100 (More) Days of Trump: Big Tech & Voter Sentiment 4/30/25

0:00Bring in show music, please. Hi, I'm CNBC producer Katie Kramer. Today on Squawk Pod. 100 days into President Trump's second term, what's changed? For voters, pollster Frank Luntz says not too much. The level of hardcore support among Trump voters for their president I've never seen in 35, 40 years of politics. The hostility among those who did not vote for him is similarly as great, as intense. Three eventful months, including a skirmish between the White House and Amazon over tariffs and potential price changes. Wired editor-at-large Stephen Levy explains the tension, the placating, and the big tech big picture.

0:45This is just a little scuffle. It's portending bigger scuffles to come. Plus, the first trade deal made. Really? So the Commerce Secretary says. And the U.S. economy contracts for the first time since 2022. GDP, sentiment, and all the number crunching with CNBC's Steve Leisman. I have explained a lot of very complicated things on television in the last 20 years. This is the most complicated thing. Really? It's Wednesday, April 30th, 2025. Squawk Pod begins right now. Stand Becky by in three, two, one. Cue it, please. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to Squawk Box right here on CNBC. We're live from the Nasdaq market site in Times Square.

1:30I'm Becky Quick, along with Joe Kernan and Andrew Ross Sorkin. And here we go on this Wednesday morning. Had to think about what day it is. April has been a bit of a rebound month. If you're looking right now at where these markets stand, it's been six days in a row of wins for the Dow. That's the first time that that's happened since July of last year. The S &P is up for six days in a row, and that's the first time that's happened since November of last year. The Dow and the S &P 500, both on those winning streaks for the S &P. That's the longest stretch, as I mentioned, since November of last year.

2:01Both the indexes, though, are on pace at this point to be down for the month of April. If you're watching through what's going on, not just April, but down for three months in a row at this point. I think if you're looking at the S &P, it's down by less than 10 percent, by 9.5 percent off its all-time highs. Dow's down by just over that. NASDAQ is off by a little bit more. I think it's just over 12 or 13 percent. It's flat for the month, isn't it? I'm sorry, from the all-time highs. Right. From the all-time highs. The dark days. We're down below the 50-day moving average and the 200-day moving average for all the major averages.

2:33But the dark days were early April. I think it was like April 5th, 6th, and 7th. We broke. Right after Liberation Day. Right then. We lost. We were under 5 ,000, briefly, on the S &P. and now we're almost to 5 ,600. So I think, you know, looking at it, I think we're up a little bit. We're down by almost 1 % for the S &P for the month today. For the month. Yeah, down nine-tenths of a percent. Because if you just look on, I saw the thing, it's a one-month chart has the S &P up 44 points, but I don't know what it's measured from. It's down nine-tenths of a month based on, I'm just looking at our charts on how we measure them from Chris Hayes in the notes that he said about.

3:17Right, but it got much worse, briefly. It did. And I think we, did we go into bear market territory? Barely on the S &P. Now we've gotten back up. Barely. It just hit 20%. Now we're less than correction. I mean, the thing that surprised me yesterday is the Russell 2000 has been under so much pressure. It's actually out of bear market territory. It's down by 19%. You see oil today? I did. You see the 10-year today? I haven't seen the 10-year. 4, 16 or something? So a lot of things. Okay. But those are growth. Those could be growth. Well, you know, oil in a 416 could be growth concerns, obviously.

3:50I think Calci now forecasting a negative print, you know, it's a betting market. Yeah, but a negative print for GDP. So there are recession fears that may account for that. But the world didn't completely stop buying treasuries. Obviously, that was that was the concern. Right. Meanwhile, President Trump is saying China is going to be hit hard by tariffs. He's imposed on the country. he made those comments in an interview with ABC News marking his first 100 days back in the White House. This is what he had to say. 145 percent tariffs on China and that is basically an embargo. They deserve it. It'll raise prices on everything from electronics to clothing to building houses.

