The Jackpod: The demons
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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Hey, Jackpotters, a quick note that we are recording this around one o'clock on Wednesday. Why you need to know that is about to be very clear. ♪♪

I'm On Point Senior Editor Dori Scheimer, filling in for Meghna Chakrabarty. This is The Jackpot, where On Point News Analyst Jack Beattie helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hi, Jack. Hello, Dori. It is Episode 74. What's the headline this week? The Demons. What kind of demons are we talking about? Trade Demons.

On a recent podcast, Ted Cruz alluded darkly to Trump's tariff war with the world. Cruz said, there are angels and demons on Trump's shoulders. Who does he listen to? Well, of course, first and last, Trump listens to Trump.

Trump's inner trade demon has been remarkably, that imp has been remarkably consistent on tariffs for going on 40 years. In 1987, Trump spent $100,000 to purchase full-page ads in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe, warning, quote,

that for decades Japan and others have been taking advantage of the United States in trade. And he especially resented, although he didn't put this in the ad, that the Japanese were buying buildings in Manhattan and therefore giving him competition in his real estate career. So

That's been his demon on trade all through the almost two generations. Can I just ask you right off the bat, I mean, isn't that a consistent through line through a lot of different policy areas? President Trump's kind of obsession with fairness and feeling like, you know, I won't be taken advantage of. The United States won't be taken advantage of, even if that's only his perception of what's happening.

Oh, yes. The aggrievement is just central to it. And of course, it's also central to his political appeal.

Even if he's talking about his private grievances, you know, or Liz Cheney insulted him or whatever it might be, it's the language and the effect of grievance that has connected with aggrieved American voters. So, yeah, his complaints against the world have found resonance in the electorate. So on one side, there's the, you know, monomania.

about tariffs and people taking advantage of us. And then on the other side, there's something he said the other night at a Republican fundraiser. He said, quote, these countries are kissing my ass. The idea is that the countries are coming to him and saying, Mr. President, please don't tariff us. We'll make a deal with you. Trump

Loves that because it allows him to be dominant it allows him to humiliate other people other countries and so he's caught between his conviction that Tariffs are paid for by the country you tariff. They're not we're paying for them American consumers He's been consistently wrong for 40 years on that and then on the other side the the joys of

of humiliating people and the joys of extorting from others, in this case, from countries. He said, they're calling me up. Japan is coming, Korea. And of course, what Trump is doing there is undercutting exactly the promise of consistency in the tariff threat. After all,

If I'm a company abroad and I'm saying, "My God, I'm going to face tariffs forever in the United States, I better move my factory to America." That was the sort of vision of the tariff, right? But they won't do that if you say that on one day and then the next day you say, "I'll make a deal." No firm in the world would commit to the millions and billions it would cost to build a factory here.

If tomorrow Trump could pull the rug out from it. So Trump is obviously the responsible actor here for creating what the Financial Times called America's act of self-harm.

But he has allies. The Washington Post has had really good reporting on the background to Trump's tariff decision of last Liberation Day, last Wednesday. And the Post has found that right after inauguration, people from various agencies in the government, Trump appointees to be sure, but

experts in their various fields started to prepare his tariff policy. And what they did was, you can't believe this, but they actually proceeded empirically. They called up companies and they said,

What kind of trouble are you having selling your goods abroad? Can you tell us? And this went on for weeks. Careful country by country, industry specific, country specific tariffs were prepared for Trump to issue. And even over the last weekend, there were briefings on this issue.

by comparison to what he has now, sophisticated plan based on interviewing American firms that do business abroad to open foreign markets to more American goods. That was ready to go. But on Wednesday, just three hours before he made his announcement, Trump met in the Oval Office with his

his henchmen, and we'll talk about them, and decided instead for a simple formula that simply bases U.S. tariffs on the trade deficit in goods we have with other countries. This idea was the brainchild of Peter Navarro, his chief economist.

aid on this White House economics aid. And of this idea to base tariffs on the trade deficit we run with other countries, Larry Summers has said this, this is to economics what creationism is to biology, as astrology is to astronomy.

as RFK Jr. thought is to vaccine science. You know, in his book, Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence, in his chapter on Moby Dick, he said, he's talking about the Pequot, you know, the Ahab ship.

And he says the Pequot, a maniac captain of the soul and three eminently practical mates. Well, Trump is not a captain of anybody's soul, but he does have that maniacal monomania, his white whale being the tariff and the idea that he can get other countries to pay it.

