SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
It's been just a few dizzying days since President Donald Trump announced an expansive new round of tariffs on goods from nearly all countries.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: April 2, 2025, will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed and the day that we began to make America wealthy again.
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TRUMP: Going to make it wealthy, good and wealthy.
SIMON: The country's wealth, as indicated by the U.S. stock market, has sharply declined. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2,200 points yesterday after falling 1,600 points the day before. NPR senior contributor Ron Elving joins us. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: President said things were going very well while the stock market dropped. He referred to the economy as a sick patient who'd been through an operation. A lot of people don't seem to share his assessment right now.
ELVING: I do think a lot of people would agree with that one word, sick. They're feeling that way right now, especially those who lost a lot of their savings this week. For them, the thought of those losses may be more vivid than the golden promise of Trump's high-tariff theory. But as for Trump and his advisers and supporters in Congress and portions of the news media, they're all standing by their confident predictions. They say the retaliation we're seeing from China and elsewhere will be transitory. They say our trading partners will knuckle under and lower their own tariffs. And most important, they say American companies will bring home the jobs that they've shifted overseas and that other countries will shift their manufacturing to the U.S., creating jobs here rather than in their own countries.
You know, for weeks now, we've seen the market rising and falling almost daily with each new rumor that tariffs are coming. No, wait. It's all just a bluff. Trump was playing that trombone right up to this week, and there are still those who are suggesting he'll just negotiate it all away in the months ahead. But as of this morning, we have the start of a trade war, and wars are often easier to start than stop.
SIMON: Ron, what about the president's contention tariffs will right the wrongs, as he sees it, of U.S. trade policy and bring jobs back to the U.S.?
ELVING: That is the heart of the sales pitch, and it has a lot of appeal in the parts of the country that have lost economic vitality since World War II and especially since the 1990s. Smaller communities and rural areas, they'd already seen so many of their young people migrate to the cities and metro areas, and much of what they still had has been lost since the year 2000. And it's easy to blame it all on foreign competition, whether that's the only culprit or not.
But the tariffs are just part of Trump's larger effort to redefine the American people - the American role, I should say - in the global order, economically and in every other sense. Trump sees international agreements as weakening to the U.S., and he sees treaties by which the U.S. defends other countries as a bad bargain - a chance for other countries to freeload, whether they can afford to pull their own weight or not. Much of that seems far less about economics and more about political and even personal grievances, Scott.
SIMON: What's the reaction in Congress?
ELVING: The reaction that matters most is coming from the president's own party, the Republicans. Some of them have been worried for months about Trump's tariff talk, but they defend it as a way to soften up our trading partners. Prior to negotiations, that'll be good for us. They talk about what a savvy negotiator Trump is. But this week we saw several Republican senators backing two efforts to rein in not the threats, but the actual tariffs themselves. One would protect Canada, in particular, and the other would more generally and explicitly assert a role for Congress in setting tariff policy. Now, neither of these has any chance in the House where Trump's hold is still absolute. But the first signs of restiveness in the Senate alone are notable, given the lockstep we've seen in support of Trump's nominees and budget moves in the past, including the most controversial ones.
SIMON: Nationwide protests against the Trump administration happening this weekend. Earlier this week, a one-man protest marathon. Senator Cory Booker held the Senate floor and spoke for more than 25 straight hours.
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CORY BOOKER: I listen to him. I listen to how he talks about people. We have a government now, as I said earlier, that isn't ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. We have a country now where a president says, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for Donald Trump.
SIMON: Senator Booker set a record for floor speeches. No food, water, bathroom breaks. Lot of leg cramps. Did he make a political point, too?
ELVING: He did make a political point, partly by breaking a record that had been set by a segregationist senator fighting the civil rights bill back in the 1950s. But the larger meaning for our moment in time is as a kind of alarm bell in the night. Booker was saying this is not just another left-right dispute, another spot - spat between the parties. There are issues here as fundamental as the Constitution itself, the shared powers of the branches and the primacy of Congress. Trump has shown he's willing to bypass Congress, even to question the authority of the courts. So the president and his party have all the levers right now, and he has shown a willingness to push those levers hard.
SIMON: Ron Elving, thanks so much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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