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Natalie Kitroeff

From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroweff.

Narrator/Reporter

This is the daily for people right across America. Everything has been getting more expensive. From food to fuel, healthcare to heating. Everyone's feeling the pain.

Anna Swanson

Our CBS News poll says that 7 in 10Americans say they are frustrated or even angry with the administration's approach to the economy.

Natalie Kitroeff

At a moment when inflation and affordability are on everyone's mind.

Jamison Greer

The new analysis from the Federal Reserve bank reveals nearly 90% of President Trump's tariffs in 2025 were paid by consumers and businesses.

Natalie Kitroeff

And when economists are saying that tariffs are partially to blame for the relentless rise in prices, my colleague Ana Swanson talked to the most influential driver of President Trump's tariff policy, Jamison Greer. Greer told her that despite tanking public opinion, the Trump administration is now planning a new slate of tariffs that it believes will survive any legal challenge.

Anna Swanson

So according to your own metrics, are tariffs working?

Jamison Greer

They are, yeah. I think we've been wildly successful today.

Natalie Kitroeff

Why Greer thinks that Trump's tariff policy has been a success and why the administration is doubling down.

Jamison Greer

Whenever you're trying to change policy in a big way and you're upending special interests or corporate interests, people are gonna come back and try to fight that. They want the status quo. We don't want the status quo.

Natalie Kitroeff

It's Monday, July 20th. Anna, you spent hours with Jamison Greer, not a household name, but someone who is very important in crafting U.S. trade policy as the U.S. trade representative. So, Jim, just say why this guy matters and how much.

Anna Swanson

Yeah. So he has become very influential. So the fascinating thing about Jameson Greer is he's not your typical Trump appointee. He's not a billionaire, he's not brash. You might remember we had Peter Navarro on this show before as well.

Jamison Greer

Yep.

Anna Swanson

Navarro is kind of more of a loose cannon, but Greer, on the other hand, is quite considered. He's more of a quiet, low key type of guy, but he has a lot of knowledge in the trade law he has a lot of experience in trade, and he really is the brains behind a lot of the trade agenda at this point.

Natalie Kitroeff

Okay, so after you sat down with him a couple times, I understand what was your main takeaway?

Anna Swanson

So even though he's facing a lot of headwinds, including the fact that public sentiment for Trump is low, you've got these legal challenges against the administration's tariffs. The Supreme Court overturned a big swath of the trade agenda.

Podcast Sponsor Announcer

Right.

Anna Swanson

Greer has not been dissuaded by any of this. In fact, he's proposed a lot of new tariffs to essentially recreate the tariffs that were overturned by the Supreme Court. And he remains very intent on this policy and the benefit he thinks it will bring to the country.

Natalie Kitroeff

And why, why are none of those obstacles that I think would normally be considered pretty big dissuading this guy?

Anna Swanson

Because according to him, the tariffs are working.

Natalie Kitroeff

They're working how? Like, help me understand that.

Anna Swanson

So there are a lot of reasons that he gives disputing all the arguments that people make about tariffs, all the complaints that people have. But I think to really understand why he thinks tariffs are working, you have to understand how he became such a die hard believer in tariffs in the first place. Hey, how are you?

Jamison Greer

Good to see you. Want to sit there as a setup?

Anna Swanson

So I went to his office with colleagues from the Daily.

Jamison Greer

Welcome to this building, which used to be part of the War Department.

Anna Swanson

Right. This is a very historic building. Right.

Jamison Greer

It's the second oldest federal building in Washington after the White House. But there's less gold in here than there is in the White House.

Anna Swanson

Ah, right. Okay.

Jamison Greer

Well.

Anna Swanson

And we started talking to him about those early experiences that he had that shaped the way he thinks about trade and tariffs and how the US Needs to change the way that it's trading with the world. Just quickly, I'll go back a little bit more. Maybe we just briefly talk about your background and how you got to this position. Can you describe your childhood?

Jamison Greer

I was born in a town called Gridley, California, which is the Kiwi capital of the United States. And then When I was 2, we moved to Paradise, California. I went to Paradise High School. It was the only public high school in town. And I did pretty normal things. I ran across country, I did student government. I worked in the local McDonald's. I was a little league umpire with parents yelling at me. So had a very normal American style childhood.

Anna Swanson

So GRU grew up in California, not coastal California, San Francisco or la, but in the northern central part of the state. It's a Town called paradise that had this massive wildfire subsequently.