And tragically, he is not surrounded by three eminently practical mates because these are the people who were in the Oval Office with him and who basically said, throw out all that complicated research-based idea on using tariffs to get our way in the world and let's just tariff the whole world together.

And Jack, let me jump in real quick before you detail who they are. We have news just as we're recording this that President Trump and these folks that you're going to talk about have just made the decision to pause tariffs for 90 days after now. Oh!

Now, a week of the markets plummeting and, you know, tons of backlash around this, except Jack China. President Trump says he's going to increase tariffs on China once again to 125 percent. So I will let you continue on to detail the people who have just made this most recent.

recent decision on what's happening with tariffs. Okay. Well, we're saying we wish they were eminently practical. They're not, these three mates, unlike the three mates of the Pequot. And meanwhile, the ship of state, if it's the American economy, it hasn't yet had its encounter with the whale that has been put off by 90 days. Okay.

Kind of. Maybe. Well, the first demon, hardly a demon, he's as close to the angel as you can get, is Scott Besson, the secretary of the Treasury. Treasury secretaries, their main job is to give confidence to the markets, make the markets think, well, you know.

These people know what they're doing with money. Unfortunately, as a headline in The Dispatch, which is a conservative publication, has it, our Treasury Secretary is an economic illiterate. It lists all the follies and foolish things he has said, none more foolish.

than what he was talking about a couple of, I think about a month ago, maybe a little more, where he said, quote, China will probably eat our tariffs. In other words, China won't respond.

Oh, how can you go before the markets and have anybody, any investor, have confidence that you know what you're talking about when you say something so immediately corrected by experience as that? China has tariffs of at least 85% now.

on U.S. goods. And we'll have to see if they up the ante even further. And yet, he's the voice of sanity in this group because, after all, he is responsible for Wall Street. He is a billionaire. He made his money investing. And he keeps...

He keeps one foot in reality, and it looks like he might have won on this, at least for this short-term pause that you just told me about. So that's Scott Besson, demon number one, impractical mate number one. The second mate is Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary, also a billionaire.

In the New Republic, one writer says, Lutnick privately does not believe in any of this tariff stuff or has severe doubts. But, quote, he's not an idiot. He just plays one on TV and in the Oval Office.

And he was in that fateful meeting last Wednesday when they threw out the sophisticated plan and came up with this simple, stupid formula. He was one of the loudest for, yeah, go for it, Mr. President. And the reason is, of course, that, again, to quote the New Republic, and this echoes reporting in the Wall Street Journal this week,

quote, in an administration brimming with sycophants, no nose is buried deeper inside Trump's glutamous maximus than Howard Lutnick. He is forever fawning over Trump, forever flattering him, trying to get him to really think that he's the man that Trump has to look to. So the Wall Street Journal did a profile titled

Lutnick's strategy flummoxes business leaders and White House aides. In one meeting with businesses, he said there would be exemptions for some products like mangoes, but there'd be no exception for oil. That was on one day. Well, when Trump rolled out his tariff plan in the Rose Garden, and it was Howard Lutnick who was

you know, sycophantically holding the chart that Trump pointed to. When Trump rolled out the plan in the Rose Garden, there were no mango exemptions and Trump did give an exemption to the oil industry. So,

What Lutnick had assured companies on one day, Trump reversed on the next. Not something that gives you any great confidence in his judgment. Yeah. Yeah. Isn't Howard Lutnick exactly who we should have expected to be around Trump in the second Trump term? Because what we saw in the first was, you know, the firings of Trump.

pretty often by Twitter. And often those firings came because of a perceived lack of loyalty from the president. So this time around, that's exactly the kind of person he's going to have around him because that's the lesson that was taken from his first administration, right?

That's right. He wants people who have as little to do with reality as he does. And there's another one. Oh, there is another one. And this guy, Peter Navarro, is a true believer. He's not just, you know, faking when he talks about giving lip service to tariffs. No, no, no. This is his baby. And it's been for years.

what he has advocated. And the story of how he came to Trump is interesting. In the 2016 campaign, Trump asked his son-in-law, can you find me an economist, somebody who'd give me... And so, you know, instead of going to the American Economics Association or looking at the people at the University of Chicago, Jared went to the Amazon.

And he went on, he clicked on economists. And he saw one book, something like China's War on America or, you know, China means death. And he said, that's the guy we want. And it was a University of California, Irvine professor named Peter Navarro. He became an advisor to the campaign.

