American Existential Crisis: A Week of Global Trade Wars

0:00 Tariffs, protectionism, or free trade won't solve the family problem, the family breakdown problem. We have to do it for ourselves. Hey there friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Papola here, and I have to take this Friday to continue the conversation about trade. And I think more broadly about how we as a nation see ourselves and how we as individuals should understand what it means to be both in a country and to navigate this world of economics because I think when it comes to the the battles around trade, the debate that's taking place since President Trump's announcement of a reordering of the global order on Liberation Day, I I think that that is what we are being forced to confront.

0:54 And as part of that, uh, we did something a little different this week and actually dropped two podcasts. One from the protariff side with my friend Orin Cass, who, uh, is very close to President Trump and the way he understands trade and trade balances and what should come next. and the other side with my friend Scott Lindum who is a free trader from the Kato Institute and uh and and how to think about what's going on economically and what does the data say about the impacts on our country. Um I want to come back to all these things. I I don't think there's a simple story here, but uh I think it's important we catch up on where President Trump is at in this um wild ride he's taking us all on. I'm telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are they are dying to make a deal. Please, please, sir, make a deal.

1:52 I'll do anything. I'll do anything, sir. Additional tariffs on Chinese goods are in place effective midnight tonight at 104%. Until they make a deal with us, that's what it's going to be. I think they'll make a deal at some point. China will they want to make a deal. I They really do. They want to make a deal. They just don't know how to get it started because they're proud people. I know what the hell I'm doing. I know what I'm doing. And you know what I'm doing, too. That's why you vote for me.

2:22 I think that this is President Trump doing what President Trump does. You know, uh, HL Mein said, "Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." And man, are we getting it good and hard on this front? There are those who think this is great. There are those who think this is terrible. Um, one of the people who thinks this is great is Kevin Oir. 104% tariffs in China are not enough. I'm advocating 400%.

2:50 400%. That is that's basically a ban on imports from China, a 400% tariff. No. Who's going to buy something that's 4x the price? I do business in China. They don't play by the rules. They've been in the WTO for decades. They have never abided by any of the rules they agreed to when they came in for decades. They cheat. They steal. They steal IP. I can't litigate in their courts. They take product technology. They steal it.

3:15 They manufacture it and sell it back here. This is not about tariffs anymore. Nobody has taken on China yet. Not the Europeans, no administration for decades. As someone who actually does business there, I've had enough. The government cheats and steals. And finally, an administration, you may not like Trump, you may not like his style or his rhetoric. Finally, an administration that puts up and says enough. This is something that has become pretty clear in trying to grapple with this this this week. Um there's trade in general and whether trade is good and whether trade balances are good or bad or or don't matter or or matter a lot. But there is more consensus around the idea that China is a problem and specifically that as Kevin Olirri is talking about that not only does China pose national security threats, you know, it's easy to to forget that one of the Chinese manufacturers, Huawei, was pretty clearly compromising fundamental networking technologies and essentially trying to create back doors into our internet infrastructure That sucks. That's not good. We don't want that. But the idea that the Chinese government is a totalitarian communist regime is a real problem. And the the sense in which it has actually gotten harder to not just do business in China, but harder to work with the Chinese because of their government is something very, very real. And I think that President Trump's willingness to tackle this in a very very profound way may in fact be the right call. I want it to be the right call. Not the wrong call. But there's some who think it's the wrong call.

5:08 Obviously, one line of criticism of President Trump comes from the likes of Scott Galloway. Really? This is the guy's plan? He wants me to sew sneakers. Yeah, Dave Chappelle summarized it perfectly. We want to wear Nikes, not make them. And quite frankly, the Kato Institute did a study. 80% of Americans, we have this sort of romanticization of manufacturing. 80% of Americans think we need more manufacturing, but only one in five Americans have any interest in working at a plant. There aren't a lot of people lining up to work on the shop floor, the at the plants in Lancing, Michigan. And we have purposely outsourced these low-wage manufacturing, dirty manufacturing jobs for high-end service, marketing, strategy, service jobs that just pay more. you'd rather be an associate at JP Morgan than working on the shop floor at General Motors.

5:54 That's the bottom line. So, so this this is like simultaneously perhaps true in many cases and also deeply and fundamentally insulting to a lot of Americans. This is part of a cultural divide that is ripping the country apart. And it is one that Charles Murray in his book Coming Apart talks about. Scott Galloway, NYU professor, uh, is part of the cognitive elite. And so this is an easy thing for him to say. And in a certain sense, he's not wrong. But it still kind of sucks.

