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08-05-2025
- Business
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How Much Would You Pay for That Doll?
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts When President Donald Trump mused that 'maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?' it wasn't a deeply developed critique of late capitalism, or a sly nod to Weberian asceticism. Still, for those of us who'd been hoarding items in a Temu shopping cart, it did raise some important philosophical questions: Is a car vacuum necessary? How many baseball hats can you stack? How many dolls is too many? Once again, Trump reached into our guilty, greedy, modern hearts and dug out the nostalgia for a simpler time when we were content with less. But also, once again, he skipped over the dirty details. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans' relationship with choice. Elenor Mak, the founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale discusses who would actually be hurt by the tariffs, and the choices they take away—and what you could actually do if you wanted to shift American consumer Rosin: Last week, at a Cabinet meeting, while answering a question about tariffs, President Donald Trump mentioned dolls. President Donald Trump: Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. [] Rosin: Now, this wasn't any deep social commentary, just an offhand statement. But it did get me thinking about how kids today—including my own—do have a million dolls versus, say, when I was a kid. Rosin: Do you remember your first doll? Elenor Mak: Oh, of course. My first doll was Ada. I took Ada with me everywhere: to the park, to dim sum. I tried to bring her to school. But I also remember she was beautiful in a way that I felt I never could be. Rosin: This is Elenor Mak. Mak: She had these beautiful blond curls. She had big blue eyes. She had that porcelain skin. And even then—I think I was somewhere [around] 5 or 6 years old—I remember thinking, I wish I looked like Ada. Rosin: When Elenor was a kid, like when I was a kid, what she didn't have was that much choice. But even after Elenor grew up and had her own kids, the options were still pretty meh. There were basically blond dolls, some brunettes, and some that Elenor describes as 'vaguely Asian.' Mak: You're not really sure what they're supposed to be. And the only reason I knew some of these dolls were intended to be Asian was because they had a name like Ling, or they were holding panda bears or had a really bad haircut and— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: —you know, like that bowl cut my mom did give me. But as an Asian American mother, I don't relate to any of that. Rosin: So when Elenor had her daughter, she did not want her to have the bowl-cut model. She wanted a doll that her child could actually relate to. So Elenor did the thing that most people do not do— Mak: Oh, of course. Rosin: She started a company to make her own dolls. It's called Jilly Bing, partly named after her daughter, Jillian. Mak: Jillian is now 5, Jilly Jillian. Rosin: She wanted to create them in the U.S., but she couldn't find a doll manufacturer here who could do it. Mak: Every lead led to the same thing, which is: They've closed. They no longer create dolls. Rosin: So Elenor looked outside the U.S. and found a factory in China that she developed a close relationship with. Mak: Doll manufacturing is a heavily manual process. The rooting of every doll's hair is done manually. Rosin: Wow. Mak: They would weigh the hair to make sure there's consistency. And someone would free-form, like, sew it, putting it through the sewing machine until the doll's head was fully rooted. There is tremendous precision required. Someone is manually placing these tiny little dolls' head[s], right? So my doll is 14 inches. So the head, I'm guessing it's two to three inches. So someone is manually putting this onto the assembly line, which then they stamp the eyes and the blush. And even if it's just, like, one-one-hundredth off, that doll suddenly, like—I have some Jilly dolls that look like Party Jilly because her eyeliner is like— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: I saved those. I saved those—a special edition. But the eyeliner's just a little bit off, and suddenly it's like, Okay. This is not the adorable, you know, wholesome— Rosin: Jilly was out late last night. Mak: I call her the Party Jilly. [] Rosin: Things were going okay for Elenor. She got some good press in places like CBS— Anchor: Elenor Mak, good morning. Rosin: —and the Today show. Reporter: How many dolls in this house right now? Mak: Three hundred or 400. We started out with close to 2,000. Rosin: But then came the tariffs. Anchor: Just in the last few moments, the BBC has confirmed that U.S. tariffs against China add up to 145 percent— Mak: My husband texted me. I remember him saying, Have you seen the tariffs? And I was like, What are you talking about? My head spun. Anchor: —that is including the existing 20 percent tariffs that were already imposed on the country at the beginning of the year. Mak: Our doll retails for $68, so that is considered a premium doll already. To think that I would charge $150-plus for this doll—it was like putting a nail to the coffin of our business. [] Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. Tariffs are no longer an abstraction. They are showing up in shopping carts—supermarket and virtual. And they are forcing a lot of Americans to reckon with a way of living we've taken for granted—products get made cheaply somewhere else, giving us an abundance of choice over here. We'll talk more later about how tariffs have the potential to change American culture, but first: the Jilly Bing emergency—what tariffs look like from the side of the American producer who is determined to give us more choice. Before the most restrictive tariffs on China went into place last month, Elenor Mak was already in emergency mode. A factory she'd developed a good relationship with announced they had plans to close—totally unrelated to the impending trade war. So like every good entrepreneur, Elenor hustled. Mak: And that whole process nearly broke us—just really kind of rushing inventory in and starting work with a new factory—and I thought that was gonna be the worst of it. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: So when the tariff announcement came, it was almost like, Wow. It just felt debilitating. Rosin: And when you heard about the tariffs, did you immediately go into action? Like, call the staff, sit back of the envelope, figure it all out? Did you call people? How did you move through that process? Mak: Yeah. I think there was a part of—you know, speaking to a lot of founders who are also in consumer-products sourcing from China, Vietnam—I think a lot of us just said, This can't be. This won't pass. This is a political move. This won't actually go through. So I think it was disbelief. But there was also a need to start actioning, right? Calling our factory, calling the freight forwarders, trying to understand what the impact was. And I would say it was just chaos. No one really knew, right? There was speculation: This is what it could look like, or, If you get it in by this date. But [at] the end of the day, there was this risk that by the time our imports came in, we would be hit with this 145 percent price increase. Rosin: So the decision—I understand. So the decision is even about putting in orders because you don't know what's going to happen at the back end. It's about the uncertainty because you just can't predict the entire process. You can't predict it from beginning to end, so you could be stuck with this inventory that you then have to pay so much more for. Mak: Absolutely. So for me, you know, now that you're—I'm walking down memory lane: We were about to sign a purchase order, right? So April—and then that way we would get the goods in by sort of August, September, right before the holidays, to have it arrive into our warehouse. But once we sign that purchase order, that becomes binding. And then, you know, once it arrives in the port, whatever the prices are, I am responsible for that. So for me, the decision was to not issue that purchase order. Rosin: I see. Okay. So it's April; you've got a decision to make. So I see why you had to do this really quickly. Numbers are going through your head, like, How much more is this gonna cost? Everything that you mentioned. But on the other side of it is your company, this thing that you've built that's very personal. So how did you weigh all that? Mak: I think it was pure exhaustion. It was a feeling of, Oh my gosh, how many more of these boulders coming downhill can this small business [take]? Right? It's largely me who was full-time on the business, and I think just from a mental capacity, I was burned-out. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: And to think about, you know, signing that PO, waiting for my shipment to come in, and holding my breath until it arrived at the port to figure out what the price could look like, it was just, I think, more than I could bear. And I was devastated, right? Because I think for us, you know, it was always about giving more families choices. I think one thing I wanted to share is: This doll is meant to be Asian American. And our doll has brought joy to a lot of kids and adults, and it was devastating to think this could end if I'm forced out of business. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: But for me, in the short term, we have inventory, we have the silver lining, and I can ride this out for some time. But that inventory also will not last forever. Rosin: You know what? I don't know that I have a good sense of—maybe this is just how entrepreneurs are. I don't know that I have a good sense of whether you—do you think you'll weather this? I can't tell. Like, how realistic a hope is that? Mak: I can only weather this if the policies change in the next year. And so as an entrepreneur, I think, I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic. But I'm also practical when I look at my numbers, when I see my inventory, you know, the trends. So yeah, maybe that's why you're not—it's like a part of me is optimistic things will sort itself out before my sort of self-imposed deadline of when we would need to place a PO comes out. Rosin: So before the last doll is out of your house or wherever you keep the dolls, things have to shift politically. Mak: Yes, because with the current tariffs, there's just—I cannot survive. [] Rosin: That was Elenor Mak, founder of the doll company Jilly Bing. After the break, the other side of the equation: Us, the consumers—our coffee, our toasters, our cars, our assumption that all things are available to us instantly. That's in a moment. [] Gimbel: My name is Martha Gimbel. I'm the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, which is a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the impacts of federal economic policies. Rosin: So Martha, I know the Budget Lab has been busy tallying up how Trump's tariffs are going to change the prices of all kinds of goods for Americans. I myself am thinking about the long term, like how our consumer culture around cheap products might change. But first I want to talk about some specifics. We just talked to an independent doll manufacturer, so want to use that industry as an example. Say it's my kid's birthday coming up, and I want to buy them a doll. What is the landscape I'm looking at? Gimbel: It's not ideal, I think is the technical term, you know? We just don't produce that many toys in the United States anymore. And, you know, I think people sometimes get a little bit itchy about that, and they think, Oh, we should be making things in the good old USA. But that makes things much more expensive, and it also means that if you're making toys, you can't do other types of jobs, which may be more highly compensated. Rosin: Right. And just to dig in, let's say you have to buy a toy in three months— like, are we talking twice as much? Like, do you have any projections? Since I know this is what you guys do. Like, how much more expensive would I expect it to be? Gimbel: So it depends a little bit on where specifically the toy is made, how much the producer of the toy was able to get inventory into the country ahead of time, how much they feel they can try to pass the price onto their consumers, etcetera. Just as an example, we think that in the short run, rubber and plastic products overall—so obviously, a lot of dolls are made out of plastic—will increase their prices by about 22 percent. But obviously, given the tariffs on China, if something's entirely made in China, it will likely increase by much, much more. Rosin: Yeah, so for weeks now, we've been warned that we should expect prices of certain goods mostly made in other countries to go up, like rice, toasters, coffee, I mean, plastic goods, like you just said. Can you project overall how much a household budget of an average American family is likely to go up? Gimbel: Yeah, so we find that we think that, you know, on average, households will pay about $5,000 more a year. Rosin: Wait—$5,000? That's actually a lot. Gimbel: It's a lot of money. You know, most people can't easily absorb that in their household budgets, right? If you say to people, all of a sudden, To consume what you consumed last year, that's gonna cost you $5,000 more, that makes people a little bit itchy, understandably. One thing I should say is that as a share of income, it is a higher percent increase for households at the bottom. And that is because poor households tend to spend more of their income on goods, right? If you are a lower-income household, you are spending much more as a share of your income on shoes for your kids, food, things like that. Whereas higher-income households may be buying vacations, which are not tariffed. Rosin: Right. Are there some surprises that Americans might have in store? Like, things that you found are likely to go up way more than we expect? Things that I maybe don't even associate with China or know are made in China? Gimbel: To some extent, a lot of this is quote-unquote 'obvious,' right? We are expecting the big hit to be on clothing, for example. I think a lot of people realize that their clothes are not made in the United States. I think the thing that is going to be harder for people is: Even things that are made in the United States may buy inputs from abroad, right? So just because you've made the effort to find something that is produced in the United States doesn't mean that they're not getting cotton, silk, wood—whatever it is—from outside the United States. Rosin: So when you look at the landscape, are you thinking very few things are exempt from this? Like, most things are gonna be more expensive? Gimbel: I mean, services, technically— Rosin: Yes? Gimbel: —should be exempt from tariffs. Although, we did just see the president announce that they're going to be tariffing movies. I'm not entirely sure how that would work. But, you know, in general, I think there are very few parts of the goods-producing economy that we are expecting not to be hit. And I think one thing that's important to keep in mind, right, is: Say that you are, by some miracle, a domestic producer who is totally insulated from this, right? You buy your fabric from a nice fabric producer down the road who gets everything in the United States, etcetera. Why would you not raise your prices, right? So all of your competitors have to raise their prices by, let's say, 10 percent in the face of tariffs. You can raise your prices by 8 percent, still get a lot of market share, and get the benefit of those higher prices. And so we do also expect even domestic producers to raise the prices. Rosin: Oh, okay. That I hadn't thought of. So everything—all prices get raised. I mean, that just makes economic sense. Like, you're just increasing your profits. Gimbel: Yeah, why not? I mean, in the face of tariffs, it really is one of those no-place-to-run, no-place-to-hide kind of thing[s] for the consumer. Rosin: I want to talk about the problems President Trump says he's trying to solve with tariffs, because he talks about how short-term pain is worth it for the long-term gain, and that we'll see factories reopening in America. What do you make of this conversation we've been having for decades now about manufacturing shifting overseas? Gimbel: You know, I think that there is a lot of nostalgia for manufacturing. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Gimbel: I think one of the things that I find really bizarre about this entire conversation is that the United States is this incredibly rich country. And yes, to be clear: There were, you know, jobs lost in response to the 'China Shock,' in response to automation. But even so, if you can think about which country in the world has one of the strongest economies, most vibrant economies, where you can succeed, it's the United States. Other countries want to be us. They are trying to make their economies more like our economy. Why are we trying to be like other countries? Rosin: I see. So you are seeing it as a positive evolution away from manufacturing, so it's hard to understand what the nostalgia for manufacturing is. Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, in 1902, we all used to work in farms, right? And you know, yes, there are people still in the United States who work in farms today. A lot of their work looks very different than it did in 1902. And those jobs were really, really hard, and we've evolved to a version of the United States where we get to buy goods produced cheaply by other people who do really, you know, physically painful work, and we get to provide services and be paid—in the realm of the world—a pretty high wage for that. That seems like a really good deal to me. Rosin: Interesting. Do you think that that's a perspective from an expert looking on high and doesn't take into account people's feelings about service work or people's connection to factories or, you know, all these kinds of things that Trump talks about? The things that people are missing? Because it sounds so easy when you say it. Gimbel: I mean, I want to be very clear: Economists are not always great about people's emotions. And so I do not want to deny that. It is also the case, right, that there are people who used to work in manufacturing who have lost those jobs [and] have found it relatively hard to adjust to the new economy. And I do not want to dismiss the pain that those people have experienced, and it's been very acute pain for those specific people. For our overall economy, though, the shift to services has been really, really positive. And so I think there's a couple of things that kind of all get jumbled together here. Some is the specific, acute pain that the people who were not winners from the shift to a services economy have felt. And the other is a desire for what is seen as, like, a more old-fashioned version of America, and people are using manufacturing as some kind of proxy for that. I don't want to come across as if I'm like, There are no problems here. You know, the hollowing out of the middle class has been a real issue. But I think it's really important not to accept the premise that the problem is that manufacturing moved to China. Rosin: Right. I see. The problem is way more complicated than that. And from someone like you who looks at the big picture of the economy, it feels like an evolution, and it's a little confusing why we would want to undo it. Gimbel: Yeah, I mean, there are things that you can do to fix the economy, make it more equal, make people feel like they have more opportunities, etcetera. Putting giant tariffs on China in an attempt to bring back jobs that are legitimately hard and relatively low-paid jobs to the United States is not going to end the way I think a lot of people want it to. Rosin: Okay. Here's another big question: Americans are, in fact, used to cheap prices and infinite options. Is that fair to say? Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, we love cheap prices, and we love being able to just pop over to the store and pick whatever doll out we want for our kids. Rosin: Oh, it's funny you should mention dolls. So Trump did make the statement about dolls: Kids could have two instead of 30. And I am not pretending that Trump was making some kind of well-developed policy statement, but it is a diagnosis that people on all sides of the political spectrum have also made over the years. So what do you think about that sentiment in the context of this tariff-heavy moment? Gimbel: I mean, look—we can have a cultural conversation about: Do we have too much stuff? That is different than the economic conversation of, like, Should the government be putting strictures in place such that it makes it hard for people to buy the stuff that they want? I think one of the things that's been sort of confusing to people is that the Trump administration has started to say some of these things that sound a little bit, you know, for lack of better phrasing, central plannery, which is not something people have traditionally associated with government in the United States, much less the Republican Party. And so it'll be interesting to see how the American public responds to that. You know, I think on the 'Do we all have too much stuff?' thing, I think, again, it is easy to be nostalgic for, you know, quote-unquote 'a simpler time.' And my version of the story is that, you know, I had an Easter-egg hunt for my daughter and, you know, other small children a few weeks ago, and my mother and I were out there in the morning scattering plastic eggs. If any small children are listening to this, the Easter Egg Bunny was scattering the eggs. Rosin: (Laughs.) Gimbel: And my mother said, you know, When I was a child, we didn't have this. My mother dyed literal eggs and hid them in the backyard, and then we hunted for eggs, and we hoped we found all of them, because otherwise it smelled terrible. Rosin: Yeah. Gimbel: And, you know, I think there's just a lot of things like that that we just don't think about, like: Do the children need plastic eggs? No, they'll be fine. They'll survive. Is it kind of nice? Yeah, it is. Rosin: That's an excellent example. I totally see what you're saying by 'central plannery.' I got that concept immediately. It's, like, shifting culture from the pulpit, as it were. But why not go back to dyeing eggs? Like, don't you need to be forced into artificial scarcity? Like, is there a universe in which higher tariffs do have a potential to shift consumer habits and maybe help out this addiction to cheap? Because we all know that the addiction to cheap encourages bad labor practices and pollution all over the world. So it is a big problem that's hard to shift. Gimbel: You know, if there's something that you think is bad, you can tax it, right? So, you know, this is one thing that economists are in favor of but almost no one else likes, is a carbon tax where you put taxes on the amount of carbon that it takes to produce something, because there are externalities to that. The thing about tariffs, right, is they're just, like, a blunt, inefficient tool. So maybe there are things that are—just to stick with the carbon example—you know, very high-carbon intensive that are being produced that we're happening to hit with tariffs. But we're also hitting bananas. Why are we tariffing bananas? We can't grow bananas in the United States, certainly not at scale. Why are we tariffing coffee? None of this makes any sense. Rosin: I see. So it's just too crude an instrument. Gimbel: Yeah, we're just—we're hitting everything, rather than trying to think about: What is the behavior that we are actually trying to do here? Are there things we are trying to disincentivize? Is there revenue we're trying to raise? Is this the most efficient way to raise revenue? And we're just saying: Everybody's tariffed. We don't like it when we buy things from other people. And that's where we are. Rosin: Right. Right. So there isn't any intentionality. If you wanted to shift consumer culture, improve the environment, you would be doing it in an entirely different and more targeted way. Gimbel: Yes. I mean, I will say: I'm a little itchy on, you know, using taxes or, you know, economic incentives to shift culture. I think that's a broader conversation. But there are places where, you know, there is behavior that has spillover effects—like carbon—to society and the economy. And we do think about taxing those kinds of things, but we are taxing that specifically, rather than just a broad, everything's-gonna-hurt-now approach. Rosin: Right. Like, the very obvious example is: higher gas prices, less driving, like what they do in Europe. Can you see any scenario where this all unfolds in the way Trump imagines, which is short-term pain for long-term gain? Gimbel: No. Rosin: No scenario in which, like, the American manufacturing—more things are manufactured in the U.S.? You know, people figure out where the—how to make an American doll factory? Like, none of that seems realistic to you? Gimbel: No, it doesn't. And you know, first of all, you have to think about trade-offs here. So sure, if you do the tariffs, it is likely that some manufacturing jobs come back to the United States. That is absolutely the case. You are almost certainly going to lose a ton of construction jobs—just as an example, just in that one sector—because construction relies on a lot of inputs from abroad, and if those become much, much more expensive, they're not gonna build as much, and people are going to lose jobs. And so you have this focus on this one specific, relatively small part of the economy, and you're gonna ding the rest of the economy for that one small sector. And even within that sector, right, there are gonna be some manufacturers—as we were discussing before—who are going to suffer because they rely on inputs from abroad. And so what you're going to do is have a very, very expensive way of creating relatively few jobs in small industries, but everyone else loses. Rosin: Who do you think is gonna be hurt the most in the next year or two? Gimbel: You know, as we were discussing earlier, you know, as a share of income, this is gonna hit lower-income people harder. But the real answer is: everyone. This is going to hurt everyone. Everyone's going to be paying more money at the grocery store. They're going to be paying more money for children's clothes. Jobs are going to be lost. There will be impacts for the stock market. There are no wins here. This is not good. And I think because it seems so insane, people want to say or find some something that will be better because of this. And that's just very, very, very unlikely. Rosin: Well, Martha, I really don't relish ending an interview on no silver lining and no wins for anyone, but I think that's just the reality. So thank you for delivering us this medicine. I appreciate it. Gimbel: Anytime. Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's I'm Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
08-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
How Much Would You Pay for That Doll?
When President Donald Trump mused that 'maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know?' it wasn't a deeply developed critique of late capitalism, or a sly nod to Weberian asceticism. Still, for those of us who'd been hoarding items in a Temu shopping cart, it did raise some important philosophical questions: Is a car vacuum necessary? How many baseball hats can you stack? How many dolls is too many? Once again, Trump reached into our guilty, greedy, modern hearts and dug out the nostalgia for a simpler time when we were content with less. But also, once again, he skipped over the dirty details. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with a doll manufacturer and a policy analyst about tariffs and Americans' relationship with choice. Elenor Mak, the founder of Jilly Bing, talks about her dream of giving Asian American kids the choice of having a doll that looks like them, and how the new tariffs might kill it. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab at Yale discusses who would actually be hurt by the tariffs, and the choices they take away—and what you could actually do if you wanted to shift American consumer behavior. The following is a transcript of the episode: Hanna Rosin: Last week, at a Cabinet meeting, while answering a question about tariffs, President Donald Trump mentioned dolls. President Donald Trump: Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally. [ Music ] Rosin: Now, this wasn't any deep social commentary, just an offhand statement. But it did get me thinking about how kids today—including my own— do have a million dolls versus, say, when I was a kid. Rosin: Do you remember your first doll? Elenor Mak: Oh, of course. My first doll was Ada. I took Ada with me everywhere: to the park, to dim sum. I tried to bring her to school. But I also remember she was beautiful in a way that I felt I never could be. Rosin: This is Elenor Mak. Mak: She had these beautiful blond curls. She had big blue eyes. She had that porcelain skin. And even then—I think I was somewhere [around] 5 or 6 years old—I remember thinking, I wish I looked like Ada. Rosin: When Elenor was a kid, like when I was a kid, what she didn't have was that much choice. But even after Elenor grew up and had her own kids, the options were still pretty meh. There were basically blond dolls, some brunettes, and some that Elenor describes as 'vaguely Asian.' Mak: You're not really sure what they're supposed to be. And the only reason I knew some of these dolls were intended to be Asian was because they had a name like Ling, or they were holding panda bears or had a really bad haircut and— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: —you know, like that bowl cut my mom did give me. But as an Asian American mother, I don't relate to any of that. Rosin: So when Elenor had her daughter, she did not want her to have the bowl-cut model. She wanted a doll that her child could actually relate to. So Elenor did the thing that most people do not do— Mak: Oh, of course. Rosin: She started a company to make her own dolls. It's called Jilly Bing, partly named after her daughter, Jillian. Mak: Jillian is now 5, Jilly Jillian. Rosin: She wanted to create them in the U.S., but she couldn't find a doll manufacturer here who could do it. Mak: Every lead led to the same thing, which is: They've closed. They no longer create dolls. Rosin: So Elenor looked outside the U.S. and found a factory in China that she developed a close relationship with. Mak: Doll manufacturing is a heavily manual process. The rooting of every doll's hair is done manually. Rosin: Wow. Mak: They would weigh the hair to make sure there's consistency. And someone would free-form, like, sew it, putting it through the sewing machine until the doll's head was fully rooted. There is tremendous precision required. Someone is manually placing these tiny little dolls' head[s], right? So my doll is 14 inches. So the head, I'm guessing it's two to three inches. So someone is manually putting this onto the assembly line, which then they stamp the eyes and the blush. And even if it's just, like, one-one-hundredth off, that doll suddenly, like—I have some Jilly dolls that look like Party Jilly because her eyeliner is like— Rosin: (Laughs.) Mak: I saved those. I saved those—a special edition. But the eyeliner's just a little bit off, and suddenly it's like, Okay. This is not the adorable, you know, wholesome — Rosin: Jilly was out late last night. Mak: I call her the Party Jilly. [ Music ] Rosin: Things were going okay for Elenor. She got some good press in places like CBS— Anchor: Elenor Mak, good morning. Rosin: —and the Today show. Rosin: But then came the tariffs. Anchor: Just in the last few moments, the BBC has confirmed that U.S. tariffs against China add up to 145 percent— Mak: My husband texted me. I remember him saying, Have you seen the tariffs? And I was like, What are you talking about? My head spun. Anchor: —that is including the existing 20 percent tariffs that were already imposed on the country at the beginning of the year. Mak: Our doll retails for $68, so that is considered a premium doll already. To think that I would charge $150-plus for this doll—it was like putting a nail to the coffin of our business. [ Music ] Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I'm Hanna Rosin. Tariffs are no longer an abstraction. They are showing up in shopping carts—supermarket and virtual. And they are forcing a lot of Americans to reckon with a way of living we've taken for granted—products get made cheaply somewhere else, giving us an abundance of choice over here. We'll talk more later about how tariffs have the potential to change American culture, but first: the Jilly Bing emergency—what tariffs look like from the side of the American producer who is determined to give us more choice. Before the most restrictive tariffs on China went into place last month, Elenor Mak was already in emergency mode. A factory she'd developed a good relationship with announced they had plans to close—totally unrelated to the impending trade war. So like every good entrepreneur, Elenor hustled. Mak: And that whole process nearly broke us—just really kind of rushing inventory in and starting work with a new factory—and I thought that was gonna be the worst of it. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: So when the tariff announcement came, it was almost like, Wow. It just felt debilitating. Rosin: And when you heard about the tariffs, did you immediately go into action? Like, call the staff, sit back of the envelope, figure it all out? Did you call people? How did you move through that process? Mak: Yeah. I think there was a part of—you know, speaking to a lot of founders who are also in consumer-products sourcing from China, Vietnam—I think a lot of us just said, This can't be. This won't pass. This is a political move. This won't actually go through. So I think it was disbelief. But there was also a need to start actioning, right? Calling our factory, calling the freight forwarders, trying to understand what the impact was. And I would say it was just chaos. No one really knew, right? There was speculation: This is what it could look like, or, If you get it in by this date. But [at] the end of the day, there was this risk that by the time our imports came in, we would be hit with this 145 percent price increase. Rosin: So the decision—I understand. So the decision is even about putting in orders because you don't know what's going to happen at the back end. It's about the uncertainty because you just can't predict the entire process. You can't predict it from beginning to end, so you could be stuck with this inventory that you then have to pay so much more for. Mak: Absolutely. So for me, you know, now that you're—I'm walking down memory lane: We were about to sign a purchase order, right? So April—and then that way we would get the goods in by sort of August, September, right before the holidays, to have it arrive into our warehouse. But once we sign that purchase order, that becomes binding. And then, you know, once it arrives in the port, whatever the prices are, I am responsible for that. So for me, the decision was to not issue that purchase order. Rosin: I see. Okay. So it's April; you've got a decision to make. So I see why you had to do this really quickly. Numbers are going through your head, like, How much more is this gonna cost? Everything that you mentioned. But on the other side of it is your company, this thing that you've built that's very personal. So how did you weigh all that? Mak: I think it was pure exhaustion. It was a feeling of, Oh my gosh, how many more of these boulders coming downhill can this small business [take]? Right? It's largely me who was full-time on the business, and I think just from a mental capacity, I was burned-out. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: And to think about, you know, signing that PO, waiting for my shipment to come in, and holding my breath until it arrived at the port to figure out what the price could look like, it was just, I think, more than I could bear. And I was devastated, right? Because I think for us, you know, it was always about giving more families choices. I think one thing I wanted to share is: This doll is meant to be Asian American. And our doll has brought joy to a lot of kids and adults, and it was devastating to think this could end if I'm forced out of business. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Mak: But for me, in the short term, we have inventory, we have the silver lining, and I can ride this out for some time. But that inventory also will not last forever. Rosin: You know what? I don't know that I have a good sense of—maybe this is just how entrepreneurs are. I don't know that I have a good sense of whether you—do you think you'll weather this? I can't tell. Like, how realistic a hope is that? Mak: I can only weather this if the policies change in the next year. And so as an entrepreneur, I think, I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic. But I'm also practical when I look at my numbers, when I see my inventory, you know, the trends. So yeah, maybe that's why you're not—it's like a part of me is optimistic things will sort itself out before my sort of self-imposed deadline of when we would need to place a PO comes out. Rosin: So before the last doll is out of your house or wherever you keep the dolls, things have to shift politically. Mak: Yes, because with the current tariffs, there's just—I cannot survive. [ Music ] Rosin: That was Elenor Mak, founder of the doll company Jilly Bing. After the break, the other side of the equation: Us, the consumers—our coffee, our toasters, our cars, our assumption that all things are available to us instantly. That's in a moment. [ Break ] Gimbel: My name is Martha Gimbel. I'm the executive director of the Budget Lab at Yale, which is a nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the impacts of federal economic policies. Rosin: So Martha, I know the Budget Lab has been busy tallying up how Trump's tariffs are going to change the prices of all kinds of goods for Americans. I myself am thinking about the long term, like how our consumer culture around cheap products might change. But first I want to talk about some specifics. We just talked to an independent doll manufacturer, so want to use that industry as an example. Say it's my kid's birthday coming up, and I want to buy them a doll. What is the landscape I'm looking at? Gimbel: It's not ideal, I think is the technical term, you know? We just don't produce that many toys in the United States anymore. And, you know, I think people sometimes get a little bit itchy about that, and they think, Oh, we should be making things in the good old USA. But that makes things much more expensive, and it also means that if you're making toys, you can't do other types of jobs, which may be more highly compensated. Rosin: Right. And just to dig in, let's say you have to buy a toy in three months— like, are we talking twice as much? Like, do you have any projections? Since I know this is what you guys do. Like, how much more expensive would I expect it to be? Gimbel: So it depends a little bit on where specifically the toy is made, how much the producer of the toy was able to get inventory into the country ahead of time, how much they feel they can try to pass the price onto their consumers, etcetera. Just as an example, we think that in the short run, rubber and plastic products overall—so obviously, a lot of dolls are made out of plastic—will increase their prices by about 22 percent. But obviously, given the tariffs on China, if something's entirely made in China, it will likely increase by much, much more. Rosin: Yeah, so for weeks now, we've been warned that we should expect prices of certain goods mostly made in other countries to go up, like rice, toasters, coffee, I mean, plastic goods, like you just said. Can you project overall how much a household budget of an average American family is likely to go up? Gimbel: Yeah, so we find that we think that, you know, on average, households will pay about $5,000 more a year. Rosin: Wait—$5,000? That's actually a lot. Gimbel: It's a lot of money. You know, most people can't easily absorb that in their household budgets, right? If you say to people, all of a sudden, To consume what you consumed last year, that's gonna cost you $5,000 more, that makes people a little bit itchy, understandably. One thing I should say is that as a share of income, it is a higher percent increase for households at the bottom. And that is because poor households tend to spend more of their income on goods, right? If you are a lower-income household, you are spending much more as a share of your income on shoes for your kids, food, things like that. Whereas higher-income households may be buying vacations, which are not tariffed. Rosin: Right. Are there some surprises that Americans might have in store? Like, things that you found are likely to go up way more than we expect? Things that I maybe don't even associate with China or know are made in China? Gimbel: To some extent, a lot of this is quote-unquote 'obvious,' right? We are expecting the big hit to be on clothing, for example. I think a lot of people realize that their clothes are not made in the United States. I think the thing that is going to be harder for people is: Even things that are made in the United States may buy inputs from abroad, right? So just because you've made the effort to find something that is produced in the United States doesn't mean that they're not getting cotton, silk, wood—whatever it is—from outside the United States. Rosin: So when you look at the landscape, are you thinking very few things are exempt from this? Like, most things are gonna be more expensive? Gimbel: I mean, services, technically— Rosin: Yes? Gimbel: —should be exempt from tariffs. Although, we did just see the president announce that they're going to be tariffing movies. I'm not entirely sure how that would work. But, you know, in general, I think there are very few parts of the goods-producing economy that we are expecting not to be hit. And I think one thing that's important to keep in mind, right, is: Say that you are, by some miracle, a domestic producer who is totally insulated from this, right? You buy your fabric from a nice fabric producer down the road who gets everything in the United States, etcetera. Why would you not raise your prices, right? So all of your competitors have to raise their prices by, let's say, 10 percent in the face of tariffs. You can raise your prices by 8 percent, still get a lot of market share, and get the benefit of those higher prices. And so we do also expect even domestic producers to raise the prices. Rosin: Oh, okay. That I hadn't thought of. So everything—all prices get raised. I mean, that just makes economic sense. Like, you're just increasing your profits. Gimbel: Yeah, why not? I mean, in the face of tariffs, it really is one of those no-place-to-run, no-place-to-hide kind of thing[s] for the consumer. Rosin: I want to talk about the problems President Trump says he's trying to solve with tariffs, because he talks about how short-term pain is worth it for the long-term gain, and that we'll see factories reopening in America. What do you make of this conversation we've been having for decades now about manufacturing shifting overseas? Gimbel: You know, I think that there is a lot of nostalgia for manufacturing. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Gimbel: I think one of the things that I find really bizarre about this entire conversation is that the United States is this incredibly rich country. And yes, to be clear: There were, you know, jobs lost in response to the 'China Shock,' in response to automation. But even so, if you can think about which country in the world has one of the strongest economies, most vibrant economies, where you can succeed, it's the United States. Other countries want to be us. They are trying to make their economies more like our economy. Why are we trying to be like other countries? Rosin: I see. So you are seeing it as a positive evolution away from manufacturing, so it's hard to understand what the nostalgia for manufacturing is. Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, in 1902, we all used to work in farms, right? And you know, yes, there are people still in the United States who work in farms today. A lot of their work looks very different than it did in 1902. And those jobs were really, really hard, and we've evolved to a version of the United States where we get to buy goods produced cheaply by other people who do really, you know, physically painful work, and we get to provide services and be paid—in the realm of the world—a pretty high wage for that. That seems like a really good deal to me. Rosin: Interesting. Do you think that that's a perspective from an expert looking on high and doesn't take into account people's feelings about service work or people's connection to factories or, you know, all these kinds of things that Trump talks about? The things that people are missing? Because it sounds so easy when you say it. Gimbel: I mean, I want to be very clear: Economists are not always great about people's emotions. And so I do not want to deny that. It is also the case, right, that there are people who used to work in manufacturing who have lost those jobs [and] have found it relatively hard to adjust to the new economy. And I do not want to dismiss the pain that those people have experienced, and it's been very acute pain for those specific people. For our overall economy, though, the shift to services has been really, really positive. And so I think there's a couple of things that kind of all get jumbled together here. Some is the specific, acute pain that the people who were not winners from the shift to a services economy have felt. And the other is a desire for what is seen as, like, a more old-fashioned version of America, and people are using manufacturing as some kind of proxy for that. I don't want to come across as if I'm like, There are no problems here. You know, the hollowing out of the middle class has been a real issue. But I think it's really important not to accept the premise that the problem is that manufacturing moved to China. Rosin: Right. I see. The problem is way more complicated than that. And from someone like you who looks at the big picture of the economy, it feels like an evolution, and it's a little confusing why we would want to undo it. Gimbel: Yeah, I mean, there are things that you can do to fix the economy, make it more equal, make people feel like they have more opportunities, etcetera. Putting giant tariffs on China in an attempt to bring back jobs that are legitimately hard and relatively low-paid jobs to the United States is not going to end the way I think a lot of people want it to. Rosin: Okay. Here's another big question: Americans are, in fact, used to cheap prices and infinite options. Is that fair to say? Gimbel: Yeah. I mean, we love cheap prices, and we love being able to just pop over to the store and pick whatever doll out we want for our kids. Rosin: Oh, it's funny you should mention dolls. So Trump did make the statement about dolls: Kids could have two instead of 30. And I am not pretending that Trump was making some kind of well-developed policy statement, but it is a diagnosis that people on all sides of the political spectrum have also made over the years. So what do you think about that sentiment in the context of this tariff-heavy moment? Gimbel: I mean, look—we can have a cultural conversation about: Do we have too much stuff? That is different than the economic conversation of, like, Should the government be putting strictures in place such that it makes it hard for people to buy the stuff that they want? I think one of the things that's been sort of confusing to people is that the Trump administration has started to say some of these things that sound a little bit, you know, for lack of better phrasing, central plannery, which is not something people have traditionally associated with government in the United States, much less the Republican Party. And so it'll be interesting to see how the American public responds to that. You know, I think on the 'Do we all have too much stuff?' thing, I think, again, it is easy to be nostalgic for, you know, quote-unquote 'a simpler time.' And my version of the story is that, you know, I had an Easter-egg hunt for my daughter and, you know, other small children a few weeks ago, and my mother and I were out there in the morning scattering plastic eggs. If any small children are listening to this, the Easter Egg Bunny was scattering the eggs. Rosin: (Laughs.) Gimbel: And my mother said, you know, When I was a child, we didn't have this. My mother dyed literal eggs and hid them in the backyard, and then we hunted for eggs, and we hoped we found all of them, because otherwise it smelled terrible. Rosin: Yeah. Gimbel: And, you know, I think there's just a lot of things like that that we just don't think about, like: Do the children need plastic eggs? No, they'll be fine. They'll survive. Is it kind of nice? Yeah, it is. Rosin: That's an excellent example. I totally see what you're saying by 'central plannery.' I got that concept immediately. It's, like, shifting culture from the pulpit, as it were. But why not go back to dyeing eggs? Like, don't you need to be forced into artificial scarcity? Like, is there a universe in which higher tariffs do have a potential to shift consumer habits and maybe help out this addiction to cheap? Because we all know that the addiction to cheap encourages bad labor practices and pollution all over the world. So it is a big problem that's hard to shift. Gimbel: You know, if there's something that you think is bad, you can tax it, right? So, you know, this is one thing that economists are in favor of but almost no one else likes, is a carbon tax where you put taxes on the amount of carbon that it takes to produce something, because there are externalities to that. The thing about tariffs, right, is they're just, like, a blunt, inefficient tool. So maybe there are things that are—just to stick with the carbon example—you know, very high-carbon intensive that are being produced that we're happening to hit with tariffs. But we're also hitting bananas. Why are we tariffing bananas? We can't grow bananas in the United States, certainly not at scale. Why are we tariffing coffee? None of this makes any sense. Rosin: I see. So it's just too crude an instrument. Gimbel: Yeah, we're just—we're hitting everything, rather than trying to think about: What is the behavior that we are actually trying to do here? Are there things we are trying to disincentivize? Is there revenue we're trying to raise? Is this the most efficient way to raise revenue? And we're just saying: Everybody's tariffed. We don't like it when we buy things from other people. And that's where we are. Rosin: Right. Right. So there isn't any intentionality. If you wanted to shift consumer culture, improve the environment, you would be doing it in an entirely different and more targeted way. Gimbel: Yes. I mean, I will say: I'm a little itchy on, you know, using taxes or, you know, economic incentives to shift culture. I think that's a broader conversation. But there are places where, you know, there is behavior that has spillover effects—like carbon—to society and the economy. And we do think about taxing those kinds of things, but we are taxing that specifically, rather than just a broad, everything's-gonna-hurt-now approach. Rosin: Right. Like, the very obvious example is: higher gas prices, less driving, like what they do in Europe. Can you see any scenario where this all unfolds in the way Trump imagines, which is short-term pain for long-term gain? Gimbel: No. Rosin: No scenario in which, like, the American manufacturing—more things are manufactured in the U.S.? You know, people figure out where the—how to make an American doll factory? Like, none of that seems realistic to you? Gimbel: No, it doesn't. And you know, first of all, you have to think about trade-offs here. So sure, if you do the tariffs, it is likely that some manufacturing jobs come back to the United States. That is absolutely the case. You are almost certainly going to lose a ton of construction jobs—just as an example, just in that one sector—because construction relies on a lot of inputs from abroad, and if those become much, much more expensive, they're not gonna build as much, and people are going to lose jobs. And so you have this focus on this one specific, relatively small part of the economy, and you're gonna ding the rest of the economy for that one small sector. And even within that sector, right, there are gonna be some manufacturers—as we were discussing before—who are going to suffer because they rely on inputs from abroad. And so what you're going to do is have a very, very expensive way of creating relatively few jobs in small industries, but everyone else loses. Rosin: Who do you think is gonna be hurt the most in the next year or two? Gimbel: You know, as we were discussing earlier, you know, as a share of income, this is gonna hit lower-income people harder. But the real answer is: everyone. This is going to hurt everyone. Everyone's going to be paying more money at the grocery store. They're going to be paying more money for children's clothes. Jobs are going to be lost. There will be impacts for the stock market. There are no wins here. This is not good. And I think because it seems so insane, people want to say or find some something that will be better because of this. And that's just very, very, very unlikely. Rosin: Well, Martha, I really don't relish ending an interview on no silver lining and no wins for anyone, but I think that's just the reality. So thank you for delivering us this medicine. I appreciate it. Gimbel: Anytime. Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Kevin Townsend and Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sara Krolewski. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Four Brands to Fire Up for 420
