Trump's Tariffs Won't Save Workers from A.I.

15:29Binyamin Appelbaum:And so you've got this sort of reality in which, you know, a lot of congressional Republicans are looking around and saying, hey, I'm up for reelection, you know, not that many months from now. Americans are unhappy about the economy. They think tariffs are part of the problem, the driving up the cost of living. You could see, I think, an intensification of resistance to tariffs, which are fundamentally tax increases. Republicans have been very successful for a very long time opposing tax increases. It's been kind of amazing to watch them fall under the spell of this idea that this kind of tax increase should be the great exception.

16:02Binyamin Appelbaum:Not that hard for me to imagine them waking up and saying, hey, wait a second, we're against tax increases.

16:07Emily Bazelon:Right. But then they have to say, hey, wait a second, we're against President Trump's favorite tool and biggest part of his agenda. And that is a harder sentence for them to utter, right?

16:16Binyamin Appelbaum:It for sure it is. And, you know, Betting against him has not been a good bet for a while now, but he is going to be a lame duck. He is going to be facing the potential of a change of control in either house of Congress, you know, in the midterms. I don't know. I'm not predicting that it's going to happen, but you can at least see some of the pressures building against his ability to continue sort of imposing tariffs unilaterally and without any pushback from Congress.

16:43Emily Bazelon:Yeah, totally. And he's also unpopular. So if the normal rules of politics applied, then I would be more I'd see more room for the path that you're talking about. And maybe they will begin more and more to apply. Right. I mean, Trump has has had this kind of magnetic hold over his party because his supporters are so devoted and they're such an important percentage of Republican voters. But maybe we will start to see those dynamics shift. And look, you know, the other alternative is that the Republicans lose the midterms, the Democrats take at least a House, if not the Senate, and then that will absolutely shift the dynamic.

17:19Steve Stromberg:We are already seeing some forms of, if ineffective, opposition in Congress, even among some Republicans on the tariffs issue. You have resolutions passing the House, for example. Some of the lawmakers who voted for some of these resolutions on tariffs are going to be hearing the president very soon on Tuesday at his State of the Union address. Yes. What do you expect from the president in the State of the Union Tuesday night? Binya, you've already previewed a little bit, or at least pre-budded a little bit of what he might, of some of the arguments he might make about the power and benefits of tariffs to revive the domestic economy.

18:02Steve Stromberg:What do you think?

18:03Binyamin Appelbaum:I think it is sort of a fascinating test of like his, you know, ability to sort of do whatever he wants versus what his advisors clearly want him to do. He has been resisting talking about the big issue in all of the polls is affordability, the cost of life. Democrats have seized on it. They're making hay from it. And a lot of Republicans really want the president to focus on how he is going to address that issue. And Trump has strongly resisted doing so. He's insisted it's not a real issue. He's already dealt with it. It's fixed. And the tariff thing really, you know, brings that to a head. My expectation is that he is going to make a full-throated case for the importance of tariffs and double down on it and brag about it, because that is everything consistent with his character.

18:50Binyamin Appelbaum:That is the way that he deals with setbacks, at least in the first instance. The more interesting question as a policy matter is whether he actually sticks with tariffs. Because the other thing that sometimes happens is after, you know, insisting that he's going to keep on doing whatever he's been told he can't do anymore, he sometimes then backs off. But the adjustment comes later. But the real question to me is whether his own instincts, which frankly have served him well, you know, prevail on Tuesday night. And what we hear is sort of, you know, a doubling down on the things he considers important or whether his aides and his supporters in the party have any luck in convincing him that his party's fate in the midterms rests on a change in tone and a change in message and some form of reassurance to the American people that he's actually taking the cost of living seriously.

19:38Emily Bazelon:I agree that that is like the main drama of the State of the Union. I think in terms of the theater of the event, there's also a sort of side question. Are the Supreme Court justices going to show up? Usually most of them do. They sit really close to where the president is standing. They're there in their robes representing their branch. you know presumably they are going to show up because they still think that's part of their role and i think it's gonna be really hard for president trump to resist the temptation to go after them and you know maybe that will just be like a moment of spicy performance and it won't matter a whole lot but it also could sort of put you know even more of a point on this real difference in how the justices see their jobs versus the president.

