The Case for Trump’s Tariffs
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What are the key headlines in today's news?
Mark Zuckerberg looks to the White House for help as he fights an EU law that could undermine Meta's ad business. Plus, a day before the unveiling of sweeping U.S. tariffs, we hear a case for the president's trade agenda.
Well, in some respects, you need a permanent policy. You need a change in just the baseline American economic strategy, which for decades now has been free trade. And so step one is that baseline shift that says, no, the default is now actually free We are going to use tariffs if trade is imbalanced.
And Trump pledges a crackdown on price gouging in the ticket market. It's Tuesday, April 1st. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. President Trump says he has settled on a plan for his latest batch of tariffs due to be announced tomorrow, but for now is keeping those plans close to the vest.
What is Trump's strategy with the new tariffs?
Among the options he's been weighing is whether to apply a universal tariff of up to 20 percent on all imports or take a so-called reciprocal tariff approach that would levy individual tariff rates on specific countries subject to negotiation. As we await details, we spoke to someone with a strong sense about why Trump and his allies are leaning so hard on a tariff strategy. Oren Kass is the founder of the conservative populist think tank American Compass, which since its establishment in 2020 has become the most influential group on Capitol Hill among the pro-Trump policy movement that calls itself the New Right. He's also a longtime friend of Vice President J.D. Vance and And I began by asking him to summarize the various use cases for tariffs.
Who is Oren Cass and what is his perspective on tariffs?
Sure. Well, I think the most important thing to recognize is that tariffs can both be an economic policy. Let's say, you know, we want to encourage domestic manufacturing. We want to try to reduce our trade deficit. Then we might want to have tariffs in place. But they can also be a negotiating tool, a tool of statecraft that just as we use sanctions, just as we even threaten military force,
How do tariffs serve as economic and diplomatic tools?
We can threaten a country with a tariff. So it's important to ask the question, what is the tariff supposed to be doing? And then evaluate it on those terms.
Is there a risk of maybe muddling the message if you're using tariffs so broadly? It sounds like you see all of those as legitimate uses, but do you need to be clear about why you're wielding each particular tariff?
That's definitely a risk, and I think it's a challenge the administration is facing right now because for political purposes, you need to be signaling clearly to your domestic audience what you're doing and why. Obviously, there are costs also to tariffs. If you're asking people to accept costs, you need to explain why and what they're going to get out of them.
What are the potential risks and benefits of the tariff strategy?
It's really important to signal to investors if the goal here is to change where capital gets deployed. And then third, it's really important to be clear to allies, to other countries that we do want to work with. If we are using tariffs to try to, in some cases, force them to change their behaviors, to say, we want to see changes in your policies that either keep China out or that reduce your trade surplus with us, they need to know that so that what you're doing doesn't just look like kind of arbitrary ax wielding, but actually comes with a clear if this, then that.
I mean, I guess we'll see if we hear that articulated and then how countries respond to that. For now, though, Oren, we've seen a good deal of frustration over U.S. policy. Is there a risk that that frustration gets so severe that it leads countries to pursue, I don't know, closer economic relations with China maybe in a way that would truly hurt the U.S. in the long run? Is that something worth being concerned about?
Well, look, I think the frustration is entirely natural and to be expected. I think the reality in the long run is that if you step back and look at this situation objectively, the countries that we want to be allied with and working with closely, countries in the Anglosphere, the EU, Japan, India, Korea, these countries, for very good reasons, have a very, very strong preference for
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What are the key headlines in today's news?
0:03–1:02
2
What is Trump's strategy with the new tariffs?
1:02–1:47
3
Who is Oren Cass and what is his perspective on tariffs?
1:47–2:10
4
How do tariffs serve as economic and diplomatic tools?
2:10–2:48
5
What are the potential risks and benefits of the tariff strategy?
2:48–4:37
6
How might tariffs affect the U.S. economy and global relationships?
4:37–13:00
Speakers
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