Transcript: Trump Wrecks His Case for Tariffs as SCOTUS Rant Backfires

And what those deals mean, I think, are up for interpretation. They often mean whatever is good for Trump. And so being able to get something out of these countries personally—at the expense of the U.S., and of workers, and of the economy—I think has been the highlight thus far.

And so, whether it’s trying to solidify a deal with Xi and sell it as something that it is not in terms of China, whether it’s cleaning up his mess in Argentina and with the cattle farmers he has angered, or whether it’s this tariff situation in which he’s trying to give people the money back that has been collected on their backs—it really feels like he is jumping from problem to problem and trying to fix them without any sort of coherent strategy.

Sargent: Just to wrap this up, looking forward here, let’s say Democrats take back the House. We’ve seen that the Senate does seem to have a bare majority of willing, including a couple of Republicans, two or three, willing to undo the tariffs. Do you expect if Democrats take back the House will they try to take some kind of action to reverse these? 

Jacquez: I anticipate that they will. We’ve seen it, as you mentioned, in the Senate—particularly these big, sweeping IEEPA tariffs that are predicated on a national emergency that I think is incredibly difficult to recognize as an actual emergency. Right? The trade deficit—which, by the way, Trump’s tariffs are not fixing in any way as we speak.