Jamison Greer

Paradise, California, in Butte County. This is deep red California, deep in the woods, logging country. You know, we had something every year called the Gold Nugget Festival. I mean, it was gold country. So it was very much a working class kind of place.

Anna Swanson

He's one of five kids. His mom worked as a bank teller for Wells Fargo for many years. His dad, on the other hand, did a variety of jobs.

Jamison Greer

We actually moved to paradise because he was going to take a job in plastic injection molding. There was a small industrial park there, so he was going to do that before those jobs went to Asia.

Anna Swanson

He worked at auto dealerships in the maintenance and service shop, and he worked in pest control.

Jamison Greer

I grew up in a mobile home. Not in a mobile home, but in a mobile home.

Anna Swanson

Even though they weren't very well off, his parents really valued education.

Jamison Greer

We had a subscription to National Geographic, famous magazine with the yellow border. So always had a desire to go out and do more.

Anna Swanson

And his family is also Mormon, so he goes to Brigham Young University in Utah, and he studies international relations. And then after he graduated from university, he decided to go to law school, and he ends up joining the military.

Jamison Greer

And again, when you grow up in a place like paradise, it's not unlikely being in Appalachia in a lot of ways, right? It's kind of poor area, more working class. Doesn't look like there are a lot of ways for social mobility there. And, you know, you go to the military.

Anna Swanson

He worked as a military lawyer in Kansas, Turkey and Iraq.

Jamison Greer

I ended up getting connected with a headhunter who was really helpful.

Anna Swanson

And he finds a job that combines his interest in the law and in international relations, working at a prestigious law firm in D.C. called Skadden.

Jamison Greer

You know, my headhunter said, hey, I think you'd be interested in this group at Skadden, where they're doing this international trade work for, you know, American manufacturers.

Anna Swanson

And he finds himself on this team where he's defending US Companies against unfair trade from other countries. And it ends up becoming this very formative experience for him.

Natalie Kitroeff

How so?

Anna Swanson

So at the time when he starts working there in 2012, this is a period where globalization is going full steam ahead. Companies are offshoring to China. China is expanding into different markets. And Greer was representing U.S. steel companies that are dealing with this onslaught of cheap steel coming out of China. They're subsidizing their industry. They're pricing things unfairly low and basically undercutting U.S. companies and putting U.S. steel mills out of business. There were rules around this kind of behavior. But a lot of multinational companies actually benefited from trade with China. And so they turned a blind eye to China's unfair trade practices. And a lot of politicians did the same.

Jamison Greer

You know, if you look back at 2012, 2013, this was a time when in Washington, in fact, particularly among Republicans and the US Business community, the view was the purpose of trade is efficiency purely. That's all we're looking for. We're looking for efficiency, and we want to have good relations with China and trade deficits don't matter. And if we're losing steel mills, that's okay, because everyone's going to transition to services, jobs that are better, and software development and healthcare and all these different things. This was the prevailing view.

Anna Swanson

And within this international trading system, Greer is working to get protections for US Manufacturers. He's taking foreign companies to court.

Jamison Greer

They have massive subsidies, and it becomes very difficult for American workers and the companies that employ them to compete with a Chinese or a Vietnamese steel company that doesn't have to make money. Right. Or if they lose money, they're going to get a subsidy from their government.

Anna Swanson

And the subsidy, he's arguing that they're using unfair trade practices.

Jamison Greer

Oh, look at this. Actually, you're selling below cost, or you're selling at no profit, and you're doing at length.

Anna Swanson

And he's actually winning his cases.

Natalie Kitroeff

And what does it mean to win? What happens when he wins these cases?

Anna Swanson

So the big consequence is that the Commerce Department, because of these court rulings, puts tariffs on these countries. But the problem is this process takes a long time, and the tariffs are narrow in scope.

Jamison Greer

They're country specific, they're company specific, they're product specific. And I just thought, well, this is. We're taking care of this. But it's quite laborious.

Anna Swanson

And China and other countries are also really good at finding loopholes, finding other ways to ship cheap steel into the

Jamison Greer

US So it becomes a whack, a mole issue.

Bank of America Private Bank Announcer

Right.

Jamison Greer

It's not just in steel solar panels. Right. Maybe you shut down access for Chinese solar panels into the US and then just move to Southeast Asia or somewhere else.