6:27 The Chinese or Chinese bots or I don't know what were flooding social media with their own take on this that is both funny and offensive at the same time. This is what someone in China thinks um the future of America might look like. And it's um fairly [Music] insulting. Of course, we're all fat. Of course, we're all dead in the eyes.

7:05 [Music] That guy used to work at Goldman Sachs and now he's putting together the iPhone 17. There was of course this variant, a little more direct. [Music] I'll leave it to you to decide whether these videos are um inviting or insulting. I I tend to think they are mostly the latter. There's another piece of the puzzle here that I think is worth talking about. Uh but I want to move to an area uh to talk about the legal basis of what President Trump has done. In the last two weeks, all we have seen is reports in the newspaper. Congress has not had one ounce of authority in determining tariff policy. Uh do you think Congress should be completely left out of the process or does the president have emergency power to do anything he wants with regard to tariffs? Sir, Congress gave him this law where if he determines a national emergency, he can take appropriate action to regulate imports. That's what he's done. This is the argument being made by the administration. this is an emergency and therefore um the president has unilateral authority. I voted for President Trump. I like President Trump in general. So let's imagine that I like him having the ability to make these decisions freed from the compromise and the group think and the the decisions by committee that would come about by bringing the Congress into the fold. He is our elected representative. It is not anti-democratic for him to act on our behalf. We elected him. He's actually the only nationally elected official, the president of the United States.

8:58 But you you and I might like him. We won't necessarily like who comes next. And this is one of the things that we should never forget. At some point, the shoe will be on the other foot. And these emergency powers for unilateral action will be used by people we don't like. And I think that that can be handwaved away, but we shouldn't handwave it away. It is real and our politics is volatile and there is no guarantee that we won't end up with President AOC in 2028. I'm being serious about that. So if you want President AOC to declare a climate emergency and shut down all domestic fossil fuel production and drive electricity prices through the roof and impoverish the society in the name of a climate emergency, just know that being rah for this use of power is the precursor to that. It is this is something we need to understand about what comes next and then what. But let's keep going. As you see it now, this trade war is China versus the rest of the world. Well, I'm not calling it a trade war, but I'm saying that China has escalated and President Trump responded very courageously to that and we are going to work on a solution with the our trading partners. If I could just Excuse me. Excuse me. If I Excuse me, Raquel.

10:25 If I could just add to what the secretary said. One thing that's changed in the Trump era, which I think is interesting, is that the role of the press secretary, should we just eliminate this job? I mean, talking about like cutting jobs. I mean, all of the members of the administration are out there talking to the press all the time. And then you have this person who's supposed to be the intermediary. That does seem to know the least. Many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here. You you tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China when in fact we've seen the opposite effect. The entire world is calling the United States of America, not China, because they need our markets. They need our consumers and they need this president in the Oval Office to talk to them. And that's exactly why more than 75 countries have called uh because the United States of America is the best place in the world to do business. uh and as the president has shown great courage as the secretary has said in choosing to retaliate against China even higher there is a sense in which perhaps the bigger picture is a is a is a is an alignment play and um President Trump talks about this himself about how to align our trading partners who he has beat the hell out of against China and with us what you believe is the end game with China are you waiting ing for President Xi to blink. How do you think this is all going to be resolved? Look, for years we've been ripped off and taken advantage of by China and others in all fairness, but by China that's that's the big one. And uh it's just one of those things. You know, we're making$2 billion dollars a day right now. This country, $2 billion a day with tariffs. And just to be clear, the country is not making two billion. The government is making two billion. not the same thing. They were making $2 billion a day. We'll be making more. Now, when you see what happened today, I don't know if it's still there. You know, this was I looked an hour ago, but uh we were up like close to 3,000 points. Nobody's ever seen a day like that. I think that's a record, isn't it? And this was on uh April 9th. As we sit here, it's the 11th. Uh I'm not going to talk about stock market going up and down. It's crazy. It's going up and down. It was up 3,000. It was down a thousand. Who knows where it's headed? That's not really what matters uh in trying to understand the world. Who would have thought we're gonna have a record like that after uh watching? But because the geniuses of the world, they get it. Our country is very strong. We were left a very very weakened country both economically, financially because of all of the tariffs and all of the other companies just raiding us and ripping us off. This is the rhetoric that President Trump has used for the entirety of his public life.

