency and what he's doing to the country, tonight, interesting news out of Washington, interesting news out of Congress. Tonight, Republicans in the House had expected to pass their budget blueprint for the whole government, for all the spending in the government. Republicans, of course, control the House.
They only need a majority to pass it, so they can pass it just on their own party's say-so. But just within the last hour or so, they have had to pull that tonight because Republicans in the House apparently don't have support to get it done. So they have canceled their budget vote tonight, expecting that it would have failed had they put it up.
And again, they can pass it only with their own members because they have a majority in the House. They've canceled that vote tonight. They may try again in the morning. We shall see.
Meanwhile, in the wake of those demonstrations this weekend, we've also got some new polling in from Quinnipiac University, which essentially validates the criticism of Trump that we saw on display in such large numbers this weekend. The big protests this weekend were on Saturday. This latest Quinnipiac poll was in the field on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
Actually, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday. So it overlapped in time with these demonstrations. But this poll is a nationwide poll of how the American public is feeling about Trump and how he's doing as president. From the results of this poll, you'd almost think that they just polled the demonstrators, because what people were saying in the streets and at state capitals and on the
is pretty much in keeping with what the public at large was telling pollsters who were in the field at the same time.
here's what i mean quote do you approve or disapprove of the way donald trump is handling his job as president disapprove by a margin of twelve points do you approve or disapprove of the way donald trump is handling the federal workforce disapprove by a margin of thirteen points do you approve or disapprove of the way donald trump is handling foreign policy disapprove by a margin of fourteen points do you approve or disapprove of the way donald trump is handling the economy
disapprove by a margin of 15 points. Do you approve or disapprove of the way Trump is handling trade? Disapprove by a margin of 16 points. All right, well, you know, how about this one?
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Chapter 2: How did Trump's tariff policy impact the stock and bond markets?
The bond market falling apart is a much bigger deal than the stock market falling apart in terms of the fundamentals of who we are in the world and how our money and our economy works. Because the stability of the U.S. bond market is what we depend on, essentially, for the spine of our economy.
Everything from mortgage rates in the housing market to the integrity of our multi-trillion dollar national debt. So, yes, the stock market stuff under Trump has been scary. But if the bond market blows up, say goodbye to the U.S. economy. And today, what happened is, the bond market started blowing up. When that happened, at the opening of the bond markets today,
That's apparently what turned things around. That's how we discovered this lovely cave that Donald Trump led us into today on his tariff policy. NBC News reports tonight that Trump caved, Trump reversed course on his tariff gambit today because of, quote, deep concern bordering on panic from his top economic officials regarding the bond markets.
Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, not always allies in the various tariff debates at the White House, nevertheless presented a united front today to the president, urging a pause on what he was doing on tariffs, a pause, quote, over concerns about the bond markets. My colleague Chris Hayes, I think, nutted up what happened here very well today.
He posted this on Blue Sky. Quote, you set the house on fire, watched it burn, and then lost your nerve and put it out. You now have a partially burned house. Great job. Exactly. But don't lose sight of some of the other lovely caves on our spelunking tour today.
For example, this one, headline, Associated Press, Trump administration says it cut funding to some life-saving UN food programs by mistake. Quote, the State Department says it has rolled back an undisclosed number of sweeping funding cuts to UN World Food Program emergency projects in 14 countries, saying it had terminated some of the contracts for life-saving aid, quote, by mistake.
Oops.
Yeah, we have no idea. So I guess we'll put them back. We don't even know how we're making these mistakes. We know it's a mistake, but we don't even know what the mistake is. But rest assured, we know what we're doing. And if you criticize us, watch out.
But, you know, just as Chris noted, as he said, even after panicking and putting out the house fire you started, you still have a partially burned house. There's still damage done, even as they try to reverse all these mistakes they're making. You still have a partially burned house, just as Chris noted there. The New York Times is reporting tonight that even some of the critical programs that the
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Chapter 3: Why did Trump cave on tariffs and what role did the bond market play?
