Sheppard: It’s not just that though, too. The stated rationale for this tariff policy has shifted somewhat, at its foundational basis, that it’s supposed to rebuild American enterprise, manufacturing, it’s supposed to make Americans wealthy by building up their ability to make things, right? So I think the other thing that’s so absurd about this is that you have an actual successful industry. There is really no market for domestic American soybeans. If you’re an American soybean farmer, you sell them to foreign markets, most notably China. And so I think what you have here too is like an example of just how ridiculous this entire stratagem is that Trump is essentially like taking existing successful American industries that do export goods, in this case soybean farmers, and holding them hostage so he can one, extort the rest of the world in the form of tariffs and claim that he’s making all this money. but also to build up successful American industry or farming, manufacturing, whatever you want to call it. And what you have here is an actual successful thing. It’s being destroyed. And there’s nothing that this administration can point to that’s being built domestically because of these tariffs.
Sargent: And just to underscore the depths of the scamming here, Trump constantly says that other countries pay the tariffs. No, they don’t. We do. His own voters do. And on top of all this, the economic news is getting worse. ADP just put out its report finding that the economy lost 32,000 jobs in September. That’s the worst since March of 2023. They also revised the August numbers down from 54,000 gained to a loss of 3,000 jobs. A new report also finds that consumer confidence dipped in September. You’ve got the farmers getting clobbered. Now the government shutdown. It sure seems like the bad economic news is really going to pile up on Trump right now. What’s your reading of that overall picture? How bad is it?
Sheppard: I mean, I think it’s been pretty bad for a while. Consumer sentiment has been a sort of leading indicator for quite a while now, and it hasn’t always meant bad economic news. But I think—you always had a situation where you had the so-called “vibecession” during the Biden administration. Talking to a lot of Dem policy people, I think that was always misjudged to some extent. You could point to a lot of good numbers during the Biden administration, but at the same time, there was inflation, there were various things that made you feel like your dollar was being stretched more.