13:12 uh that trade is fundamentally a zero- sum game and um and that we're getting ripped off if we buy more from one country than we sell to that country. I disagree with that. I think it's the wrong way to think about it, but that is the way he looks at the world and uh it comes with the territory. I I knew it going in as a voter. It's still wrong. This was the strategy all along to bring them to the table. Why did you instruct or advise or or maybe they did it on their own some of your top aids to to say this is not a negotiation to to hold the line that they were going to hold the line that you were not going to change? A lot of times it's not a negotiation until it is and that happens and you know I said outside that you have to have flexibility to do it right and that's what we have. We brought everybody to the table and it may not be a negotiation. It may not last. I mean, you know, things may be as that I think are not fair to us. It's very hard to plan in a world of extreme uncertainty and um and that is certainly what's going on this week and and and it might be unavoidable. It might be unavoidable if what needs to happen is change. Wherever you might fall on the spectrum, if there's going to be significant change, it's going to be hard and it's going to make planning hard. President Trump's style and his um rapid fire approach in real time in the public doesn't make it easier. It might be right, but it doesn't make it easy for everyone else who's trying to figure out what to do next. and the risk of plunging us into recession by the sheer fact of the uncertainty in how to plan the next steps for your businesses on a global scale is real. And that's not about the stock market. That's about individuals trying to make plans, trying to decide whether to hire, whether to invest, whether to build, where to build, when to build, how to build. All of those decisions are contingent on the cost of doing business and right now the cost of doing business on this planet is much more uncertain. So how should we as individuals think about all this? I really encourage you to watch both of these conversations I had with Orin Cass on behalf of really on behalf of President Trump's worldview. a worldview that says that trade balances are bad, that we should trade less with others overall and make as much ourselves inside of our country as possible versus Scott Lindum who represents not just a a free trade perspective but frankly brings a lot of receipts in terms of data. And if you can listen to both with an open mind, I think you can make a decision for yourself about whose argument is stronger, about who marshals more facts. I think that as an economic matter, the facts are on the side of freer trade, not more closed trade. I don't think trade balances necessarily produce bad outcomes um or even tend to produce bad outcomes. It's remains the case to me that it's not clear that trade balances matter at all. Actually, they're an artifact of trading with money, of the monetary system. They're not really giving us much of an insight into what's real. And I think they're one more piece of the sort of complicated and hard to understand macroeconomic storytelling that more often than not, frankly, ends up being about politics and ideology. But you might disagree and that's fine. That's that's for each of us to try to work our way through. I'm doing the best I can to try to present the facts as I understand them and I trust you are smart enough to work it out for yourself.

17:06 Underneath this debate is something broader. It's something more fundamental and I think it's one where I am at least much more sympathetic to the arguments that President Trump is making in general. And that is the question of what is a country. Much of this conversation around free trade fundamentally is only economic. The arguments are about how do we maximize material output productivity and to have a global economy is better for that. But we don't have a global society. We don't I think we do in a metaphysical sense as a Christian. I think that all all of us have human dignity and we should care about the lives of everyone for sure. But even Adam Smith said that when it comes to our nature in his theory of moral sentiments that frankly we will be more occupied by a hangail on our finger than thousands did around the world because that is our nature. We are focused on our immediate concerns and abstract distant ideas end up being exactly that.

18:21 And I think that is one of the things going on. If you come back to first principles, what we are fundamentally is a social creature. And even though we're all connected on the internet now and it feels like we're part of global communities, we are still fundamentally a social local creature. We are happy with our tribe. We our tribe defines a major part of our identity and that's not going away nor probably should it. And I I think that that's a function of what we are as a creature. We are not just a truck and bartering robot. We are a tribal groupish creature.

19:05 And so this debate about our place in the world about what does it mean to put America first about what does it mean to trade with other countries and should we do it at all a lot of that boils down to how do you think about what a country is and what is the role of the community at the scale of the nation and I don't have an answer for that economically it's better to have a global economy economically but politically culture Culturally, that is way more complicated and frankly there's a lot of warning signs that our global integration has had some poisonous effects. I don't think it's a good thing. for example, that the European Union has been trying to backdoor all of our technologies, literally rip us off in terms of slapping our technology companies with massive fines, trying to break encryption so that they can spy on us, and then coordinating with our own intelligence agencies against us as the American people. There is a lot of elite global coordination that sucks. And that kind of globalism I think is frankly pretty evil. Um that's not the same thing as us as individuals trading with each other. But we can't disentangle those things. We can't. That's one of the problems of globalization and of globalism. So how should we think about this as individuals because I I can't change what's going on in the world and neither can you. We are to some extent victims of our times and whether we choose to be a victim or not is up to us. And I've been thinking about this and I think about my own life and and I'm I'm 47. And so I graduated from school in 1999. And so over the course of that time, the past 25 years as an adult or trying to be an adult, uh I came into the workforce and was quickly laid off as part of the dotcom bust that eliminated my entire department at MTV.

