What Trump’s Tariffs Will Actually Do | The Ezra Klein Show
The tariffs President Trump unveiled this week were both bigger than most people expected and a lot more confusing. These aren’t the flat tariffs he proposed during the campaign. And they aren’t reciprocal tariffs, as he claimed in his Rose Garden speech. So what is Trump actually doing here?
I knew my former colleague Paul Krugman would have some thoughts. Krugman is a Nobel laureate trade economist who was a New York Times Opinion columnist for 25 years. He now writes an excellent newsletter on Substack, where he’s been trying to make sense of the theories behind Trump’s tariff policies and, now, their strange reality.
0:00 Intro
1:11 Liberation Day
3:45 What is a trade deficit?
9:11 Market reaction
13:33 Trade war
21:37 Contradictory policy
30:03 The emperor has no clothes
39:32 MAGA’s relationship to U.S. power
45:38 Case for tariffs
50:36 Book recs
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You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-....
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