Anna Swanson

You crack down on Chinese steel shipments in one place, and they just kind of pop up somewhere else.

Natalie Kitroeff

So Greer is experiencing firsthand all of the challenges in the system in that it takes a really long time to prove that foreign companies are cheating international trade rules. And even when you can prove it, the protection that US Companies get in return ultimately isn't that effective.

Anna Swanson

That's right. And he's also seeing the impact of this on everyday Americans.

Jamison Greer

When we're bringing in people to testify before the International Trade Commission about the effect of trade policy on them, we're bringing in people on the line. We're bringing in people who wear hard hats, we're bringing in people who wear safety glasses and do eyewash at the end of the day because of chemicals. These are the people we're ultimately trying to benefit.

Anna Swanson

And this really helps to shape Greer's view of trade and how trade is impacting the country. And then his boss at Scadden, a guy named Bob Lighthizer, is appointed to become the top trade negotiator in Trump's first term. And Greer gets tapped to become Lighthizer's chief of staff, which is a big

Natalie Kitroeff

deal, right, because it gives him the chance to take all of this stuff that he learned as a trade lawyer and now presumably directly affect U.S. trade policy.

Anna Swanson

Policy, right. And one of the key actions that they take in that first Trump term is they issue broad tariffs on China. They hit hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods with tariffs. And these actions were quite controversial at the time. But the way Greer explains it, the US Needed to start taking unilateral action against China or else it would have just lost more and more of its manufacturing base to China.

Jamison Greer

If America doesn't develop and implement its own policies to protect its industry and its workers, we will end up being policy takers. Right? So if we're not policymakers, we end up being policy takers. And China is very, it's very strong in making policy. It publishes every five years. They have a five year plan for years.

Anna Swanson

China has made its ambitions very explicit in these five year plans it puts out. It has been pushing to become more self sufficient and it has set a goal to dominate key industries.

Jamison Greer

Listen, China's just going to do this. This is their goal. They don't have a lot of room for everyone else's manufacturing capacity. And guess what? I'm not even going to pass a value judgment on that. Whatever. That's their country, that's their economy, that's how they're working. It's really important for us, the United States. You know, if China is not going to change its practices that we believe are harmful, then we have to take unilateral measures. We have to be policymakers. Otherwise we just have to accept all these giant surpluses that they're developing through their own policies. And I'm not going to take that. The President doesn't want to take that because he's not just going to take other countries policies and say, oh, well, okay, I guess we'll just hand over our industrial base to everybody else. I guess everyone else will just have subsidies and we'll lay down and take it on the chin again.

Anna Swanson

And the way that everything rolls out, they end up demonstrating that the political conversation around trade had actually changed a lot. And the Biden administration ends up keeping Trump's China tariffs, even when they have the chance to remove them.

Jamison Greer

I mean, it had become politically unsustainable, almost bubbling up from the US Population. It was not a top down kind of thing. It was. There were these kind of instinctual things that the American population is feeling that Trump tapped into. And he called on Lighthizer and Lighthizer brought together a team to really implement and attack these issues that the President had detected personally, but also in the US population. So it was a popular message. I keep using these words like population. And popular were populists.

Natalie Kitroeff

Okay, let's turn to Trump 2.0. Greer now has the top trade job. The administration came out swinging last year with tariffs expanding way beyond China, hitting almost the entire world. We've covered this a bunch on the show. What was Greer's role in that approach?

Anna Swanson

So Greer is not the ultimate decider. Trump is the decider. But Greer, as the trade lawyer, is preparing kind of the legal basis for. And he becomes the face of it. He's negotiating with foreign governments and companies and Congress. He's the one who executes this plan which ultimately fails.

Natalie Kitroeff

Right. The Supreme Court ruled that many of these tariffs were illegal. But for a while there, for about a year, Trump was able to impose tariffs any day of the week, whenever he wanted. He imposed them against India for buying Russian oil. He imposed them on Brazil for prosecuting their former President Trump. These moves caused massive economic disruption and also really hurt America's relationships with its allies. What did Greer have to say about that?

Anna Swanson

Yeah, those are fair questions. And I did ask him about it.

Jamison Greer

It was very important to the President and we understood it was important to the President to move very quickly because in our view this was an emergency.