21:08 And then what quickly followed, I was in New York at the time, was 9/11, enormously disruptive and scary, and then years of grinding global war and worries about our troops. And a housing boom that turned to bust and produced the greatest financial crisis since the 1930s in 2008, massively disruptive. And that was the first major crack in the world. Because when you look at some of the data when it comes to trade, productivity, all these things, a lot of them went sideways starting in 2008. And then just a couple years later, our political order is flipped upside down, moving from Barack Obama, sort of elite, polished, sounds centrist, but fairly left-wing guy for Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States in 2016.

21:56 And then the COVID pandemic in 2020. So when you think about the amount of change that has happened, the amount of disruption, the amount of um chaos that has happened in the past 25 years alone, it is pretty crazy. And then you have to take a step back, take a deep breath, and think, is it crazier than the prior 25 years? That's not that's not so clear. the Vietnam War, the assassination of JFK and MLK, the great inflation of the 1970s, the political revolution of Ronald Reagan, the breakdown of the Soviet Union and complete collapse of our greatest international nemesis. That is a lot of change. That is a lot of transformation.

22:46 What about the prior 25 years? That's a big one. That's got it. World War, Great Depression, complete reordering of the global order from Britain to the United States as the dominant player on the world stage. Every 25 year cycle, you could say these same things. So, what do we do about this? Well, this is Dad Saves America after all. And I fundamentally believe that the family is always the answer. That's the answer. the family and our community, our close-in community, the people that we rely on, the people we can trust, the people that call us when we're sick, the people that show up at our door when they know something's going wrong and they want to help or they need help. This is the buffer stock for turbulent times. This is what it is. This is what matters because and this is actually what the true communists have always attacked.

23:48 When you go back and you look at Karl Marx and you look at the assault on the family, the philosophy of attacking the family, it is fundamentally about making us weak, making us incapable of surviving change and turbulence, of making us dependent. And this is the more important problem for American society than anything economic. and it feeds back into our economics, but it is not the same thing. Tariffs, protectionism, or free trade won't solve the family problem, the family breakdown problem. We have to do it for ourselves.

24:30 So, what does that mean for us? That means that if you are a man, you got to man up and be a good man and be a good father and be a leader in your family. If you're a woman, you should do the same thing. This is not really about gender. If you don't have a family, if you are one of the one in four Americans who doesn't have a good father figure in your life, you can still be the father figure for the next generation to come.

24:56 And I think that that is a call to adventure. I think that in turbulent times like this and they we will always live in interesting times having that support is the thing that will see us through as individuals as a community and as a culture that is the thing that works when Alexis Dtoqueville came to this country what he saw was this he saw these little platoon of resilience of problem solving of working things out of not sitting around waiting for dear leader or the Congress or the parliament or the legislature to solve our problems for us. And if that sounds like pull up your bootstraps and do it yourself, it kind of is. I think that's the most American thing we do is actually just doing it ourselves, solving it, not waiting for somebody else to tell us what to do. And I I think that that is the thing that is most important when you think about what does it mean to be in our tribe that is America. That is being an American. I think that is the America worth saving.

26:09 And I I pray that President Trump is on a course to making America even greater. I hope he is. I am not deranged about President Trump. I like him. I'm an East Coast guy. I even like his rhetoric. I think he's funny. I think he says the quiet part out loud. And in times like this, we could use more of that than less, even if he goes overboard sometimes. But, uh, I I think that this is something we can't forget.

26:37 And we can't let the distractions of the world prevent us from focusing on what really matters, which is each other and our families. But let me know what you have to say. Let me know how you're thinking about this. Let me know if it was helpful to have these two interviews dropped together putting two different points of view in your lap to chew on. I hope it's helpful. That is what I am here to do. I am here to try to be helpful for how you understand the world and how you can communicate it with your friends and family. Have a great weekend.