Trump officials struggle to explain tariff strategy but claim Americans won't feel ‘big effect'
CNN's Jake Tapper clashed with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Sunday as she and other Cabinet-level officials hit the interview circuit to reassure Americans in the wake of a stock market plunge as the fallout from 'Liberation Day' continues.
The Texas-native and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent were the face of the Trump administration's PR offensive on Sunday. The White House battled a wave of negative headlines surrounding two days of steep market losses and the criticism of free trade advocates in both parties who claim that the president's actions will crash the US economy.
Tapper questioned the USDA director over one of the more questionable aspects of President Donald Trump's 'Liberation Day' tariff rollout — an imposed duty of 10 percent on exports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, a pair of uninhabited rocks off the coast of Australia used for legal purposes for occasional small-scale exports.
"Why are you putting import tariffs on islands that are entirely populated by penguins?" asked Tapper. US imports from the island chain in 2024 totaled just under $14,000, according to the World Bank.
"Well, I mean — come on Jake, obviously here's the bottom line: we live under a tariff regime from other countries,' the secretary responded.
The CNN host interjected: "The McDonald islands is not imposing--'
"I mean, come on. Whatever,' Rollins said. 'Listen, the people that are leading this are serious, intentional, patriotic, the smartest people I've ever worked with. I did not come up with the formulas, I'm the [Agriculture] Secretary."
Rollins, interviewed on State of the Union, also struggled to answer when pressed on whether Trump's implementation of tariffs ranging from 10 percent to 49 percent on virtually every US trading partner would be permanent measures kept in place throughout his four years in office — or whether the White House was open to negotiation.
'We're two business days into this new American order,' Rollins said. 'So I think we have a lot to be determined. But the president is resolute in his focus, in his boldness, in his fearlessness, and in his relentlessness to ensure that we are putting America first by using these tariffs.'
America's economic mood was clearly darkening over the weekend. On Sunday, as Rollins and Bessent gave interviews, 'Black Monday' trended on X/Twitter, and CNBC's Jim Cramer tweeted that he saw the country on course for a 1987-style crash if present trends continued into the resumption of trading Monday morning.
'Like I said this morning--odds now favor the October '87 pattern if we do not get constructive comments from Trump this weekend,' the Mad Money host said on Friday.
On NBC's Meet the Press, Bessent tried to dissipate some of those fears.
'I reject [...] the assumption,' Bessent told Kristen Welker. 'There doesn't have to be a recession. Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week.'
He added: 'In terms of the market reaction, look, we get these short-term market reactions from time to time. The market consistently underestimates Donald Trump. I remember that in 2016, the night President Trump won, the market crashed. And it turned out he was going to be the most pro-business president in over a century, maybe in the history of the country. And we went on to very high after-inflation returns for the next four years.'
However, even the Commerce Secretary couldn't predict how long sustained losses on Wall Street would continue.
The director of Trump's National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, was also trying to put out fires on Sunday as he told ABC's This Week: 'I don't think that you're going to see a big effect on the consumer in the U.S., because I do think that the reason why we have a persistent long-run trade deficit is these [foreign countries] have very inelastic supply.'
Trump himself spend the weekend at his Florida properties once again. Amid a barrage of re-truths of positive coverage of his tariff actions in conservative media, the president told Americans on Saturday: 'THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won't be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!'
Unnerving some, he also re-truthed one supporter's claim that a stock market crash was intentional — part of a plan to help the Federal Reserve refinance America's debt.
Meanwhile, those same talking heads in conservative media enjoying the president's favorable gaze spent Saturday and parts of Sunday attempting to explain away the crowds of thousands and, in some cases, tens of thousands who descended on cities including Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City and more on Saturday for a nationwide day of 'Hands Off' protests against Trump, his DOGE baron Elon Musk, and the rapid reorganization of the federal government under the second Trump presidency.
Among the speakers at Saturday's demonstration on the National Mall was Jamie Raskin, a rising star in the Democratic Party who served as an impeachment manager during the president's second impeachment.
'No moral person wants an economy-crushing dictator who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,' Raskin said on Saturday while addressing the crowd about the effects of the president's actions on the US economy.
As business leaders know, he claimed: 'There is no prosperity with stupid trade wars against the whole world. There's no prosperity with stock market collapse and mass unemployment. There's no future with presidents who have the politics of Mussolini and the economics of Herbert Hoover.'
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