On this Friday edition of The Editors, Rich, Charlie, MBD, and Dominic discuss the brouhaha over Trump’s recent announcement of tariffs on automakers.

“Like other Trump tariffs,” Michael says, “I’m curious how long they’re going to last and what exceptions are going to be added to them.” He points out ways other countries are responding to this announcement, and how this seems to “speak to even their uncertainty about whether this is going to be a long-term thing.

“We’ve just seen it before. If you want a tariff to have the effect of rebalancing a trade relationship, the best thing for you to do is to implement it slowly over time, raise it over a number of years, and to pass it through Congress. . . . I’m not gonna commit to any defense of it when I know Trump is liable to change his mind.”

Dominic says that he doesn’t think “think you can quite blame [the foreign auto industry] for not expecting this. But it is true at the same time that Trump was campaigning on this. . . . And so it shouldn’t be a total surprise that he’s doing it now.

“If it’s really true that car imports are a threat to national security, there should be no exceptions, right? But we all know that’s not really true,” Dominic points out. “And so they’re going to come through, and they’re going to they’re going to narrow down some exceptions on things. They’ve already said that for the time being, imports that are compliant with USMCA will be tariff free while the government comes up with a process to only tax the non-compliant components of the cars, which is a whole other lobbying mess of trying to figure out what counts as a domestic component and how much of it has to be assembled in a certain place in order for it to count as being from that place.

“It’s all just complete nonsense. Insider elitist D.C. stuff. This belief that you can rejigger global trade through tariffs.”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.