Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Steve Benen: Thanks, Greg, it’s great to see you.
Subsequently, he reduced the tariffs after a Swiss delegation of industry figures visited. As one report put it, they were literally bearing gifts: a Rolex, a personalized gold bar, and loads of flattery, as Axios put it.
Sargent: Then the administration announced that the tariffs would be cut to 15 percent. So Steve, it’s interesting that Trump is deciding to set tariff rates based on whether this female leader’s voice annoyed him and then on the level of flattery and tribute he’s receiving. That’s not how it’s supposed to work, is it?
And so with that in mind, you would like to think that the White House has an actual emergency in mind, that this emergency exists. And yet here we are seeing Donald Trump repeatedly and publicly explaining that as far as he’s concerned, there really isn’t an emergency. There are just whims, his own personal preferences. He’s giving away the game on purpose in public in ways that we can all recognize.
The emergency that they’re citing is our trade deficits. That’s the emergency, but that’s nonsensical. By the language in the law that we’re talking about here, there’s no conceivable way that trade deficits constitute the sort of emergency he’s talking about. Can you talk a little bit about how absurd that is?
Well, but that’s okay. That’s... that’s just economics. We get... we get food. They get our money, and then the world keeps going on. It’s not a problem, then, necessarily, that... that this trade deficit is somehow this boogeyman that we have to be panicked about. So right off the bat, that’s an important thing to emphasize.
Congress has, under the Constitution, the authority over tariffs... [it] is in Article I. It does not extend Article II in the presidency. And so I think given that, with that in mind, given those circumstances, there’s a reason that most legal experts think that the president is likely to lose at the Supreme Court because the law just isn’t on his side.
And I think that’s how the administration itself and the people around Trump—particularly the more kind of monarchical of his advisers, the ones who want a monarch—really conceive of this again and again on other fronts, including immigration. They’re testing their ability to just claim that reality is some other thing than it actually is and daring the courts to say the president can’t say that.
And so with that in mind, I think that the White House is increasingly panicked about the likelihood of a defeat at the Supreme Court. And so we’ve seen Donald Trump lobbying justices by way of his social media platform, raising the specter of an economic calamity, of national security crises, if the White House ends up losing. And yet if the justices honor the law as it’s written, there’s no realistic chance that Donald Trump’s going to succeed when the ruling comes down.
Over and over, Trump has threatened tariffs for all kinds of reasons: against Brazil for prosecuting one of his allies; against European countries for not supporting his desire to annex Greenland; and even against France after Emmanuel Macron declined to join his “Board of Peace” for Gaza. Those don’t sound like economic emergencies. So what gives there, Steve?
I think he genuinely just doesn’t remember that he’s supposed to stick to certain talking points in order to keep up appearances, in order to make it seem as if the emergency is legitimate, even though it’s not, even though we know it’s not. And he routinely, with increasing frequency, admits that it’s not.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that there’s not really a lot of clarity around whether the court will see it that way, right? We just don’t know whether this has any actual legal significance, particularly with this court.
The White House is claiming an emergency that doesn’t exist, and Donald Trump is forgetting to maintain the pretense that those emergencies are real. The result of that is that he’s effectively, if not literally, giving away the game.
Mike Johnson (voiceover): I have no intention of getting in the way of President Trump and his administration. And he has used the tariff power that he has under Article II very effectively. The Article I branch, he has not exceeded his authority. There’s no reason in my view for the Article I branch to intervene in that.
Benen: So here’s the thing to keep in mind. Here’s what I [want] your listeners to keep in mind, because this is something that a lot of people don’t necessarily remember, which is that Mike Johnson has described himself for years as a “constitutional lawyer.”
Except there’s one nagging problem with that. There is no Article II tariff power. Mike Johnson just referenced this constitutional provision that does not exist in reality. Don’t take my word for it, listeners. Look it up. It’s [not] in Article II. It’s in Article I.