Anna Swanson

And he said the President wanted to move fast and they considered the trade situation an emergency. So Greer thought this was a legally defensible strategy.

Jamison Greer

Our trade deficit exploded by 40% in the five years before President Trump's second term. It was $1.2 trillion at the end of 2024. This is crazy. So for us, this is an emergency because that deficit represents jobs and production going overseas that could be here. So the President declared an emergency we set tariffs as soon as we could. We set them in a way that could really set a strong market signal that production needs to come back to the US and then it resulted in all these deals which opened markets overseas. So I think it was critical and important that we used this statute because we were responding to an emergency. We had to move very, very quickly, and we had a lot of good outcomes from doing it.

Anna Swanson

And he also argues that the way that they rolled this out gave the administration a lot of leverage over other countries. It allowed them to negotiate trade deals with a lot of partners, including the U.K. the EU, Indonesia, India, and Japan. And when I've talked to experts, many of them are actually surprised about how much the US Was able to get in these deals. But it was an incredibly chaotic period. Companies were complaining that the tariffs were totally unfair. They were suddenly hit by these massive bills that they had to pay to the government. They had to figure out how to come up with the money. So there may have been bipartisan support for the more targeted tariffs that had been done in Trump's first term, but when they did these supersized ones in the second term, Americans seemed very unhappy. You were able to move quickly. You know, the president was able to change tariffs when he wanted to, but, I mean, on the other side, all of that money has had to be paid back. The deals are slowed. Right. So, I mean, isn't that a major setback?

Jamison Greer

Well, I take a broader perspective on this. I mean, we had the same trade policy from, like, post World War II until the Middle of President Trump's first term. Right. So that's like, that's a long period of that trade policy. The past eight years or so, it's modified. And now in this year, we've essentially upended 70 years of trade policy in one year.

Anna Swanson

So you don't have any regrets in terms of that legal strategy?

Jamison Greer

No, I don't have any. Well, I regret that the Supreme Court went the wrong way. Right. But, I mean, that's their fault. That's not ours.

Natalie Kitroeff

So it doesn't sound like he actually regrets pursuing tariffs this way, even though those tariffs were later struck down by the courts.

Anna Swanson

No, he said he doesn't regret it.

Jamison Greer

Well, we're always going to get sued. There's always going to be people who are trying to make a buck on the back of the American worker, and they're always going to want to sue to maintain their business model. My message is that these business models are not sustainable politically or economically in America anymore.

Natalie Kitroeff

But what does he have to say about the fact that they now have to refund billions of dollars to these companies.

Anna Swanson

So he does think refunding all of these companies is a major setback for the administration because they lose a huge source of revenue. But he says he's talking to many companies who had actually benefited from the tariffs, companies that are manufacturing in the United States.

Jamison Greer

I have folks in California, for example, where I'm from, where they do plastic injection molding, small batch. They're a small business now. They feel like they can actually compete with the Chinese and Asian producers, which

Anna Swanson

is what your dad did, right?

Jamison Greer

Actually, yeah, that's actually an excellent point. Yeah. So for every small business person that says, well, my business model is to import from China a finished good, mark it up and resell it to an American, could that impact their business? Yeah, of course it could.

Anna Swanson

And for those that have been hurt by the tariffs, he said he doesn't really feel sorry for them if they structured their business models around importing cheap stuff from China and from other countries.

Jamison Greer

So whatever strategy you choose, there are upsides and downsides. And when you're talking about a presidential term, you've got four years. This is a very short time. You know, we could do what the Biden people did. They came in and they said, we're going to have a worker centered trade policy. We're going to keep what the Trump people did in the first term because it made sense. And we're going to study these issues. And so the Commerce Department, all these folks, they studied supply chains for batteries, for pharmaceuticals, for renewable energy products, all these things, and they created these great reports which I've read, and I appreciate them, but they didn't really do anything. Could we have refined things? Could we have made it much more nuanced? Could we have done all that? Yeah, but it would not have nearly been as effective. I mean, we're acting right now. And by the way, it's not like we acted with nothing. We've spent years thinking about this. This is an extension of the president's original trade policy in his first term. So it didn't come out of nowhere. You just lose time. And we're already way far behind. We are already behind the curve. There's just no time to waste.

Anna Swanson

So he really thinks the tariff policy is working as intended, and he has a whole new plan to keep tariffs going.

