Posted on 04/11/2025 9:03:40 AM PDT by Kazan
What’s lost in all the doomcasting is that Americans — particularly Democrats — are behind Trump’s goal to achieve truly free trade deals.
Fueled by fear, nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed believed President Donald Trump’s tariffs would hurt the U.S. economy in the short-term, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday.
The sentiment check dropped as the Trump administration announced a 90-day pause on his reciprocal tariffs, with the exception of serial free-trade abuser China. Instantaneously, the battered markets surged. Trump said he paused his sweeping reciprocal tariffs on the many nations who have long screwed the U.S. consumer because they were willing to come to the negotiating table in an attempt to level the playing field.
The president also felt the fear of the American people.
Why wouldn’t they be afraid? The Trump-hating corporate media has inundated their pages and airwaves with apocalyptic coverage of the tariffs and how Trump is single-handedly driving the world into recession. Not that there isn’t cause for worry. If you’re a baby boomer staring down the barrel of retirement right now and counting on your 401(k), the markets’ bruising over the past several days is more than unsettling.
Predictable ‘Doomcasting’
While there have been moments of measured coverage on the tariff battles, the reporting by the usual suspects in the hyperbolic accomplice media has been the kind of hair-on-fire journalism the American people have come to expect in the Trump era.
Curtis Houck, managing editor of media tracker NewsBusters, says the coverage has been telling. It’s reminiscent, he said, of when the leftist press was panting over the late, great Rush Limbaugh’s comments that he hoped then-President Barack Obama would fail. Corporate media got on its high horse over Limbaugh’s opinion that America would eventually be a better place if Obama’s leftist policies were unsuccessful. Now, Houck says, it feels like the same hypocritical “news” outlets are rooting for America to fail under the leadership of the left’s arch-enemy.
“The doomcasting from the corporate media has been pretty predictable,” Houck told The Federalist. “They are looking at the economy as something that, if it doesn’t go well, they can hang around the president in next year’s midterms.”
It’s funny. The same accomplice media that dismissed the bad economic months and years of the Biden presidency, including an actual recession by any traditional measure, is quick to pounce on Trump’s economic policies a few months in.
“Now they can’t get enough of the ‘R word’,” Houck said, noting that we have yet to fully come to terms with the economic damage of the big government-led lockdown years.
That’s not journalism. That’s the Pravda Press.
Americans Are With Trump
But while they’re understandably worried, Americans generally support what Trump is trying to accomplish.
“Even as President Donald Trump’s tariff policy sparks controversy, the underlying goal – protecting American manufacturing – is a big winner with voters,” a Rasmussen Reports poll finds.
According to the national telephone and online survey, 45 percent of likely U.S. voters say the government doesn’t do enough to protect U.S. manufacturers and businesses from foreign competition. Just 17 percent believe the government protects U.S. businesses too much, and 25 percent say the current level of protection is about right.
The findings haven’t changed much from a similar survey from Rasmussen Reports conducted in 2018, during Trump’s first term. At the time, as the president imposed hefty tariffs on some foreign manufacturers, Americans by a two-to-one margins supported tariffs.
Monthly trade deficits north of $110 billion are an intrinsic problem for the U.S. economy, despite so-called free-trade advocates insistence that such deficits are somehow a blessing. The crippling trade imbalance and the exodus of U.S. manufacturing jobs have been at the core of Trump’s tariffs crusade. He campaigned on tackling it. In February, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau reported an $8 billion decrease in the trade deficit, down from $130.7 billion in January.
Democrats Loved Tariffs Before and After Trump It is curious that the same leftists who swoon over fair trade coffee can’t seem to get the idea of fair trade agreements. Democrats like Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin campaign on “Buy America,” but they recoil at the heavy lifting it takes to make it easier to fulfil that promise. Their principles melt in the hot lure of cheaply produced crap from countries that have long stuck it to American manufacturers with punitively high tariffs. Those countries include the U.S.A.’s “dear friends” and tenuous allies.
Look at Michigan’s far-left governor and political climber, Wretched Gretchen Whitmer. With an eye on the 2028 presidential election cycle, Whitmer just gave a speech on her vision to bring “supply chains home from China, create more good-paying jobs, and invest in our defense industry.” What incentive does industry have to build in the United States when it is so much cheaper and less regulated to do so elsewhere?
Asked by interviewer Gretchen Carlson what she would have done differently than Trump has done to achieve her stated goals, Whitmer said she really hasn’t thought about it.
“I don’t know how I would have enacted them [tariffs] differently,” the Democrat said. What she has thought about, Whitmer claimed, is tariffs “need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.”
You see, Democrats used to be for tariffs before they were against them. Before the rise of Trump.
“Democrats have been more scattered. Most are wary of criticizing a tariff power that they believe in, and that presidents of their own party have used to benefit US companies and unions,” Semafor reporter David Weigel wrote this week. “All of them disagreed with how Trump executed his tariffs. Few — but not none — are interested in being part of an anti-tariff party.”
As Weigel pointed out, the Dem Party 2024 platform praised President Joe Biden for “strategically increasing tariffs” while attacking Trump for his tariff plans. It’s an incredible talent to be able to speak so fluently out of both sides of one’s mouth.