And he has a distinction, other than being the man who may wreck the world economy, but his other distinction is that he's the only advisor to a president who's ever done time in jail. He got a 90-day sentence to a Miami federal prison for defying a subpoena to testify before Congress on the January 6th

and its surrounding scandals. And here's some sound of him. He was released just as the Republican convention last summer was opening in Milwaukee. And here he is at that convention. Yes, indeed. This morning I did walk out of a federal prison in Miami. Joe Biden and his Department of Injustice put me there.

Tonight, I'm here with you in this beautiful city of Milwaukee. I've got a very simple message for you. If they can come for me, if they can come for Donald Trump, be careful, they will come for you.

There again, you know, the pool of grievance. They're coming after me. Trump used that so effectively. And Navarro, whom Trump calls my Peter. My Peter is a man after his own heart given to the same monomania about tariffs. And in, I think, a half dozen books, he has cited as an expert source of

one quote, Ron Vera. And here is Rachel Maddow on Ron Vera. V-A-R-A, Ron Vera.

When Trump won the presidency and entered the White House, this Ron Vera started circulating a memo around Washington in support of Trump using tariffs in trade policy. According to The New York Times, the memo had been, quote, sent from an email address purportedly belonging to Ron Vera. At one point, Ron Vera wrote in the memo that Trump could, quote, ride the tariffs to victory.

The problem is Ron Vera doesn't exist. He never has. The economics expert that Peter Navarro has long cited to explain why he's so gung-ho on tariffs, this person Ron Vera is a made-up person. He is a fictional person. Who is Ron Vera? Ron Vera is an anagram of Navarro, which is his last name.

Jack, this is part of a longer story recounted by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, in part with reporting from Vanity Fair, talking about, you know, Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law.

Finding Navarro by browsing books, covers on Amazon. Right. I mean, that's basically the origin story of how they found each other. But think that the president of the United States in setting a course of the American ship of state, our economy, listens to this quack. Two economists at the American Enterprise Institute, again, a conservative group,

They say, quote, the formula used by the Trump administration contains a serious math error that over inflates the impact of tariffs by a factor of four. But that if it had been, if they hadn't made that math error, very few countries in the world would have paid any more than that floor tariff of 10% on everybody. Even China has.

would have paid just 10% on Navarro's own formula if he had done the math correctly. It's error within fallacy within fiction. It is error.

It's beyond satire. Jack, is there anyone in Trump's inner circle or White House advisors who are pushing back against Navarro or this tariff policy? Navarro has just this week drawn heavy fire from Elon Musk, who, of course, favors free trade. In fact, he wants a zero tariff policy.

with Europe. And he's hit at Navarro. He's called him a moron. And worse, I believe. And worse, yeah. He did something very valuable, though, Musk. He put on X this soundbite from the Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman about the interdependence and the supply chains that go into making one pencil.

Not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it's made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the state of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead, but it's really graphite, compressed graphite. I'm not sure where it comes from, but I think it comes from some mines in South America.

This red top up here, the eraser, bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn't even native. It was imported from South America by some businessmen with the help of the British government. This brass ferrule, I haven't the slightest idea where it came from, or the yellow paint, or the paint that made the black lines, or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.

Yes, that's the vision of one world. And that's the, you know, that is the world that America created in its drive since the Second World War to freer and freer trade.

One round after another, lowering tariffs, encouraging international travel, bringing in students from abroad, becoming a cosmopolitan center of world innovation. That's the country that Trump seems bent on.

on on on destroying with with his with his economics. Well, Jack, I just want to jump in. The White House communications office sent this email to the press talking about how how the trade policies that you've just described the past several decades of United States trade policies have, in their words, destroyed lives.

And they're saying that this shift to a global economy has, uh,

led to the opioid epidemic. Job loss due to international trade is positively associated with opioid overdose mortality at the county level. In general, the loss of 1,000 trade-related jobs was associated with 2.7% increase in opioid-related deaths. So it seems that the Trump administration, through these policies, is saying, okay,

We have to reverse this and it's going to reverse all of these bad things that have happened. It's going to save these destroyed lives. It's just going to hurt for a little bit. Is it even possible, Jack, to roll back the clock as Trump thinks this change in tariff policy will do? It doesn't seem possible. And as I say, if the whole thing is premised on the idea is that you will draw factories back here.

because you're tariffing them their goods sent from abroad. The whole premise of that rests on how credible your threat is of the tariff, because people have got to invest billions. Trump is undercutting his 90-day pause, his pause here, his statement, yeah, we're open for business. We want to negotiate. That has

undercut the threat that gave credibility to his re-industrialization idea. And sure, there have been, quote, losers, I hate that word, victims, I put it this way, of American neoliberalism, really. You know, the policies adopted and pushed by people like Lawrence Summers, for example, in the Clinton administration, opening our markets, opening

you know, hastening the pace of modernization and hollowing out communities all across the country as textiles, as, you know, furniture makers, as this and that went to abroad because of the cost of labor and so on. So people were really hurt.