Jamison Greer

At the end of the day, we are winning and changing the trade policy. We're winning and getting the trade deficit down. We're winning in reshoring. We're winning in wages. We're winning on all these things. So I'm happy with where we are and where we're going.

Natalie Kitroeff

We'll be right back.

Anna Swanson

This episode is supported by Building Better Health, a podcast from UnitedHealth Group.

Jamison Greer

Building Better Health is a new conversation

Anna Swanson

series from UnitedHealth Group that explores healthcare's most significant challenges and how we can fix them.

Narrator/Reporter

The people that we serve, people that this is all about, are now asking the right questions. They're pressing for answers and quite right, their expectations are getting higher and higher. And that's a good thing because what that is doing is it's pushing the system towards increased transparency as we all work together to answer those questions.

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Natalie Kitroeff

So Ana, you said Greer has a new plan to now keep tariffs going. Tell us about that.

Anna Swanson

So the administration right now is working to recreate the tariffs that the Supreme Court struck down earlier this year, and they're using a legal justification that they think will be much more durable. So they've already proposed one big tranche of tariffs which are related to other countries lack of laws when it comes to forced labor, like slave labor or other coercive labor practices that will bring tariffs of around 10% into effect against more than 80 countries, probably by later this month. And then they're preparing another huge swath of tariffs related to the unfair trade practices that other countries use to build up their factories, their manufacturing sectors, like subsidies, currency manipulation. So that could then lead to additional tariffs on more than 40 countries after that, and again, we're looking at the highest tariffs that the United States has had on the world in roughly a century.

Natalie Kitroeff

So big plans basically doubling down on all of this. How exactly is Greer determining that the tariffs are working like they should? Like, what evidence does he point to? Because my understanding is that tariffs so far have not actually been very effective at bringing back manufacturing jobs. And that seemed to be one of the key goals of the policy. And then at the same time, they've increased prices for Americans.

Anna Swanson

Yeah, I generally agree. So he told us that when he came into office, he had three main goals with tariffs. Increase manufacturing as a percent of gdp, reduce trade deficits, and increase real wages.

Jamison Greer

So on the first metric, the manufacturing share of gdp, I haven't really seen that move yet. But a lot of indicators on manufacturing have gone up. Manufacturing productivity is at the highest it's been in years. Manufacturing overtime hours are going up. Manufacturing labor wages are going up by 5% last year. And manufacturing jobs actually were net positive in the first quarter of 2026 for the first time in a few years. So all of those indicators are going the right way.

Anna Swanson

So he says one of the reasons they haven't seen manufacturing move up as a percent of GDP is that it takes time to build a factory. But he argues he sees some prom promising signs that there's a revival in manufacturing.

Jamison Greer

Look at the pharmaceutical industry, where we have new facilities going up in North Carolina, in Indiana, Southern California, in Georgia. I mean, this is real concrete progress. So I'm just seeing this happen in real time, and people are telling me tariffs are part of this.

Anna Swanson

So when I look at the data, it does look like manufacturing is picking up. But I don't think that's because of tariffs. I think manufacturing is being driven right now by other things, like the boom in AI and data centers in the

Jamison Greer

US we want the trade deficit in goods to go down.

Anna Swanson

Greer also argued that the trade deficit has fallen pretty significantly.

Jamison Greer

That's gone down by 25% in the past year. With China in particular, it's gone down 30%.

Anna Swanson

So he's right that the trade deficit with China has fallen a lot, but the overall trade balance is not that different than pre Trump. It's fallen a little bit, but overall it's not down that much.

Natalie Kitroeff

What about that third metric, wages? If this policy is supposed to be protecting wages, maybe even boosting them, how are we doing on that front?

Anna Swanson

So we talked about it and then just digging into wages as well. So wages are rising, but that's kind of the long Term trend. And inflation is now outpacing wage growth for the first time since 2023. So wages have gone up, but so has inflation, in part because of tariffs.

Jamison Greer

I disagree with that. I disagree with that squarely. I mean, first of all, wages have outpaced inflation for all of the second Trump administration, except for the last couple of months, driven by energy, because we have our operations in Iran. Everyone knows this. So before that, real wages have grown. They've outpaced inflation. But for this exceptional event in Iran,

Anna Swanson

Greer is right that before the Iran war, wages were rising faster than prices. But in the last couple months since the war started, prices have risen a lot more than wages, and they've actually jumped enough to offset all of the wage gains since Trump took office.