‘A Place of Great Certainty’
What Democrats are really for is power. But even more than that, they are for destroying Trump. The party’s useful idiots in the accomplice media are, per usual, carrying water for that mission.
On Thursday, the doomcasters were back as the markets dropped on Trump’s escalating tariffs on Chinese goods. The decline followed huge gains the day before on the tariff pause elsewhere. The corporate media players were again talking turmoil and the “R word” without bothering with context.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tried to offer a little perspective during Thursday’s cabinet meeting, telling the propaganda press that time will tell.
“Up two, down one is not a bad ratio, or up 10 down five,” he said. “And I think, as we have talked about, as we go through the queue and settle with these countries who are going to bring us their best offers, we will end up in a place of great certainty over the next 90 days on tariffs.”
TV personality and mega entrepreneur Kevin O’Leary recently said the same in schooling Madison Mills, the petulant host of Yahoo Finance’s morning show, Catalysts. O’Leary said the more complex aspects of the negotiations are around massive trade imbalances that previous presidents have failed to take on.
“You can assume that behind the scenes are two spheres of negotiations. One is, ‘Let’s try and reduce the imbalance of trade by buying more stuff from the United States.’ That’s one signal. And the other, which is very easy to fix, is to simply remove all tariffs. If you’re going to have reciprocal tariffs of 30 percent, 40 percent, just get rid of them. Bring them down to zero,” the Shark Tank shark said.
That, as O’Leary noted, is Trump’s shorter-term goal.
‘Let Him Do His Work’
But “Mr. Wonderful” knows there’s a multi-front economic battle going on here. And China, O’Leary said, is a whole different story.
“This isn’t about a trade war with China. This is about leveling the playing field on a wide range of issues, including IP [intellectual property], access to business, access to courts, being compliant on U.S. regulations on securities,” he said. “There is a laundry list of grievances with China that have been around since they joined the World Trade Organization, and none of the administrations previously have ever dealt with China.”
“They do not play by the rules. They’re going to have to start doing it pretty soon,” he added.
Mills interjected that the tariff tools Trump is using to target those core issues aren’t working.
“What tool do you suggest they use when nothing else has worked?” O’Leary asked.
Mills smugly answered, “I’m not the president. That’s not my job.”
“Exactly. So let him do his work,” O’Leary shot back.
But the corporate media’s real work is to help the left crush Trump and America First principles.
Have the opening rounds of the tariff matches been painful? You bet. For some more than others. Will Trump’s tariff “hammer” ultimately work? Time will tell. One thing is clear right now: the same globalists who are leading the indignant “free trade!” rallying cry are the same pigs who have long dined at the trough of corruptly unfair trade deals stacked against America and Americans.
BTTT
IF 1% of the media were as smart as they THINK they are-—they would be singing a different tune.
The Corporate Enemedia continue to betray American citizens and to give aid and comfort to the domestic and foreign enemies of the United States.
If 1% of the media were headquartered outside of New York City, I think the same thing would happen.
The MSM is scaring a lot of clients currently, it’s happened before. I will point out to them after this has passed that it was the medias lies that became the problem. Do your own research folks, most don’t know how to. I’ll use this to shave some customers from my books permanently.
Ultimately this will end up further tanking the medias credibility. Darn, already down to 30% trust, how low will they go? Will they follow the Democrats into the dustbin of history?? I will try and find a liberal tear as a memorial, there will be many to choose from.
All five of CNN’s viewers are scared of Trump’s tariffs.
The market tanks, yes, but two days and it’s all doom and gloom? Can we not wait a bit to see ?
“Weber reveals how the Copperheads came perilously close to defeating Lincoln and ending the war in the South’s favor. Indeed, by the summer of 1864, they had grown so strong that Lincoln himself thought his defeat was ‘exceedingly likely.’”
“Copperheads is a gripping account of the fierce dissent that Lincoln called ‘the fire in the rear.’”
https://www.amazon.com/Copperheads-Rise-Lincolns-Opponents-North/dp/0195341244
WIKI
During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the Copperheads nominally favored the Union and strongly opposed the war, about which they faulted abolitionists. They demanded immediate peace and resisted draft laws. They wanted President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans ousted from power, seeing the President as a tyrant destroying American republican values with despotic and arbitrary actions.
The Copperheads had numerous important newspapers, but the editors never allied. In Chicago, Wilbur F. Storey made the Chicago Times into Lincoln’s most vituperative enemy. The New York Journal of Commerce, originally abolitionist, was sold to owners who became Copperheads, giving them an important voice in the largest city. A typical editor was Edward G. Roddy, owner of the Uniontown, Pennsylvania Genius of Liberty. He was an intensely partisan Democrat who saw African Americans as an inferior race and Lincoln as a despot and dunce. Although he supported the war effort in 1861, he blamed abolitionists for prolonging the war and denounced the government as increasingly despotic. By 1864, he was calling for peace at any price.