According to an internal memo obtained by The Post, plans to force people awarded retirement, disability, and Medicare benefits to set up direct deposit payments online or in person have been canceled. Those applying for benefits can also continue the process by phone without the need to go online or visit an office in person.
That's according to a Monday memo from the acting deputy commissioner of the agency to the acting commissioner. Starting Tuesday, emails and training started to go out to field staffers, informing them that they won't have to curtail phone service after all. Managers told other employees verbally in meetings that the proposed changes were dead.
One Indiana field office employee said, quote, So, back to where it always was. What a waste of our time. Quote, the shift amounts to a wholesale retreat by Elon Musk's Doge team and their bid to dramatically curtail phone access to services.
Their new system would have removed a phone option in place for years, which has come to be a mainstay for these 73 million Americans who rely on Social Security for retirement, survivor and disability benefits and Medicare claims. So, caving. Yes, they are caving on this, on this part of what they are doing to Social Security. Right? So we've put out this house fire.
But, you know, as before, we now live in a partially burned house. Because they're still messing everything up. They're just trying to make sure that we find out less about how badly they're messing it up. Because look at what else they're doing here. This is back to the Washington Post today.
Quote, as beleaguered employees work to understand the latest announcement about changes, some employees were hit with an additional puzzling change as to how they do their jobs. A new rule preventing communications with Congress or advocates for the elderly and disabled.
An email went out to Social Security technicians on Monday, instructing them to cease all written responses to congressional inquiries and inquiries from advocates. A similar email went out to employees in other divisions, affecting a wide range of staff members, including benefits authorizers, claims specialists, and customer service representatives.
The second email obtained by the Post read simply, quote, effective immediately, do not respond directly to any public or congressional inquiries. After a surge in questions, another employee sent a follow-up email clarifying that staffers should continue to pick up the phone if Americans call for help.
But definitely don't talk to anyone else about how we're destroying this agency and the kind of chaos that it is wreaking among Americans who have, in many cases, no other options to pay for the basic necessities of life. Oh, I guess we're going to fix this one part that people have really been squawking about. But definitely don't answer any questions from Congress.
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Chapter 4: What mistakes did the Trump administration make regarding UN food program funding?
On the steps of Todd Hall Tuesday afternoon. A local union for academic student workers at Washington State University organized a demonstration in correlation to National Take Action Day to voice concerns over potential state and federal funding loss.
And we will fight back.
Researchers, educators, and students calling on the federal government to kill the cuts. At UC Berkeley, roughly 1,000 protesters showed up. Today is only the beginning of our movement. Students like Tanzil Chaudhary are defending university research, noting that scientific breakthroughs happen on college campuses.
And there are so many other examples. Antibiotics, insulin, invented in university labs. I have colleagues who, you know, themselves are cancer survivors who are doing work on immunotherapies.
I'm terrified that this country is just going to have a massive brain drain.
I want to be a researcher. I want to be a scientist in America. And I don't know if I'm competing to do that. I'm worried that science is going to disappear. It's going to go to other countries.
The consequences of all of this will be catastrophic. More talented scientists will be driven out of research. And more people will die preventable deaths.
Those protests at college campuses all over the country yesterday, kill the cuts protests. This was Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz last night, not in Minnesota, but in Ohio, in Lorain, Ohio, in a congressional district that's held by a Republican congressman named Bob Latta. Bob Latta is not holding town halls in his Ohio district, so Democrats will do it for him.
Democrats are meeting with his constituents instead. In this case, nearly 2,000 people came out in Lorain, Ohio, last night for a town hall with Democrat Tim Walz. Pushing back matters. I mean, if you do fight, you don't always win. But if you don't fight, you always lose. The Trump administration is deep into its caving phase right now on matters high profile and low.
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Chapter 5: How is Trump's administration impacting Social Security services?