4:32You don't know that. You don't know whether or not China's going to eat it. That's mathematics. China probably will eat those tariffs but at 145 they basically can't do much business with the United States. The interview aired last night, the same evening, the president was in Michigan for a campaign style rally marking 100 days in office. Here's what he said then about interest rates and the Fed. I have a Fed person who's not really doing a good job, but I won't say that. I want to be very nice. I want to be very nice and respectful to the Fed. You're not supposed to criticize the Fed. You're supposed to let him do his own thing.

5:07But I know much more than he does about interest rates. Believe me. as a real estate guy who likes low interest rates that's all he likes it was uh it was like one of the one of his rallies it was a campaign stuff i watched some of it i mean he you can see when he's reading what he's supposed to read and then you can see when he decides i'm just gonna there are people that are behind everything he says at those rallies okay let's just say that so he knows he's going to get a good recession but some of it really goes off some of it really goes off the He was talking about President President, former President Biden being able to sleep in these these crappy lounge chairs on the beach and how when he tries to stand on the beach, the sand is there.

5:50And it just it's like, what? Where are we talking about here? So they they they roar, though, the crowd roars. I will say I was sitting behind him once at the Economic Club in New York during the campaign season when he came and spoke to the Economic Club about his plans. I could see the prompter. There was more in the prompter than I realized. Some of the crazy, some of the stuff that he likes. Well, some of the stuff that I thought he was ad-libbing was actually in the prompter for some of them. Not what you were just talking about on some of those things. But I was surprised. But then you can see it gets back on track.

6:23No sign of him acknowledging that, like the cover of the New York Times today, is like unbelievable. But it's a totally different take on where we are right now between Republicans. You know what the split is. I think it's 90 percent of Republicans are like, yeah, this is great. And one percent of Democrats think the world might or nine. Yeah, one percent think the world is not ending at this point. We're in a very fractious, divided environment. Right. I don't think it's as bad as people think. I'm not sure we get a recession at this point. Labor, we'll see you tomorrow. Have the job. I mean, the problem with all the data that we're seeing at this point is it's backward looking.

7:06We're going to get first quarter GDP today. That number is backward looking. Everything we've heard from the companies that are reporting earnings is backward looking, except for the outlook. So that's been the valuable point. But the problem with government numbers, we don't get the outlook. He keeps talking about strategic uncertainty. And that's, I think Scott Bessent mentioned that yesterday, that this, it almost is like they're insisting that there is a method to. A plan. A plan. Yeah. One thing that has been a little disconcerting for the markets is, you know, President Trump creates what I would call strategic uncertainty in the negotiations.

7:40So he is more concerned about getting the best possible trade deals for the American people. We had four years of bad deals for decades of unfair trading, and we are going to unwind those and make them fair. And that this keeping your enemies on their toes, not knowing what is coming is a grand part of it. The problem is it also keeps investors and business leaders and consumers on their toes. I think they'd like a deal. I think they'd like a deal, any deal. South Korea. Well, you heard the comments yesterday from Lutnick. There's a deal that's very close. We don't know which one it is, but then he said that the prime minister and the parliament both have to sign off on it.

8:23Treasury Secretary Vesson is focused on China. That's his portfolio. He's got to get something done with China. And my portfolio is the rest of the world's trade deals. So they are coming. That's a big portfolio. Oh, it's the greatest thing. Because we have every country in the world, just like Donald Trump has said, who wants to do a deal with us. Now, here's the point. I have a deal. Done, done, done, done. But I need to wait for their prime minister and their parliament to give its approval, which I expect shortly. Treasury Secretary was saying similar things too. We might shift a little to, we're going to talk more about this big, beautiful bill again.

9:04If there's any progress at all on trade deals, or who knows, on any given day, he could say, you know. And by the way, when Lutnick made those comments yesterday, the market traded to its highs at the session. And as we were just mentioning, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick saying that the Trump administration has finished negotiating its first trade deal, but he said it wasn't finalized and he declined to name the country involved. Again, this was something where he said both the prime minister and the parliament of this other country both have to sign off on this first. He said the secretary of the treasury, Scott Besant, was handling China trade negotiations and that his purview was deals from the rest of the world.

