Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville appeared Tuesday on MSNBC’s “The Beat with Ari Melber” to discuss President Donald Trump’s steep international tariffs, sharing both confusion about their economic logic and the potential reason behind them.
“They’re just Trump going power mad,” Carville told Melber.
“He gets in there and he figures, ‘I don’t have to get approval from Congress, I don’t need to bring it to a Cabinet, I can just do this,’” the political consultant continued. “And so the idea that he can just do something on his own, unilaterally, has great appeal to him.”
“And then, of course, everybody’s got to call him … because you can exempt people,” he added. “And so he likes getting you up. He loves having foreign people call and say, hey, can you exempt … Finnish steel from these tariffs, or whatever it is, and it’s all just a play.”
Trump said on the campaign trail last year that “tariff” is “the most beautiful word in the dictionary.” In an executive order issued on his first day back in the White House earlier this year, ordered his Cabinet picks to prepare new tariffs for his administration to impose.
The impending levies against China, Canada and Mexico, as well as the European Union, have already damaged ties between affected nations and the U.S. Global markets braced Monday for the tariffs to go into effect April 2 — on what Trump has called “Liberation Day.”
Economists have warned in recent months that these tariffs will spike prices for consumer products, as the businesses importing them have to shoulder the tariff cost themselves — and charge customers a higher price to make up for the increased cost of acquiring them.
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“I think voters are getting very, very apprehensive about this,” Carville said Tuesday.
The strategist argued these policies will “hurt a ton of people” with new financial burdens “you can’t imagine,” and noted that even The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board — whom he called “some of the most conservative people in the country” — shared concern.
“There’s no policy behind it,” he added. “It’s just his ego playing itself out in public.”