A president ordering the Justice Department to open individual investigations into people he deems his enemies? is Banana Republic stuff, and I don't mean the clothing company. We're also seeing Trump and his administration taking some wild and hard-to-explain swings at the IRS, of all places, with consequences that at this point seem very, very unclear.
We're also seeing Doge try to grab a whole bunch of money for themselves to put in their own pockets. Get it while you still can, maybe they're thinking. It is a really wild day in the news today. We've got a lot to get to tonight. Stay with us.
An administration as chaotic as this one, it can sometimes be hard to tell on a day-to-day basis when things are going bad in just kind of a run-of-the-mill way versus when things are going bad in a not-at-all-run-of-the-mill, maybe-actually-consider-panicking kind of way. It's hard to tell sometimes on a day-to-day basis.
But one of the good indicators that something really big is going wrong is when you get news that people who have really big jobs in one part of the government, they all leave. They all quit or are fired suddenly, all of a sudden and without warning. And it's because they had been trying to stop something from happening.
They weren't able to stop that thing from happening, and so now they have left the agency. They have left the government. That is a pretty reliable sign that something quite big and quite bad is happening. And you only see these things every so often, even in an administration as disastrous as this one.
For example, there were the senior prosecutors who resigned after the Justice Department ordered them to drop the corruption case against New York City's mayor. There was the longtime official who resigned from the Treasury Department after people working for the president's top campaign donor demanded access to the most sensitive payment systems in the whole U.S. government.
There was the top official for vaccine safety in the whole U.S. government who said he would not give Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his new team access unrestricted read-write access to a very sensitive central vaccine database.
And again, I'm no expert, but I feel like I can measure the size of the splash that's being made by this particular cannonball at the IRS by the news of who is leaving the agency all of a sudden and without warning because of something going wrong there. This news started to come in last night, just as we were getting off the air, when we got news that the acting head of the IRS was gone.
She had resigned over a Trump administration plan for the IRS to give sensitive tax data to immigration authorities so the Trump administration can use it to target immigrants. This woman had been acting commissioner for less than six weeks. She had been appointed after Trump's previous acting head of the IRS also abruptly resigned in another controversy. That alone is a bad sign.
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Chapter 6: What was the public and political response to the Social Security cuts?
I am an interested observer watching these things just as a layperson reading the news and trying to understand it here. I have to ask if you feel like I'm focusing on the wrong things, if I'm being unduly alarmed by some of the things that I'm seeing in the news that to a tax professional such as yourself maybe should seem more benign.
No, I think this is unprecedented. You know, first, the attack on tax return information, the confidentiality of it. If there's one thing that all IRS employees and executives know, it's to keep that information confidential. Taxpayers file their returns confidential.
with the expectation that the IRS is going to abide by the law, which says tax return information is confidential unless Congress has carved out an exception. And that's drilled into you from day one. So that's the first thing that we're talking fast and loose about, you know, sharing information with all sorts of agencies and creating some kind of big database system.
in the sky that federal agencies can tap into. That will lead to taxpayers not being willing to share as much information as they are now because they're afraid that it might get into other agencies and have consequences. And then you see the reaction of the senior leadership of the IRS. First, the duly nominated and appointed commissioner steps down, even though he had a five-year term.
And then you have the acting commissioner step down. And now you have a second acting commissioner step down because of the desire for the tax return information to be shared with ICE, Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
And it's not just the chief risk officer who stepped down or the chief privacy officer, but the head lawyer in the IRS who is who opines on and interprets the section of the Internal Revenue Code that deals with confidentiality. She has also stepped down. So the legal expert on this provision that is under attack has stepped down.
On this point of confidentiality and the seriousness with which this has been greeted by senior IRS personnel, when Nixon tried to weaponize the IRS, the IRS commissioner at the time refused. Even Nixon didn't try to Saturday night massacre the IRS and go through person after person and after person to get his way. Even he was rebuffed here.