9:43Okay, but you know how awkward that is because we've had Scott Besant on and saying that he says that he's not handling the China trade deals at all. Are there negotiations? Was there a phone call with President Xi and President Trump? You know, Joe, Treasury Secretary does a lot of things, running the White House switchboard in one of them. So all aspects of government are in contact with China. and in terms of trade negotiations, we'll see where this goes. From the lowest to the highest, there's supposedly some talking going on, but he doesn't monitor the switchboard. He doesn't know what's going on.

10:28He doesn't monitor whether the president should. He knows about all of the tariff negotiations with every other country in the world, except for China, and Lutnik just said that the one country that he's responsible for is China. He didn't tell us that. He didn't say that to us. That's not a quote. I think he just said that he's not. He didn't say I'm not responsible for China whatsoever. No, no. He literally he was on on ABC. He said that those are conversations before before those were conversations for China that were happening with the president. Who's he was not. That was a special negotiation just for President Trump.

11:03That he was not that he was not a party to. I thought he was telling us that there were discussions from the very lowest to the very highest. At least that was the claim that he was making. I think he was talking specifically about the meetings he had around the IMF and World Bank last week. In which case he said there was no conversation about tariffs whatsoever. Just from his meetings last week. He said explicitly the conversations he was having did not engage in tariffs. And so then you have Lutnick saying the one person who's responsible for China tariffs discussions is this guy. And he's saying that he didn't have those conversations.

11:38They probably pushed back on that. But you seem very, very animated about this. I know. I know. It's a hair fire. I got it. It's not hair fire. It's just there has to be an honest set of facts. and if you can't have an honest conversation even here about what the honest set of facts are, then you have a problem because the public can't then understand what's happening because they're being lied to. Well, there's all kinds of machinations going on and some of it is hype, some of it's not hype. I don't, you know, but this is no different than the way sausage is made in Washington on every given day.

12:15Anytime you see... But you can't say my hair's on fire because my hair's not on fire. My job is to identify... You were going to do whataboutism again? Was there ever any facts about Biden's mental capacity? Why are we re-litigating the past every time? Because it's just business as usual. That's not what we're talking about. Let's talk about what's in front of us. It's the way it works in Washington. It's not the way it works in Washington. That's part of the problem with this whole conversation is that everybody's moving the conversation to whataboutism always. I just don't want your heart rate going up.

12:49I get it. Okay, so it's really bad. Don't make it personal. It's not a personal situation. It's the facts of the facts. You start yelling at me, and it's just okay. Because you push back on things that are the facts. The facts are, he says one thing. You don't own the facts? And you seem to think you do a lot of times about masks and everything. You don't own facts. It's on tape. Okay. So they're lying. Lutnik's saying he is. Besson's saying he's not. So they're lying to us. Well, somebody's not telling the truth. Okay. That's the point. All right. It's the first time that's happened in Washington.

13:21But shouldn't people know that? Or no? We should just pretend that they're all... It's a pretty confusing system. It's a lot of uncertainty. Tees will be next. Coming up, how American politics have evolved in the first 100 days of President Trump's second term with pollster Frank Luntz. Partisan voters have dug their heels in, but polling for Donald Trump looks worse, Luntz says, when you look in the middle. The independents, people who had voted Democrat in the past and chose to vote for Donald Trump this time, those people asked for less wasteful spending, but didn't like how it was done. They asked for less illegal immigration, but the execution wasn't quite what they were looking for.

14:09This is Squawk Pod from CNBC. Here's Andrew Ross Sorkin. We continue our coverage this morning of President Trump's first three months in office. Senior economics reporter Sue Leisman is at the table. He's got to look at the first 100 days. He's going to do it by the numbers. Yes, and Andrew, what numbers we have from the first 100 days are dismal, with historic drops in consumer sentiment and downgrades to the economic forecast. But forecasts and feelings, they are not facts. The question is whether the president can avoid the fate economists have penciled in. Among the starkest numbers, CNBC finds the plunge of consumer expectations, is the third sharpest three-month decline in the 50-year history of the conference board.