Jamison Greer

Hmm.

Anna Swanson

And then we had a back and forth on what's driving inflation.

Jamison Greer

And your point that you just kind of said that tariffs drive inflation, and I just disagree with that 100%. I mean, if you look at the first Trump administration, we put tariffs into place in July 2018 on China, which is a huge part of our imports, and our inflation at the time was about 2.7%. By the time we got to the next year, we had escalated tariffs on China. Inflation was down to like, 1.7%. So it's just not one to one. And when you look at the Biden administration, their inflation peaked at like, 10% in 2022. And at that point, they hadn't changed tariffs at all, up or down.

Anna Swanson

So he argues that tariffs aren't driving inflation. He says the money supply, the Iran war, things like health care, education are driving inflation.

Jamison Greer

So this idea that tariffs are driving inflation is crazy to me. I mean, there are a million factors that go into inflation, most importantly money supply. And now some of the inflation we're feeling is from Iran. And the other inflation we're feeling, it's not so much on goods, it's on services, things like education, health care, and insurance. I mean, things that. Where Democratic policies for a generation have driven prices up.

Anna Swanson

So those are certainly factors driving up prices over the long term. But that doesn't negate what many economists argue, which is that tariffs more recently have also added to prices on goods. And so I pushed him on that. But if you listen to the Fed, I mean, the Fed does talk frequently about how tariffs have raised inflation for goods. The New York Fed had a study showing that consumers bore the brunt of the tariffs. There was another Fed study that showed that tariffs were responsible for all of the extra inflation that we've seen in core goods.

Jamison Greer

Well, I mean, if you look at the Fed studies over years, their whole shtick was we need to import as much as possible, we need to be as efficient as possible, because that's going to help American workers. And that was just false. So the Fed and the various reserve banks and their economists, they are the ones that led us down this path to begin with. So they don't have a lot of credibility in my eyes. Just look at the actual data. If you're telling me prices are going up, look at the inflation data. The inflation is not coming from goods. Right. It's coming mostly from services. Again, putting energy aside. So it's just that that is a narrative that they're only supporting by their theories. They're not looking retrospectively at the best data.

Natalie Kitroeff

But even if he doesn't believe that tariffs are driving inflation, does he get that many Americans may be blaming tariffs for inflation and that that is probably testing their patience right now, just given how much affordability and the cost of living are on people's minds?

Anna Swanson

I asked him about that. A recent NYT poll put President Trump's approval rating at 37%, with voters expressing concerns about his handling of the economy. Cost of living, the war with Iran. And recent polls have also indicated that the majority of Americans are against tariffs. Connect them to the increased cost of living. Do you worry that your tariff policy has been too aggressive and that the kind of pendulum of public opinion has taken swung back against the administration?

Jamison Greer

So I don't think it's been too aggressive. Again, I look at this in the long span of history of decades of a bad trade policy that we're now changing. We know people have concerns about the cost of living. We all do. No one wants to be dismissive of that. We've made huge progress on that in the Trump administration. We have a lot of core staples. When you look at dairy products and eggs and cheese and flour, all these things, prices have gone down for those. So we worry about the cost of living. We don't see it as something that is going to change the trade policy. The trade policy is really about wages and protecting manufacturing and agricultural production. And I think that the American people are going to see this over time. I mean, again, we've had huge tariffs on China since 2018. We've had tariffs on steel and aluminum since 2018. We're making more steel in America than Japan is making now. I mean, this is a huge turnaround. So there's a lot of success there. And. And we've made a lot of progress in the administration, but there's certainly more work to do.

Anna Swanson

Are you worried that if Americans don't see faster results, they'll start to lose faith in this vision of reshoring and the shift in trade, increasing real wages?

Jamison Greer

I don't think they will. Over the past year, I speak to financial services companies. The American consumer has been really resilient and robust. And so you have some polls that are consumer sentiment, and then you have some hard data that shows what our consumer is actually doing. And the American consumer is quite robust. So we're confident that that will continue. You know, I can't account for the 40% of voters who are just inclined to disagree with whatever policy president does because they don't like the president or they don't agree with him and vote for him. So I kind of take that. And then you have, you know, folks in the middle who are watching their pocketbook. They want to see what's happening. I'm confident that, you know, this policy will continue to deliver for Americans as wages go up, factories come back. I mean, we're seeing it now. I think it's really valuable to the American people.