And instead of the government doing something like what they do in Denmark, and in Denmark, here's what they do. They spend in Denmark the percentage of what we spend on our defense budget, retraining people who are the victims of foreign trade. So if you lose your job in Denmark because of free trade,

The government sends you to school. The government puts money into you. The government recognizes they have a moral obligation, since their policies hurt you, to get you on your feet. We have this ridiculous thing called TANF that doesn't, you know, it doesn't

Everybody says it's a farce. Nobody gets any training. So we leave people on their own. And so there's some great truth in that. And Trump owes his election to that sense of betrayal. Betrayal pushed, I regret to say, by the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton with NAFTA, with China's admission into the WTO.

pushed there. And Trump is a response to the changes wrought by globalization. But on the whole, it has been good for all of us. You look at America's growth compared to Europe's, compared to Japan. Our country is rich because of international trade. People have been hurt and we have not helped them enough. So what was...

Milton's view of the grand result of all of this globalization, this global, this world economy? Well, you know, the vision of trade as a pacifier in international relations goes back to Montesquieu in the 18th century. And the idea when even in the Enlightenment, people talked about citizens of the world.

And Adam Smith picks this up in The Wealth of Nations. He talks about how it brings nations closer together and it softens the antagonisms that lead to war. Conversely, eras of protectionism, like the 1930s, of economic warfare, too often have led to real warfare. And as we now face off against China in this desperate,

struggle from which it doesn't seem there can be any exit. It doesn't involve humiliation for one party or the other. It's worth remembering that when you abandon free trade and go on the path of protectionism, economic warfare,

In the past, real warfare has resulted. And so the vision, Friedman ends his talk with the vision of what a global economy, freely trading economy can mean. The operation of the free market is so essential, not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.

Well, there seems to be harmony among the other peoples of the world in objecting to President Trump's trade policy, but I would say that's the only harmony I'm seeing right now.

At least some reality, you know, what's been happening, everybody's 401ks. At least that message has got to the White House. And maybe Trump can find some face-saving gesture in this. But the situation with China, where he gave China an ultimatum, you can't talk to other countries like that.

Well, on that note, Jack, we're going to actually do something a little bit different this week. The jackpot is taking a couple of weeks off. So while we're gone, jackpotters, please leave us a message either with your reaction to this week's episode, what you think about the demons as Jack made this week's headline, or leave us a question that you want Jack to answer. And we'll get to some of those when we come back. So you can do that by grabbing your phone, opening the On Point VoxPop app,

If you don't already have it, search On Point Box Pop in the App Store and leave us a message there. We have to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll hear your thoughts on last week's episode about the possibility of President Trump seeking a third term. Stay with us.

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And we're back. Last time, we talked about President Trump floating the idea of running for a third term. We talked about where that idea came from in 2018 and the time in history when the United States went from following a two-term norm to instituting a constitutional amendment for presidential term limits. So we asked you what you think of Jack's analysis that constitutional ambiguities could actually lead to Donald Trump pursuing a third presidential term.

Here's Adam in Columbia, South Carolina. No, Jack, there are no constitutional ambiguities here.

Just people that are willing to cede power. A man of few straight-to-the-point words. But we got many other messages with more words on the subject. Here's Tom in Grand Rapids, Michigan. When Trump has completed the seizure of Congress's power of the purse, when he's defied and neutered judicial review of his executive actions...

When he has smashed through every legal and historical custom of presidential restraint, and when he's nakedly pursued his political and cultural foes, he and his MAGA movement will realize they can never, ever allow that supersized presidency to pass into the hands of the opposition party. Jack, what do you think? Mm-hmm.

Well, Adam, I admire his no. But obviously, this is a remote possibility. And I was just reflecting when I looked at some of the law articles, journal articles about this, I saw, oh, there does seem to be some who knew that there was...