14:48The other declines, the other two, wouldn't have been linked to recessions. The biggest came just after the 1990 recession, and the next largest came just before the 2001 recession. Weak actual consumer spending in the past two months showed those worries about the future can lead consumers to hold back on their spending. The first 100 days also showed a dramatic decline in the growth outlook. The first quarter had been expected to be around 2.1 percent back in January. It's now seen at negative, or minus 0.4 percent. We'll get that at 8.30 this morning. A second quarter bounce back, largely the reversal of trade front running, is then forecast to give way to two lackluster quarters of well below trend growth to end the year.

15:30At the moment, those quarters are not negative, but you can see they're kind of down there below 1 percent, may be teetering a little bit. At the same time, jobless cases have remained low, and March saw strong job growth. Perhaps as employers have tried to hold on to workers that were hard to hire after the pandemic, that could change over coming months. You have these government layoffs, and you also have firings, some of them linked to the president's new tariff regime. There's also been good news on the inflation front. Oil is down. Some of that could be linked to a weaker growth outlook, some of it to greater production by Saudi Arabia and OPEC.

16:02It looks like any turnaround though is going to need a major assist from a change in tariff policy that leads to a rebound in business and consumer sentiment. It's hard to see you getting back to those robust GDP numbers with these really lousy business and consumer sentiment numbers. The GDP today though, it's like, yeah, okay, backward looking. What does it tell us? What can we pull out of it? Am I wrong? Is there something we should be reading deeply into this? I think you've got to think about the two quarters together. And, Becky, I have explained a lot of very complicated things on television in the last 20 years.

16:38This is the most complicated thing. Really? Yes. I've heard a lot of what you explained. I have a hard time to listen to that. I've explained auction rate securities, and I've explained CLOs and CBO squared. All right, I'm going to give this a shot. And, guys, don't play the music on me. Just, well, do play the music if I can. Final countdown? No. No, no. Play around, Stevie. But here's the thing. Okay, so today we get a number that will be negative because of the front running of imports, okay? Yeah. So all those imports came in. For reasons we don't really understand, they did not end up as either sales or inventories.

17:12I don't know why that is. So you bring stuff in, and you don't want to count it in your gross domestic production, so you subtract out the imports, and they end up as either a sale or an inventory, right? But they haven't ended up there, and we don't know why. Wait, wait, wait. Explain that again. It comes in here and we're not counting it. No, they didn't. It wasn't sold. It wasn't either sold and it's not being counted in inventories. So it just doesn't exist. We don't we don't. It's only the negative part of it exists. We don't know where the positive part is. OK. How is that possible? I think it's a sequencing issue as to the counting of inventories.

17:48So it's going to show up in the next quarter's numbers. Thank you very much. OK, that's why I'm saying. OK. OK, now what's going to happen. A positive impact in the second quarter GDP numbers. And that's going to throw off all of that numbers. And we're not going to know what to think of that and think, oh, maybe the economy is doing better than we think. I'm retiring. Becky got it. That's what it is. That's exactly what I'm about to say. But there's one other element. OK, so, folks, just to repeat what Becky said, you will have a positive import effect in the second quarter. The first quarter is going to look worse.

18:16The second quarter is going to look better. But here's the thing. Because of all the pull power. Forget all that. Forget what I just told you. What we really want to know about is not this top line number. See, I just continue. You just told me to wrap. I'm not even done yet. I have a question. But here's the thing. Here's the thing. Forget all that. Because the number you want to look at is final demand. Okay. It gets rid of all that import and inventory nonsense. Okay. And that's going to be reasonably strong this quarter. It's next quarter that's going to be weaker. Which is to say, folks, I guess you can tune in for this if you want.

18:50But you could also tune back in in the third quarter. We might have a better look. Check with us in six months. Check with us. Is there any way? But now you see the problem for the Fed. Right now, Joe wants him to cut now, whatever. The Fed is not going to be know what the heck's going on in this economy for six months. So what else is new?

19:11Is it possible it could be just a headline horrific number that Drudge puts on minus one and a half percent? Is it possible? It could be. Yeah, yeah. Because we don't really know. Right. Is it also possible it could be a plus and be totally wrong? I think it's going to be hard for it to be a plus because the import numbers, I think, are what they are. The question is the magnitude. But it's a very complicated thing. Let's look at real final demand at the end of the day. What businesses are buying and what consumers are buying. And let's try to get rid of all this front running. You hear what you said.