20:28Emily Bazelon:I mean, the president went after the conservatives who were in the majority on the tariffs case for being a disgrace to their families, disloyal to the Constitution. He really might as well have just said disloyal to him, because that's what's really troubling him here. And I think if he goes down that road in this kind of public way, you know, on video, which will be streamed over and over again at the State of the union, that's just going to kind of up the ante. And, you know, maybe there's something sort of usefully clarifying about that for the American people to see that the president expects the court to do his bidding, even though it is a separate and co-equal branch.

21:06Binyamin Appelbaum:Well, I think presidents have often been in the position of disagreeing with, resenting, you know, feeling unfairly constrained by Supreme Court decisions. To me, the difference isn't whether the opposition is principled, but whether, you know, what the president says is basically like, I disagree with you, or I think you're bad people who shouldn't have this power, or really even, I think disagreeing with me is illegitimate, which is really what Trump is saying, is that the power belongs to him. I mean, he's been, one trend in his second term is that he really seems to be like building up towards saying in increasingly clear ways that he is the state, and that what he says is the law, and that those who disagree with him are delegitimizing themselves by disagreeing with him.

21:51Binyamin Appelbaum:And that is what is so remarkable about this confrontation between the court and the president is not that they disagree about policy, which is really their job, but that he is questioning the legitimacy of the court disagreeing with him about policy.

22:06Emily Bazelon:Yeah, totally. I mean, if you go back to that phrase that he said that they were disloyal to the Constitution, well, that only makes sense if you think the Constitution establishes the president and his judgment is basically the only power, right? This unitary executive theory that some conservatives have really pushed to the limits during the Trump administration.

22:27Steve Stromberg:So how should Democrats respond to all of this? You know, there's an argument out there that with the midterms coming up, all they have to do is put up some candidates with a pulse and let Trump beat himself. Is that the strategy? What do they say? What do they do? Binya, what do you think?

22:47Binyamin Appelbaum:I mean, to bring this back to tariffs, one of the really interesting dynamics here is that Democrats haven't been totally sure that Trump is wrong about tariffs. Yeah. The Biden administration maintained much of the tariff infrastructure that Trump had built. There are a lot of Democrats in Congress who have long been skeptical about the benefits on balance of trade for the United States, who are extremely open to the argument that, you know, we ought to be rebuilding manufacturing in part by protecting ourselves against foreign competition. And so it's been a very difficult place for Democrats to sort of, you know, find traction or figure out what exactly they want to say that would create a meaningful distinction for voters between their position on this issue and the president's position on this issue.

23:32Binyamin Appelbaum:And I frankly don't think that's gotten any easier for the party. Where they are making hay is on affordability. The idea that the cost of living in the United States is going up, that the important things keep getting more expensive, housing, education, health care, to the point where a lot of ordinary Americans can't afford those things, and that the government isn't just failing to help, but under Donald Trump is actively making things worse. That has become a very potent message for the party. Where Democrats continue to struggle is in explaining what they would do differently. This is a party that continues to lack a coherent economic vision.

24:08Binyamin Appelbaum:I don't think it's just a civil war problem. I mean, there are different wings of the party ideologically, and they have some definable differences over what economic policy might look like. But I'm not even sure any of those wings has defined a completely coherent plan for moving forward. It is really a party in search of answers. They know what the questions are, and they're putting them increasingly forcefully and successfully. And that may be enough to prevail in the midterms, to be clear. But going forward, they need to start articulating answers to those questions. That, to me, is the singular challenge confronting the Democratic Party right now.

24:42Emily Bazelon:I mean, Binyat, is this a useful way to think about this? And I'm really just thinking out loud here. But, you know, one way to think about Trump's tariff policy is that it's a bad answer to a real insight, which is that, you know, globalization and the kind of free trade of the Clinton all the way to the Obama eras left out lots of Americans, right, especially in the parts of the country that previously had a lot of factory industrial jobs, the kind of jobs that pay well, even though you haven't graduated from college, that there is a kind of backbone there that got really hollowed out by trade agreements and all those kinds of jobs moving offshore.

25:21Emily Bazelon:And Democrats, as well as Republicans, have really struggled to deal with the flaws and weaknesses of that kind of globalization. And nobody still really knows what to do about it. And now we have the kind of potential for this like huge AI disruption to the white collar economy potentially coming down the pike when we haven't even solved the blue collar problem yet. Does that resonate with you?