Natalie Kitroeff

Okay, I want to step back, Ana, and ask a bigger question that I think has been on a lot of people's minds since Trump Trade War version 2 began, which is this trade war seems to have gone from being mainly about China to being a war on everyone. And if weakening China is still the primary goal here, doesn't that scorched earth approach undermine that purpose? Like, wouldn't it make more sense for the US to align with all of its allies and focus on containing China rather than risk alienating all of our friends and going it alone against China.

Anna Swanson

So this is one of the most common criticisms I hear of the policy, and I think that's a very real argument that the Trump administration has alienated partners that they could be working with on the trade issues that really matter for the world, like all of the excess goods that are coming out of China, huge Chinese exports that are putting a lot of pressure on American manufacturers. So why are we putting so many tariffs on Canada and Europe rather than countries like China? But Greer's answer here is really interesting.

Jamison Greer

So our role as policymakers is to do right by the American citizen. We need to take measures, frequently unilateral, because the rest of the world is all discombobulated and has different interests than we do. We have to take measures to protect our economy, to protect our industrial base, to protect our agricultural production, to protect our factories and farms. And families and the people who work there. That's how I see it. I hear people sometimes say, oh, well, you know, America should just get together with the rest of the West. Everyone should gang up and force China to change. Like, that is not our policy policy. We're not really about going out and changing the world. We're trying to change the terms of trade. So it does mean to the extent we have to take measures in other countries, we will. But it's less that we're anti any particular country and more we're just pro America.

Anna Swanson

And that has been a common criticism. You know, the Trump administration is going very hard against traditional allies. Canada, Europe, and maybe even with China kind of getting into a situation where the US is kind of more aggressive in some instances against traditional allies than it would be against traditional rivals. You know, how do you think about that?

Jamison Greer

Yeah. So again, this is not a foreign policy shop, this is an economic shop here. And so when I look at someone like the European Union that blocks American agricultural goods for species non scientific reasons, that's a problem. Friend or foe, that's an issue. And I'm not going to say, well, if you guys agree to say nice things about us publicly and say that we're great partners, I will look past all of this like I have for the past 30 years. Like, that's not what President Trump was elected to do. It's not what I was appointed to do.

Anna Swanson

So he thinks that traditional trading partners have also taken advantage of the U.S. the U.S. has given them a pass for a long time. That didn't really work. So the administration is really intentionally putting pressure on the whole world. The other reality is the Trump administration did try to go up against China and that really backfired for them. So when Trump imposed high tariffs on China last year, the Chinese threatened to cut off rare earth exports, which would have crippled a lot of U.S. factories. So the U.S. found that they were pretty limited in their ability to actually confront China.

Jamison Greer

I live in the real world, so you kind of get these model UN types who are like, well, you know, let's all get together, we'll have a meeting and a summit, we'll have these working groups and by the the of end of the day, we'll all gang up on China. I mean, the reality is if Europe or someone else has a problem with China, then they can take measures with China and negotiate with China. I mean, I'm not going to give a concession to some other country to do something they should do anyway. A lot of countries in this era of enormous imbalances and non market practices, they will find, like the United States, that it's in their interest to take measures. Now, I think there are some instances where it doesn't have to be unilateral. I just find that countries like those in Europe, they tend to be very slow to move. They tend to be very bureaucratic. They feel more bound by international legal norms than we do. So if we were waiting for the Europeans to agree or the Canadians to agree or anybody else, we'd still be waiting while all this stuff was being offshored.

Anna Swanson

And what grade would you give yourself on trade policy and achieving your goals?

Jamison Greer

Oh, well, listen, nobody is perfect. And I always see things that I can do better. And in retrospect, maybe we could have done this, could have done that, but I mean, we have an A. I mean, when you look at, you know, the past 70 years and really in the past 30 years where we saw all the offshoring, that was disastrous. We lost 5 million manufacturing jobs, 70,000 factories, and China became the world's largest supplier and manufacturer. That is a problem. And continuing that policy in the face of those results, a crazy person would do that. So we had to change that. And this is a lot of success in a given year. Are there things we could do better? Of course. Are we going to continue to refine this? Yeah, we are, but I would give us an A.

Natalie Kitroeff

We've talked a lot thus far about how Greer assesses himself and the policies that he's helped orchestrate. If we're evaluating the cost benefit of this Trump tariff regime, how should we assess?