Sargent: Well, look, one of the hallmarks of Trumpism is that all the corruption is right out in the open. His own voters are supposed to thrill to this. He is essentially saying in every which way: You’re damn right I’m corrupt. I’m going to be corrupt for you.
This one is so blatant and the law is so clear that you would think that confessing to his actual rationale for tariffs in public would at this point actually not work for him anymore. Am I... am I being too optimistic?
And on the other hand, there’s also the legislative element to this. The reason that Donald Trump is not going to Congress to get the authority that lawmakers could give him is that he knows, just as we know, that Congress would not give him the power despite the fact that Republicans are in the majority in the House and the Senate. And so when you have those three intersecting lines, what you have is a breakdown that I think is ultimately going to create a doomed policy that is unraveling before our eyes.
So Congress actually put restrictions on the president’s ability to levy tariffs. And so that just sort of makes the whole thing even more comical if you really think about it. He’s just giving the middle finger to Congress in every which way, and Mike Johnson is just kind of rolling over and taking it.
And that really resonated with me because over the course of the coming weeks and months that followed, Donald Trump and the White House repeatedly proved that they were treating Congress like a doormat—ignoring it, treating it as an afterthought, if it’s treated as a thought at all.
But Mike Johnson and his fellow GOP leaders on both sides of Capitol Hill have done exactly the opposite. They basically rolled over and said that the White House can do as it pleases and Congress will do effectively, if not literally, nothing. So, yeah, I mean, this is a breakdown in the Madisonian model of government. And the only way for this to change is for either them to wake up or for them to lose.
Now that story is mostly bullshit in the sense that, you know, he... when he came into office in his first term, one of his immediate things was to try to wipe away the Affordable Care Act, even though he had promised universal health care in the campaign. And then he cut taxes for the rich in his first and second terms.
Benen: It is. And you know, that’s an important element to this because—and we alluded to this a few minutes ago—you know, the courts that have heard this case already have said, in no uncertain terms: Just go get the authority. Just go to Congress, get the authority that you need, and you can go ahead and impose these tariffs accordingly.
And it’s because he knows that he’d lose. He knows that his grip on power isn’t nearly as strong as it has been advertised, as [it] has been hyped. He knows that congressional Republicans, given their very narrow majorities in both chambers, would simply say: No, we’re not doing this—that this policy is too dumb, too unpopular, and too destructive.
Sargent: And one last point, Steve, that I think eludes a lot of people: Republicans in Congress are going to pay the political price for the tariffs. That’s the funniest thing about this whole thing. Probably they’re going to lose the House and possibly the Senate. Longer shot, obviously, but... it’s very, very clear that affordability is an enormous issue in these elections.
Benen: Yeah, I’m looking forward to the fall when I hear GOP incumbents, if they do a town hall, if they do interviews and so forth, they get asked: Well, what did you do when tariffs were increasing the prices for consumers across our state, our district, and so on? What did you do?
Well, you know what? When Donald Trump [has] a 39 percent approval rating, and prices are... [the] affordability crisis gets worse... voters are probably not going to respond particularly well to that message, but we’ll see. Time will tell.
Benen: I do too. And I would not want to be in their shoes right now.
And then, as soon as they started entering into talks with Donald Trump about giving him some sort of fig-leaf access to Greenland that would allow him to claim that he won something, he then immediately said the tariffs are on hold. So what happened to the economic emergency, Steve?
Sargent: Yes. Well, just to close this out: if he can get away with this—this buffoonishly and obviously ridiculous...—and the entire Republican Party lets him get away with it, and the Supreme Court lets him get away with it, where the hell are we?
Sargent: Because the tariffs, when it really comes down to it—and they’re rarely described this way in the press—are an enormous abuse of power, and no institution in American governance is stopping him from doing it. That’s what the story would be if at the end of the day the Supreme Court upholds the tariffs after he’s essentially given the middle finger to the entire world about them.
Sargent: Sounds like a great plan, Steve Benen. Thanks so much for coming on, always great to talk to you.
Benen: Thank you.
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