With all of these people resigning, with the confidentiality concerns that you describe, I feel like
Again, just as a layperson looking at this, the immediate next place I go here is to the law, because as far as I know, the confidentiality of tax information isn't just a nice thing that we like because it encouraged people to pay their taxes because they believe they can trust the government to keep all their data safe.
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Chapter 7: What ongoing protests are happening across universities against federal cuts?
Wired calculates that, quote, paying Doge an estimated $1.3 million for the services of four employees over that time span would establish an implied annualized pay of about $217,000 a year, which is over $20,000 more than the maximum salary for any career civil servant. So under this contract being reported by Wired, the labor department, the U.S.
Department of Labor would have the privilege of paying over a million dollars to the Doge kids, paying the Doge kids for their acts of dismantling the U.S. Labor Department. They're dismantling the U.S. Labor Department and taking some of its budget to pay themselves more than other civil servants are allowed to get paid. One of the reporters who broke that story joins us next.
Wired Magazine's Leah Feiger and Tim Marchman have this scoop today. Quote, Doge has spent the last few months ripping through the government, gutting agencies and pushing out tens of thousands of federal workers in an effort, Elon Musk has said, to eliminate waste and fraud. As part of this plan, Musk has previously stated that Doge staffers would cost taxpayers nothing.
But now Wired has discovered what appears to be like a bill for services-ish in which the U.S. Labor Department is apparently expected to pay $1.3 million to Doge employees for their work. As Ms. Feiger and Mr. Marchman report, quote, this $1.3 million figure and previous Wired reporting about Doge salaries tells a different story. Joining us now is Leah Feiger.
She's senior politics editor at Wired. Ms. Feiger, thank you so much for being here. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much for having me. So you obtained an unsigned contract under which the Labor Department is expected to pay Doge employees a lot of money for their work. What do you make of the fact that this is an unsigned contract?
Do you know if this is something that has actually been agreed to?
So until about two hours ago, the Department of Labor did not respond to our request for comment, which included questions about whether the agreement had actually been signed or enacted. Their email back to us this evening actually just asked for the unsigned agreement and implied it wasn't real. The document is absolutely real.
And though it is unsigned, it exists and is certainly present within the Department of Labor's files. We refuse to share it, however, with the department for source protection purposes as at Wired, we protect our sources. That's the most important thing to us.
In terms of the implications of this reporting, as you note, Elon Musk has said, sort of pounding his chest, that all the work of Doge employees would be free of charge to the American taxpayers. What is it in this document that Doge employees are expected to be paid for? And to be clear, it's to be paid to them as individual employees, not paid to Doge overall as an institution, right?
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Chapter 8: Why are educators and researchers concerned about federal funding cuts?
So it's not entirely clear exactly who gets paid and how they get paid. We do know the names of the people that will be getting that should theoretically be receiving money for their work at the Department of Labor. And that includes Aram Moghadassi, Miles Collins and Marco Ellis.
Though they're not named in this interagency document, they are named as being in the agency in notes from a confidential meeting that we also obtained that actually detail an audit that the Government Accountability Office is conducting of DOJA's work at a number of federal agencies. And like you mentioned, this agreement provides significant insight into DOGE's work with federal agencies.
They have an entire scope of work section that details how DOGE will operate within labor. And it's probably the clearest look yet at how DOGE's relationships with government agencies are actually structured.
Leah Feiger, senior politics editor at Wired. And again, I know you guys have received a lot of kudos for your work thus far in these past few months. But let me just add to those congratulations. All of us in the news business have really been treading in your wake a little bit, especially when it comes to reporting on these guys at Doge and what they've been up to and who they are.
And we're really, really appreciative for the big assist to what we do and everything that you've explained to the country. So thank you to you and all your colleagues at Wired. Thank you so much for having me. All right. We'll be right back. Stay with us. All right, that's gonna do it for me for now. See you again tomorrow and every night this week at 9 p.m. Eastern.
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