Anna Swanson

So I do think tariffs have helped some businesses that are trying to compete with cheap products from abroad, but they have also been a huge drag on others. Many businesses now owe a big tariff bill to the government, or they have to pay more for their materials because of tariffs. Consumers are paying more. There are also geopolitical costs to think about to US Alliances, maybe political costs for Republicans in the upcoming election. But what's also true is that this administration has fundamentally changed the conversation on trade. They did key into some serious criticisms that people have had for a long time about trade and how the past approach this kind of unquestioning devotion to trade and globalization had not worked for a lot of Americans. There's this backlash now against their tariffs. But when you're thinking about what comes next, this is a lot for a subsequent administration to try to undo. So some of these changes could be a very lasting legacy for the Trump administration.

Natalie Kitroeff

You're saying that it May actually end up being really hard for any administration that follows this one, even if it is a Democratic administration to roll these tariffs back.

Anna Swanson

Yeah, I think it would be very difficult to undo them completely. There have been so many different kinds of tariffs on so many different things. Just a lot of complex changes in policy across dozens of industries. You see companies start to reorganize their supply chains. Other countries have started to reshape the way that they trade with the United States and other countries because of these tariffs. And in the US the politics of undoing the tariffs, too, could be pretty complicated. In the Biden administration, we saw that they debated undoing Trump's China tariffs and decided to just keep them. Now, of course, these tariffs in Trump's second term are much more extensive. They're much more global. It's a different situation, but I think what a future administration might find is a similar conundrum. It's just difficult politics to undo these tariffs. So the net effect might be that the Trump administration really has reordered the global economy for good.

Natalie Kitroeff

Well, Anna, thank you so much for being here.

Anna Swanson

Thank you for having me.

Jamison Greer

I see you have a few things

Natalie Kitroeff

signed by the president.

Jamison Greer

I do. I do have a few things right here. He's telling me we had a press conference about tariffs. He's signed it. He says, great job, big time. Right. That's a good one. Just with any boss, you know, the longer you work with them, the more comfortable they get with you. Unless they fire you.

Podcast Sponsor Announcer

Right?

Jamison Greer

So far, not fired. So that's good.

Anna Swanson

Okay.

Bank of America Private Bank Announcer

Okay.

Anna Swanson

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. Oh, and who.

Natalie Kitroeff

We'll be right back.

Podcast Sponsor Announcer

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Dan Tabursky

Hey, Dan Tabursky here. I'm a podcast host, a journalist, and now with my newest project, the author of my own manifesto. Well, it's a manifesto about manifestos, my search for inspiration in a world that feels more infuriating, more out of its freaking mind with each passing hour. Manifestos are a call to action, an artful scream. They capture our anger, and they try to do something with it. This is my attempt to take the manifesto back from mass shooters and nihilists and return it to its rightful place with the warriors, the visionary, the regular folks with just the right amount of crazy. I compare notes with radicals, secessionists, Internet trolls out for a laugh, and punk singers screaming their guts out, all trying to turn their anger into the world they want to see. Listen to Manifesto wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Manifesto early and ad free right now, join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.

Natalie Kitroeff

Here's what else you need to know today. Over the weekend, at least three U.S. service members were killed in the Middle east, making it one of the deadliest stretches of the Iran war for US Forces. Two of the service members were killed during an Iranian attack on an air base in Jordan, which left another US service member missing. Video of the attack showed US Soldiers taking cover as debris fell around them. The third American was killed during the disposal of an Iranian attack drone in northern Iraq. The deaths came amid a cycle of escalating attacks that has all but shredded the ceasefire reached last month and brought the resumption of what increasingly looks like full scale war and Spain, for the

Jamison Greer

second time in their history, have won the World Cup.

Natalie Kitroeff

On Sunday, Spain beat Argentina in extra time, winning its second ever World Cup. The score was one to nothing. It was an especially disappointing defeat for Lionel Messi, who at 39 could have played his last last World cup game. Today's episode was produced by Ricky Novetsky, Asta Chaturvedi, Caitlin o' Keefe and Claire tennisgetter. It was edited by Lisa Chow, Fact Checked by Susan Lee and contains music by Marian Lozano and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks thanks to Ben Castleman. That's it for the Daily I'm Natalie Kitroweff. See you tomorrow.

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