19:46You talked about long-lasting pandemic effects. You talk about, I mean, there's so many cross currents. This is, and we've never had tariffs like this before. There's so many things that are. Are you appreciating my job right now? No, I'm just saying. Are you having some sympathy for what I'm trying to do here? Some of it's almost, some of it could be positive. Some of it could be very negative. And we just don't know. Give people an idea of what's going on on all these different fronts. We just, I mean, oil at 59 is good. It's good. There's no few ways about it. You've got to find new data sets for us to watch that are real time.

20:17It's not good for production domestically, though. I know that, but it's good if it filters, because I still think that filters through. I think you're right. Good fun, huh? Yeah, thank you. See you in a little bit. 100 days back in office, polls showing Americans more worried about the economy than they were at President Trump's inauguration. Joining us right now on the president's first three months, pollster and political strategist Frank Luntz. Frank, it's great to see you this morning. You've now done a whole number of polls and different sessions with voters, Democrats, Republicans. Tell us what you're hearing.

20:51There is increased anxiety, a fear that the coming months will be more difficult, a recognition that the 401ks that they depended on are not going to be at the same level that they were a couple months ago, a belief among Trump voters to stay the course, not to abandon him. This is something remarkable. The level of hardcore support among Trump voters for their president I've never seen in 35, 40 years of politics. The hostility among those who did not vote for him is similarly as great, as intense. And the reason why the polling numbers have gotten worse is because of that small group in the center, the independents, people who had voted Democrat in the past and chose to vote for Donald Trump this time.

21:39Those people asked for less wasteful spending, but they didn't like how it was done. They asked for less illegal immigration, but the execution wasn't quite what they were looking for. An overall conclusion is that Trump has been exactly what they were expecting. Only for Trump voters, he's been even better. And for those who didn't like Donald Trump before, they really don't like him now. So where do we go from here, Frank? I mean, you think there's a way to bring people together around where things are? You think that the next three years are just going to be a complete split? I think it's going to I think it's going to be worse than a split.

22:16I think we're truly going to be at each other. And that is a concern. I'm looking for that common ground. And that's been a common discussion that we've had over the last 10 years of our conversations. That ability to put aside the differences when the nation needs it. And, Andrew, I'm not convinced at this point in 2025 that there is that common ground, that there is that constitutional unification that would get us to be on the same side at the same time if we really needed it in this country. That's how deep and personal and poisonous this difference is between those who like Trump and those who dislike him.

22:58In terms of his supporters, do you see you see no shift? You're arguing that they're saying that things are even better than before. Do you think that this tariff issue or this economic issue is going to have any impact if it has one? I mean, I think there's an argument to be made, at least thus far. It has not had a meaningful impact yet, though. Obviously, there are people who are predicting it might. I've been mocked for saying I'm surprised about this. But I'm surprised about this, that Trump voters who acknowledge that they're worth less today than they were on Election Day, that the 401ks they depend on for their future has been hurt, has been damaged.

23:37And yet they stand behind him. They'll make excuses that the markets were overbought. They'll make excuses that we need to level set. They were willing to accept personal pain for them to get a readjustment of the relationship between the U.S. and China, a readjustment of the relationship between the U.S. and the rest of the world. They'll take personal pain to get that readjustment. And, Andrew, I've never seen this before, because usually when you're hurt economically, that changes your perspective and your politics. Now I'm with these people. This is what we heard. And actually, if you go all the way back to before any of this happened, I think Elon Musk said there's going to be some near term pain.

24:24And that was about Dodes. That was about something else, Frank. But this is they keep talking about eating your vegetables. I was looking for a dessert that has vegetables. And they told me carrot cake was not. But I mean, and to put it in perspective, if you didn't sell, you're back to correction mode, which happens every couple of years or every year in the S &P. And to give it some and I'm not saying that it makes it any easier for people that are retiring this year. But you remember we were talking about retesting thirty five hundred on the S &P, retesting four thousand on the S &P. I mean, we are not in some type of market crash calamity situation that you would think we were in based on a lot of the coverage right now.