Copperhead newspapers were remarkable for their angry rhetoric. Wisconsin newspaper editor Marcus M. Pomeroy of the La Crosse Democrat referred to Lincoln as “Fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism” and a “worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero ... The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer ... And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperhead_(politics)
It is down to the low millions for sure. Not sure what the cutting of their budget from US AID did. Yet they still have some market place influence along with the others. It is effecting the market place. I see it personally. Most of the Boomers are also terrified of their 401k’s and other retirement vehicles. The majority of the media hates Trump and their headlines show it, causing fear and doubt.
If they can cause Trump to fail, they will at any cost.
President Trump then further raised the tariff against China to 145%. Trump put a 90-day moratorium on additional tariffs beyond its 10% tariff against all other countries.
Communist CCP China responded by calling President Trump's tariffs against China "a joke." China further said, "The U.S. escalation of tariffs on China is a mistake on top of a mistake, which seriously infringes on China's legitimate rights and interests and seriously undermines the rules-based multilateral trading system."
Xi Jinping warned President Trump that China is "not afraid" and said: "There are no winners in a trade war, and going against the world will only lead to self-isolation." Xi also said, "For over 70 years, China's development has relied on self-reliance and hard work — never on handouts from others, and it is not afraid of any unjust suppression."
For some unexplained reason (and I think freepers know why), CCP China's Communist "leader" Xi omitted the fact that China forces foreign manufacturers who want to build a factory in China to first enter into a "joint venture" with a Chinese company so the Chinese company can steal the foreign manufacturer's trade secrets and pass them on to the Communist China government which then passes them on to many other Chinese companies. Thus Chinese companies don't need to do their own R&D, they just steal technology & trade secrets from foreign companies to "catch up" and surpass foreign manufacturers. Communist China calls that their version of "capitalism."
Xi also omitted that China charges foreign companies VAT taxes. For example, China charges Apple a 13% VAT tax for an iPhone sold in China. That's even more money for the Communist China government. China also owns tons of U.S. government bonds which generate tens of billions more dollars annually for the Communist China government. China already had tariffs against nations exporting to China. All of that cumulative money generated from the U.S. and other nations gets poured into Communist China's coffers to finance the build-up of Communist China's military. So the world (especially the U.S.) has been and still is financing Communist China's military build-up. (But China and Xi say it's actually the "U.S." and "President Trump" who are "infringing on China's legitimate rights and interests" and are "seriously undermining the rules-based multilateral trading system" and that China is solely "self-reliant" and "never" ever relies on "handouts from others." Yeah, sure, Commie China "leaders," you don't need to "rely ... on handouts from other" nations such as the U.S. because you just steal everything including U.S. technologies and trade secrets.)
They sold out America for 40 years (allowing tariffs against US products, while discouraging tariffs against foreign products). Why would they start supporting America now? That’s not how they make their money. They make their money by backstabbing the American people, taking kickbacks, bribes and payoffs from foreign corporations and nations.
When will the more than 1.4 Billion Chinese citizens take matters into their own hands and topple the horrific and appalling Communist CCP China government so that the Chinese people can finally be free and enjoy their God-given rights in an actual democracy instead of continually suffering at the hands of those evil “Big Brother” Communist totalitarians such as Xi?
About two-thirds of the trade imbalance with China comes from the Chinese counterpart of ‘Buy American’.
People in China generally have the option of buying Chinese, and they do.
They don’t want to be seen as unpatriotic.
The 100% Chinese Huawei phone is bought, and the majority of the price American Apple phone isn’t.
The basis of ‘free trade’ is comparative advantage.
In the past America had many sole source comparative advantages.
The US, Great Britain and Germany are not the only advanced economies anymore.
At the present time, America has few sole source comparative advantages.
The US needs to move to managed trade.
It’s time for economists to walk away from the altar of ‘free trade’ and put their thinking caps on.
Truth: they are not hysterical because they are worried the tariffs won’t work they are hysterical because they worried that they will.
Now is the time to divert a portion of investments from somewhat safe havens (i.e. bonds, money markets, treasuries) into being more heavily into equities. If you're retired and have a 50% equities / 50% bonds portfolio, while the equities is down move some of the bond money into equities. (Buy low)
This tells me two things: 1) the GOP has done a piss-poor job of explaining how the tariff policy is going to work, and 2) people don't have a concept of short run sacrifice for long run gains. I can understand this from politicians...to them, the long run is one day less than their term of office. But for citizens, especially those who have kids, they are woefully uninformed.
The GOP should be telling things like: as people seek less risk and transfer funds from stocks to lower risk Treasuries, each interest rate basis point drop (i.e., 0.01%) in the interest rate saves the taxpayer $1 billion per day in interest rate costs. People should see the tariffs as a way of helping their kids by decreasing the debt.
It also benefits Chinese companies that the Communist China government continuously subsidizes Chinese companies. It’s true that the U.S. government also sometimes ridiculously interferes in our capitalist system (e.g., Biden’s handlers handing out government money to specific American companies that Biden’s handlers favor). But Communist China continuously subsidizes Chinese companies, year after year, as part of CCP China’s planned economy. So it’s virtually impossible for American companies to outcompete Chinese companies in China (unless the required Chinese “joint venture” partner makes out like a bandit). It’s all fully planned ahead of time by the Communist China government.
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