25:47Binyamin Appelbaum:It absolutely does. And I think it raises a really important point, which is that for all of the focus on trade and there have been some political efforts to address the impact of trade. Biden tried and why he failed is perhaps a rich subject for a whole different show. But he tried. Trump is trying. They're not even the first. What we have very rarely seen any political effort to address is what is actually a bigger part of the story, which is automation. If you look at what actually reduced employment in the manufacturing sector, trade is the smaller part of that story. Over time, what really did it was automation.

26:24Binyamin Appelbaum:And as you point out, we are about to enter a whole new chapter in that story, where a much wider swath of jobs are potentially at risk of being automated by artificial intelligence. And we still don't have any coherent policy conversation about how we as a society, as a polity, as a government ought to be helping workers who are facing that disruption, helping an economy that is facing those transitions. So that is really the looming question to me is like, yes, we have failed really to have a successful political conversation around trade, but that's never even been the biggest thing we need to address.

26:59Binyamin Appelbaum:The biggest thing we need to address is this automation conversation, which is really, for the most part, still not a part of the mainstream political conversation.

27:08Steve Stromberg:And one of the reasons why there hasn't been a boom in manufacturing employment in the United States, even in the wake of these tariffs, is to the extent that there's reshoring of manufacturing back here in the country, a lot of it is coming in the form of highly automated manufacturing that doesn't require a lot of unskilled labor. Am I right about that, Binya?

27:31Binyamin Appelbaum:I mean, that's just 100 % correct. And visiting a modern factory floor is an experience that I think is really valuable and that people should seize if they have the opportunity. Because what a modern factory floor looks like is it's a very clean space with very few people in it and whirring machines quietly producing the things that we need. And the idea that manufacturing is ever again going to be a major employment center is just very hard to take seriously.

28:03Steve Stromberg:Now, one of the interesting things about AI is that you can make its potential is so vast, or some might say so overblown, you can make almost any kind of prediction about it. But is the next sort of hollowed out industrial community going to be a walkable urban neighborhood with third wave coffee shops with unemployed white collar, you know, former coders, no longer making big bucks in tech firms?

28:29Binyamin Appelbaum:I hesitate to join the ranks of people making predictions about where all this AI stuff is going. But I do think that we as a society need to be grappling with those risks, figuring out frameworks for like how we think about AI displacing jobs. Like government, one way of thinking about the role of government economically is that it gets to regulate the pace of change. And I think about thinking of pace as a lever here is really important. It really matters how quickly people lose their jobs. how quickly we transition to new technologies, which things we as regulators decide to preserve and to demand that humans continue to do.

29:05Binyamin Appelbaum:Something we've been very comfortable doing in the context of medicine, for example, is insisting that there are some things that a doctor needs to do. Not necessarily because the technological frontier is determining those things, but because we as a society have decided we want a person to be doing it. Those are the types of questions we're increasingly going to need to engage, and that we should start talking about before they actually need to be made. And I think, you know, also questions around how important is work to us. At some point, we may reach as a society a point where, you know, the cheapest way to do something may not be the best way to do it for society, right?

29:40Binyamin Appelbaum:You may want to pay people to work, basically, or accept a cost to society in having people continue to do jobs that could be done by technology. So there's a bunch of levers that are potentially available to policymakers to mitigate the pace of change associated with AI. And I certainly wish we were hearing more conversation about them from those policymakers.

30:01Steve Stromberg:Emily, any final thoughts?

30:04Emily Bazelon:I mean, project ahead a year, we will be staring down the next State of the Union. I just wonder if this whole conversation is going to have become so much more prominent than it is now, right? I mean, it just feels to me like this huge gathering storm that we haven't really seriously started to grapple with. And I think a lot of it goes back to what you were saying, Binya, about change, that the rate of change is itself so unpredictable, right? I mean, some AI creators are talking about incredibly rapid change, like practically immediate or almost immediate, and others think it's much more long-term.

30:41Emily Bazelon:And because that in itself is so uncertain, I think the political conversation is having a hard time catching up.

30:47Binyamin Appelbaum:Yeah, I mean, I always discount the hype machine in Silicon Valley, right? Like they make money by hyping everything. Every new technology is going to transform the world yesterday. But I also think there's very little harm in having policymakers get down to these conversations as soon as possible.

31:04Steve Stromberg:Emily, Binya, thank you so much for your time.

31:08Emily Bazelon:Thanks for having us.

31:09Steve Stromberg:Thank you.

31:47Emily Bazelon:Transcription by CastingWords

32:07Emily Bazelon:The director of opinion shows is Annie Rose Strasser.

32:20Thank you.