Maybe not ambiguity, but room to maneuver in there. Even if there isn't room to maneuver, say they did the switcheroo, the Putin's and Medvedev model where Vance would run for president and Trump would run for vice president and then Trump would take over.

even if that kind of thing went to the Supreme Court? Can that happen? And Jonathan Chait makes a good point about that. He said such cases are unlikely to be decided until after the GOP convention, this would be of 2028, has locked up the party's ticket, forcing the Supreme Court to choose between effectively canceling the presidential election or

and enforcing the 22nd Amendment ban on third terms. In other words, put the Supreme Court in a squeeze. Do you want to cancel the presidential election?

Or do you want to neuter the 22nd Amendment? Again, very unlikely, but there it is. And how the institutions would respond is exactly what we got a lot of messages on. Steve Nuttall in Cave Creek, Arizona, has confidence that our institutions would stand up for the Constitution in that scenario you just laid out. I believe that the Senate and the House...

would not stomach giving a third term to any politician because of the political ramifications of allowing that. But on the flip side, Jamie Boulay in Fall River, Massachusetts, says he does not think Republicans in our institutions like the Senate and the House or the Supreme Court would stop Trump from going for a third term.

If Trump says it's possible enough times, and then the right-wing media ecosystem supports that talking point for the next three years, then his voters will simply believe there is no limitation. At that point, I can certainly see the Republican Party at both national and state levels fighting to get his name on the ballot under public outcry to do so, even if the courts ruled against it, which I certainly don't believe this Supreme Court would.

I don't think there is any court policing authority that exists to stop his name from actually being put on the 2028 ballot. Jack, I appreciate the optimism about the House and the Senate from Steve. But but I believe that what Jamie's saying reflects what, you know, a far greater number of people think that our institute, they don't have faith that our institutions will uphold the rule of law at this point.

No, and it's been shaken. And I think this, you know, what will supervene between 2028 and now 2026? If the Democrats running on Trump's, you know, war on the economy, assuming that goes ahead, at least in the China theater, it will. And by the way, that's going to really, you know, boost the price of iPhones, everything from iPhones to T-shirts.

If the Democrats, you know, win the House and if things are really bad, the Senate, then Trump will not get supported and they will, you know, they will impeach him for sure. Of course, they will never have enough people to convict him, but it might slow down any effort sort of to, you know, consolidate an unconstitutional movement.

putsch on the third term. But the point that Jamie was making about how we'll become inured to this and how the Fox News and all the rest will keep, it'll be normalized. And after all, people have come to accept that the 2020 election was rigged. For that matter, they've come to accept that Trump is a plausible president. And if they can accept that, well...

Maybe they can accept a third term heresy. OK, one more. This is from Keith Maddock in Little River, South Carolina. And he says that this moment is a test of democracy and the world is watching. It's clear to me that Trump wants what all authoritarians want, complete and absolute power at the cost of our Constitution.

We are truly an experiment for democracy, and our democracy is being challenged. He said in a rally last year, and I'll paraphrase, if you vote for me, it will be the last vote you'll ever need. What did he mean? We should be concerned about our Constitution and the threats he poses to dismantle it. The United States of America is the greatest and longest experiment in democracy, and we

We cannot fail this test. So, Jack, I mean, you just talked about it a bit, but is the 2026 election the moment that we will you think the country will really be tested? The people will be tested. Yeah. And I can't improve on Keith's lapidary eloquence there. Yes. Yes.

Everything rests on that election. I saw somebody writing this week that the people have given up on it, have given up on our role in the world, have given up on democracy, and essentially we're a degenerate people. Has our virtue as citizens been so corrupted by the scandals and shocks and failures of government in recent decades that people have essentially

given up on the Republic. If you can keep it, they've decided they don't want to keep it. Well, not if Meghna Chakrabarty has anything to do with it. She will keep the optimism alive. Jack, thank you, as always. A pleasure. Thank you. Jackpotters, again, I just want to give you a heads up that the jackpot is taking a brief break. We'll be backing your ears on May 2nd. But in

But in the meantime, I really hope you'll check out On Point's special series about why so many boys are struggling in school. It's called Falling Behind, The Miseducation of America's Boys. It has been months in the making and really is a must listen for any parent, really anyone who cares about educational outcomes for future generations of American men. The first episode drops on Monday, followed by subsequent episodes each weekday next week.

It's all going to be right here in the same feed you get the jackpot. And we hope you will give it a listen. I'm Dori Scheimer. This is the jackpot from On Point.