Sunday isn't just about bunnies and egg hunts this year! The celebratory weed enthusiast "holiday" known as 420, and Easter are on the same date this year— something that hasn't occurred since 2014. Since legalization in 2018, Los Angeles has recognized the value of (high)lighting this thriving industry, especially local purveyors, companies who give back to their communities and those who innovate within the space. Plus, the research is fun. Here are four brands and new products (available in or from California) to try this 420, plus two honorable mentions to really make it a celebration. Thematic packaging and branding partnerships make Jeeter stand out from the pot pack. We loved getting their Dodgers-themed preroll boxset in the mail at the start of MLB season, a set which celebrates our local champions past wins, aka their "Journey of Glory." The brand also offers celebratory Dodger Blue apparel. For 4/20, they unveiled a host of new products, also blue-hued. Their "Clouded" quad-infused pre-roll line features Rosin concentrate (made from pressing flower between two heated plates to squeeze the resinous oil out of the trichome), which promises a more full-spectrum effect. It's also available in vapes. Timeless, known for quality vape products, is quickly making its mark on the infused pre-roll market via its Tumble line, which just came to California last month. A top-performing brand in Arizona and Missouri, the indoor flower infused products offer THCA diamonds, which bring big flavor and long lasting potency. Each joint is geared towards a different mindset. "Rise" is a Sativa strain cultivated to spark creativity and motion; "Flow" is a hybrid meant to offer a balance of both energy and relaxation, allowing smokers to feel uplifted and engaged; and "Drift," an Indica dominant strain, is made for unwinding, rest and de-stressing. Speaking of packaging, KOA Cannabis company offers some of the coolest out there. Their mini pre-roll smokes feature live resin and top-shelf indoor flower (with above 35% THC for maximum high). They also come in arty, limited-edition collectible tins, each featuring Koa the sloth, the brand's adorable mascot. Designed to reuse as a pillbox or container for your own hand-rolled goodies later, they are very collectable and super cute. The sloth imagery suggests a play on the stereotype that pot lovers are slow-moving, but it's really about a love for the animal. The owners, who are L.A. based, have a Sloth Conservation Foundation, focused on a commitment to preserving nature and rescuing these unique creatures from the threat of extinction. Since 2018, Sauce has sought to innovate with its colorful cannabis products, like their purple Dream Pen CBN vapes (specifically made for bedtime and sleep), infused pre-rolls and "Burst" gummies. Now in California, the brand's range of products continues to grow with new flavors (White Widow and Platinum Rose) and a rainbow of vibrant vapes. Check out their new Strawberry Cough "shorties"— strong Sativa minis with a fruity yet skunky aroma and a euphorically cerebral high. Honorable Mentions (2): With 5mg THC per 1.5oz serving, this new, just launched canna-cocktail brand promises a light buzz with a refreshing fruity flavor, great as a mixer or alone Blazy SusanThe "High Roller Club" box by this cannabis accessory company has everything you need to turn a smoking session into a special event, with a grinder, tray, rolling papers and cones, games and other amusements.
Yahoo
10-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump Didn't Actually Undo Tariffs
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts Perhaps yesterday you went for a walk at lunchtime and fretted about your 401(k). President Donald Trump had announced record-high tariffs on dozens of countries. Stocks had been tanking for days. You already had to look up the meaning of stagflation (high unemployment plus high inflation, yikes). And that morning had brought more dismal news: Investors were rapidly pulling out of bond markets. Bond markets! The safe zone! The place your overanxious mother would tell you to park your money! Then maybe you got back from your walk, checked the news, and saw the headlines that Trump had 'paused' the tariffs or 'reversed course'—for everywhere except China, whose exports were now taxed at 125 percent. What does this mean? Is the economy stable again? Is your 401(k) safe? Is anything still predictable? To help us understand the extraordinary volatility of the past few weeks, we invite Justin Wolfers, economist at the University of Michigan, to speak with us on the latest episode of Radio Rosin: Was today real? Honestly, today just seemed like an unreal day. Truly. Justin Wolfers: Was this week real? Rosin: Was this week real? Exactly. Wolfers: What day's today, Hanna? It's Wednesday. Rosin: It's only Wednesday. Wolfers: Okay. So in 11 minutes we will have been at this for seven days in a row. Rosin: Yeah. Yeah. What's 'this'? Wolfers: The confused mumblings of an old man who didn't do very well in his college economics course. Rosin: Are you talking about the president? Wolfers: I might be. [] Rosin: Okay. In one single day this week—I'm talking about Wednesday, yesterday—two extraordinary things happened: In the morning, we woke up to the news that investors had started rapidly selling off U.S. bonds, which worried economists because U.S. bonds are the safe haven, and it's a very bad sign for the U.S. economy if investors no longer trust the safe haven. And then, midday, Donald Trump made the announcement that he was gonna reverse course on tariffs. Sort of. We'll get into it. President Donald Trump: Well, I thought that people were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know? A little bit yippy, a little bit afraid … Rosin: Which, around lunchtime, caused the second extraordinary thing: The stock market surged. Had one of its biggest single-day jumps in history. What is happening? [] I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. We are living in a world in which the president makes decisions with enormous global consequences and then unmakes them 24 hours later. So today we are going to try and get a handle on all this volatility. Is it over? Are we still in it? Wolfers: Yep. Do we still need to do levels or any of that magic? Rosin: To help us, we have University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers. Wolfers: It's been crazy, but that's all of us, right? Rosin: Okay. I'm just gonna tell you my experience of the day: It's Wednesday afternoon—that's when we're recording. I feel like what happened today for a lot of people who track the news: You go to lunch. You're worried about tariffs. You're worried about what's gonna happen. You come back from lunch, and it's like, Trump backs down, pauses tariffs for 90 days. Is that what happened to you today? Wolfers: Yeah. Actually, I was in my home office, and I suddenly heard this enormous belly laugh coming from downstairs. Rosin: Your wife? Wolfers: My better half, Betsey Stevenson, is also an economics professor, and she saw the humor in it. And it's kind of stunning. But we've seen this movie before, and that's what's so funny. This is what Trump did in the first term to NAFTA. The United States had a free-trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. Basically you'd had President Clinton and the leaders of Canada and Mexico get in the room and negotiate that there would be zero tariffs on everything. But each leader was allowed a couple of little asterisks because there were a few politically sensitive groups in each country. Trump comes along, rips the whole thing up, and says, I need a better deal. Now, just to be crystal clear, it's very hard to get tariffs below—they were effectively zero percent before. It's very hard to get them below zero percent. So he caused a trade war with Canada in the first term. And then basically came back with what we would say is a rebranded NAFTA. For all intents and purposes, it's exactly the same, and he declares a win. What just happened? He launched us headlong into a trade war with every country on Earth. Now says, Oh, they all wanna negotiate. Now, here's the really important thing to understand, Hanna: Almost every country on Earth had very low tariffs as of last Tuesday. Like, 1 or 2 percent because governments all around the world have been liberalizing trade for decades now. There really aren't many tariffs out there. That matters because if the next act of this play is the president just threatens to blow the world up and then everyone calls him and says, Let's make a deal, the best they can do is restore back to where we were on Tuesday. Rosin: So we've just gone around the world and come back to where we were. Is that what you're saying? Wolfers: I think that's the end game. That's not where we are right now. So here, I wanna be crystal clear. Everyone saw the president's announcement: Oh my goodness. He's getting rid of reciprocal tariffs. But he's not. For one of our most important trading partners, China, tariffs are now up to 125 percent, and for every country around the world, they're 10 percent, which means there's been no change for many countries. But some of the worst excesses of what he announced before have gone away. We are still in the midst of tariff-mageddon. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: And we're still in the midst of an incredibly disruptive tariff regime. The American average tariff rate today will be 10 times higher than it was in January. It will be roughly as high, possibly higher, than the Smoot-Hawley tariffs during the Great Depression. It will be 10 and sometimes 20 times higher than most of our trading partners, and the United States probably has no longer got the highest tariffs in the world, something we had this morning, but we will have the highest tariffs in the industrialized world. So among advanced economies—and it's not even close. Rosin: Got it. So what you are saying, what I understand you to be saying, is: crisis not averted. He reset our expectations in the course of that week to some absurd level and then lowered them back to what is still too dangerously high a level. Wolfers: Yes. Now, you might then say, 'cause I know that you love to track financial markets minute-by-minute. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: If we only got rid of a quarter of the tariffs, why did stocks soar on the news? And I think what's happened is there's been two sets of shocks over the last week. One shock is a shock to tariffs. They rose enormously. The second shock is we thought, for most of the last seven days, we'd learned how profoundly incompetent this administration was, and that the president was willing to look down the barrel of a recession and say, Let's just keep going. And that there were no adults in the White House. This was a rollout that was laughably awful from start to finish. Rosin: Now there was speculation that it was because of the bond market that he backed down. Can you explain what the bond market is and why it's important? Wolfers: Okay, so let me get to other speculations first, 'cause they may be bigger. Rosin: Okay, go ahead. Wolfers: The first is: The chances of recession skyrocketed. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: We were—are, still are—looking straight down the barrel of a recession in 2025. That would wipe out the Republican House. I think that has a lot of people freaking out—and they should, because recessions are really, really, really bad. The second thing you saw was every time Trump moved towards tariffs, stocks fell dramatically. Every time he backed off, they rose. He'd knocked off roughly $6 trillion from the value of the U.S. stock market in the week he was going—actually might be more, so it might be a trillion a day. So realize that when Elon Musk was saving us with DOGE, he was like, saving 1 billion here, 1 billion there. This was a thousand billion every day. So that is causing a lot of pain, particularly to the Republican donor class. And then you asked about the bond market. So things started to go crazy in bonds. So what is a bond? Well, when I go to the bank and put money in the bank, it might not feel this way, but what I'm doing is lending money to the bank. It has my money for a while, it can use it, and it'll give it back to me when I want it back. That's how it works for you and I. But if you want to borrow money or lend money and you're a big corporation, what you do is to lend money to a corporation, you sell them bonds. And to borrow money, if you're a corporation, you buy bonds, and what a bond is, is you say, Hey, can I have your money and I'll give it back to you in 10 years with interest. U.S. government bonds—that's how we fund the government debt—typically regarded as the safest asset in the world because the U.S. government is in charge of an amazing economy and we'd never screw things up. Rosin: And safe is the important word here. Like, an investment advisor would tell you, Do you wanna be safe? Do you wanna rest easy? Safety, it's our safe space. Wolfers: It's the only thing safer than money under the mattress. Rosin:. Yes. Right. Wolfers: So, because it's safe, people are willing to lend money to the U.S. government at a low interest rate. And that actually saves all of us tons of money. 'cause the U.S. government owes a lot of money. Just, if you've ever seen your family mortgage and thought about What would it be if the interest rate changed a little? You'll see it makes a huge difference to your family's finances. That's the same for bond yields. So what happened over the past couple of days is bond yields—so interest rates—spiked. What normally happens when the world's in chaos is the opposite, because everyone's worried, Oh my goodness, there's chaos. Let me go and buy the safe thing. Let me hide it under the covers. So how do you make sense of all of this? This is essentially the rest of the world saying, If I wanna be safe, I don't want to be associated with America. Rosin: Right. So the volatility, such as it is already so far, has made America a less predictable place, made the foreign investors' appetite dip. Wolfers: And domestic investors, too. Rosin: Yeah. Okay. Wolfers: And lest the bond market feel distant from listeners' lives— Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: —we do, just like your family pays on a mortgage, the federal government has to pay interest on its debt, and it's one of the biggest expenses in the federal budget. And so when the interest rate rises, we have to pay more, which means there's less money for roads and schools and tax cuts, if that's what—it's real money. Rosin: Yeah. So Justin, everything you just said, the cycle of events you just described, actually could make one feel safer because it suggests that what seemed chaotic, unpredictable, capricious is actually responding to real-world inputs. So if I'm a business owner and I'm trying to make decisions about sourcing or investments or whatever, you know, am I feeling like, Oh, the future is predictable. The president actually does respond to changes in the market when, when it gets really serious? Wolfers: Right, so one, you should feel a little bit more relieved than you felt this morning. But this morning, what we had was a madman raising tariffs so that we had the highest tariffs in the world, essentially cutting Americans off, imposing sanctions on Americans. Cutting us off from the global economy, even as recession threats were rising, and saying, I'm gonna stay the course. So it's good that at some point the guy's persuadable. That is an enormous relief. It is terrible that we just had the week we had. It's awful that three-quarters of the tariffs are still in place and the stock market is still well below where it was when he was elected. And it's not just that I care about your 401(k), but that stock market is essentially a bet on the future of the American economy. And people are betting we're less healthy than we were a week ago and certainly less healthy than we were on Election Day. And there's one more thing I wanna scare you about. Rosin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wolfers: So here's the cycle from the first term: Trump does something dumb, markets react, Trump listens, markets go back to normal. We just saw that play out again this week. But if what happens next time is: Trump does something dumb; markets think he's going to react and undo it, so they don't bother freaking out. If they don't bother freaking out, he's not gonna undo it. Rosin: Does anyone stand to gain from this kind of volatility? You know, he did tweet, This is a great time to buy, and some people speculated he was setting a sign to followers before juicing the market again. That's maybe paranoid, I don't know. Wolfers: No, it's not. It's before the announcement. Rosin: Okay. So you don't think it's paranoid? Yeah. Wolfers: This is corrupt on its face. This is saying, You want to time the market, you watch me, you look at me, you listen to me. It would land anyone else in jail. Rosin: After the break, how this might affect the chances of a recession for all of us—or the thing economists fear the most: stagflation. [] Rosin: So we've been through a couple of recessions, near recessions: 2008, the pandemic. The words that economists are using—depression and stagflation—why? What's the likelihood of those? How do you think about those? Wolfers: Right. So what we're worried about is a recession. None of us are quite sure how deep it might be. The good news, for those looking for the silver lining, is it's crystal clear. We've got the early data from the first quarter of the Trump administration, and all the data from the last quarter of the Biden administration: It's crystal clear that the economy's in very good shape fundamentally. So we are hitting whatever this cavalcade of bad news is with a lot of momentum. But the extent to which the president has undermined confidence is quite dramatic. What we have at the moment is what economists call a split between the hard data and the soft data. Soft data is when you ask people, Are you optimistic? Do you plan to make investments? Do you think unemployment's gonna rise or fall? And when you look at those numbers, they're terrible. They're all at recession levels. Rosin: That's because of everything you've talked about: trust—people don't trust. It's unpredictability. You can't make decisions if you're in an unpredictable environment. Wolfers: Look, on January 1, there wasn't much to worry about. And on April 9, there's a lot to worry about. Rosin: Got it. Okay. That makes sense. That's the soft numbers. Wolfers: And everyone has understood that. Rosin: Got it. Wolfers: When you look at the hard numbers, like how many people have jobs, how much money they're spending—they're substantially stronger. They're actually quite good. Now, they're also a little more dated. We get the soft numbers before the hard numbers. So the question is Which of those two stories wins the day? So that's an ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession. What we're worried about now is actually something called stagflation, which is, if you like inflation and you like recessions, two great flavors together. We call it stagflation. Stag: stagnating output, stagnating labor markets. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: Flation: inflation. Rosin: So it's high unemployment and high inflation at the same time. Wolfers: Terrific, isn't it? Rosin: And why is that every economist's worst nightmare? Why is that the worst thing? Wolfers: Well, do you like one bad thing at a time or two? Rosin: Got it. It's just because it's the doubling of terrible outcomes. And it's hard to know how to control that. Wolfers: It's very hard to know what to do, because for Jay Powell and the Fed, normally if you've got unemployment, you'll lower interest rates. And if you've got inflation, you raise interest rates. Rosin: Right, right, right. Wolfers: So go to bed at night thinking to yourself, you're not running the Fed. Rosin: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You wouldn't have any levers to pull, you wouldn't know what to do, so you're stuck. Wolfers: Yes. Rosin: Okay. So we know what Americans are worried about. The investing advice is always Wait it out. Just wait it out. Is that actually good advice? Are there any safe havens? If I were a smart economist, would I be doing something totally different than what the average American is being told to do? Wolfers: Well, fortunately, if you invest in my new crypto coin, Justin Coin— Rosin: Justin Coin. Wolfers: —I can guarantee enormous— Rosin: You didn't even name it after Betsey. It's not even called Betsey Coin. Wolfers: You know Trump did Trump coin before he did Melania coin. Rosin: Okay, fair, fair, fair. Wolfers: So Betsey Coin's coming tomorrow, for those who want the complete set. Okay, so let me be clear about what I can say and what I can't. So I wanna start with what I can't say. Realize people in financial markets are paid a lot of money to keep track of what's going on. What that means is all of the madness from earlier today is already priced in. So coming in later this afternoon and saying, Well, now that he's backing off the tariffs a bit, I should buy stocks. No, they were a good buy before anyone else knew, but as soon as anyone knew, they were no longer a good buy. Rosin: Right. Wolfers: So that's the source of the usual argument, Don't try to time the market. It's too hard. If someone tells you that they know which way the market's going, the right answer is to never talk to them again. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: They're a grifter. Rosin: So you don't know either. Nobody knows. Wolfers: I don't know either. What I do know is that we live in dangerous times. Rosin: Mm-hmm. Wolfers: If you don't have the stomach for that, then you wanna pull the money and put it, you know, in a low-interest savings account. Now, should you have the stomach for it? You know, here's some good news: When risk is high, it's usually paired with high reward. Rosin: Okay. A last thing: Let's say you're not in the stock market at all. Is there any downside to what's happening right now? Wolfers: Is there any downside? Yes. Rosin: You could be unemployed. Wolfers: The economy's on the cusp of recession. Currently, betting markets say it's a 53 percent chance of recession this year. I don't care about the stock market based on it being rich people's wealth. But the stock market is two things. It's rich people's investments, and it's also a betting market on the future of the economy. So when stocks are down, that's telling you very, very smart people in very fancy suits, running very complicated computer models who ring up all the world's data are less optimistic about the future of American business. Rosin: And that's gonna trickle down to you, whoever you are. Wolfers: That is going to affect your income, your unemployment, the inflation rate, the interest rates you pay, on and on. And so that—it's just that it's a signal of how the economy is going to affect your life. Now, it's true that the stock market is not the economy. That's an old expression people use. So you shouldn't take what I said too far, but to the extent that the Trump tariffs are meant to have any positive effects on America, they're meant to boost American businesses and then all the positive effects on you and I are downstream of that. So the fact that they have actually undermined the stock value of American businesses tells you that the overall effect of the Trump tariffs is going to be negative. Rosin: Although Trump would say that's just not yet, but you know, I know what you mean. Wolfers: You mean Trump would say that he understands the true value of American business and the stock market doesn't? Rosin: Better than you do? Yeah. Wolfers: Remember two minutes ago I said if someone ever says that to you? Rosin: Right, exactly. Exactly. Okay. I'm gonna summarize this conversation: It's a teeny, teeny bit better than it was a day ago, but we are definitely not out of crisis yet. Is that fair? Wolfers: Spot on. Rosin: Okay. Thanks, Justin. Wolfers: Wish I had happier news, Hanna. Rosin: That's okay. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's I'm Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Yahoo
03-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why Trump Wants to Control Universities
Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts A couple of years ago, conservative writer Christopher Rufo did a fellowship in Budapest, where upon his arrival, János Csák, Hungary's then-minister of culture and innovation, 'greeted me with a strong handshake,' Rufo later wrote in an essay about the trip. Hungary's population is not quite 10 million, and the country is among the poorest in the EU, yet Rufo believed it had something to teach the U.S. The two countries, according to Rufo, were beset by the same diseases: 'the fraying of national culture, entrenched left-wing institutions, and the rejection of sexual difference.' But unlike the U.S., Hungary had a plan. Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was using 'muscular state policy' to turn the culture back around. Among his major targets were Hungarian universities. In this episode, we talk with education writer Adam Harris, who believes that Rufo's essay can help explain the Trump administration's current attack on universities. Since Donald Trump has taken office, he has threatened to take back hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding for universities, and compiled lists of places that might not be in compliance, for various reasons. They failed to protect Jews on campus. They failed to protect women's sports. They use 'racial preferences and stereotypes' in their programs. Their aim, Harris suggests, is much the same as Orbán's—not just to dismantle the intellectual elite but also to build a new conservative one that better reflects their cultural Rosin: Universities are all of a sudden breaking news. Last week, a video went around showing a man in a navy hoodie approaching a woman in a long, white down coat. It was still pretty cold when the video was shot outside Boston, right near Tufts University. The woman backs away, the guy grabs her hands, and then a few more people approach her from behind. The woman's name is Rümeysa Öztürk, and she's a graduate student at Tufts University. The people approaching her are federal agents. They arrested her after the State Department revoked her student visa. [] Rosin: Just before that, ICE arrested Palestinian activist and Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. He'd been a leader of student protests. The administration said that amounted to supporting Hamas. News anchor: They claim his student visa was revoked. Rosin: Other students targeted for deportation. A fellow at Georgetown: also arrested. News anchor: —detained a grad student from India who was teaching at Georgetown University on a student visa. Rosin: Columbia was threatened with losing $400 million, and then they agreed to some demands. Harvard is now also under review for roughly $9 billion. There are dozens more universities on a list, suspected of using racial preferences or of 'forcing women to compete with men in sports.' President Donald Trump: Your population doesn't want men playing in women's sports, so you better comply because otherwise you're not getting any federal funding. Maine Gov. Janet Mills: See you in court. Trump: Every state—good. I'll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. [] Rosin: I'm Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. The administration tells one story about its attack on universities: that they're protecting students against anti-Semitism, protecting traditional women's sports, going after unfair racial preferences. But our guest on the show today says that is just what's on the surface. Adam Harris, who is a senior fellow at New America and who also covered education for The Atlantic, argues that the administration has a much more ambitious, grander plan. And it starts with a pilgrimage to Hungary. [] Rosin: Adam, welcome to the show. Adam Harris: Thanks for having me. Rosin: Sure. So Adam, about a year before Trump is elected, a conservative activist named Christopher Rufo decamps to Budapest, writes a dispatch called, 'Orbán's War,' referring, of course, to Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán. And it turns out to be kind of a road map in a surprising way for this moment, what we're seeing politically and particularly with universities. What is Rufo's argument in that essay? Harris: Yeah. He argues, effectively, that one of the more significant things and the thing that wasn't necessarily understood broadly at the time was the way that Orbán undertook this effort to sort of reshape institutions, both publicly and privately, to create a sort of conservative elite. Rosin: Okay. And this came, it seems like, as a revelation to conservative intellectuals—like, because Hungary is not an analogous country, but it seemed like a place that you would pilgrimage to learn things. So what was revelatory about this? Harris: Yeah. Well, Rufo says that they're facing some of the same issues that conservatives in the United States are, right? The sort of rejection, as he calls it, of sexual difference, the sort of liberal creep into the more general institutions. And Rufo really finds surprising the ways that Orbán was able to successfully combat that in his creation of that new sort of conservative elite in Hungary. Rosin: It's interesting because I think of conservatives in this moment of their ascendance as anti-intellectual. This is a slightly different view, where they're viewing the university as a source of a lot of decline—say, decline of Western civilization. So instead of ignoring it or pushing it away, it sounds like the vision in this essay is, No. Take it back. Harris: Yeah. It's sort of: Take it back. Bend it to your own means. Strengthen what they believe are the sort of cultural foundations, right? He talks about family life. He talks about Christian faith. He talks about historical memory. And what a lot of conservatives feel that they've lost is that control of historical memory, right? When you think about some of the history curriculums that have been attacked over the last several years, it has been because those curriculums are a sort of fundamental reassessment of the position of some of our most celebrated figures in American public life. Rosin: So it's actually incredibly ambitious. Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. We're only 60-some odd years into the idea of a multicultural democracy, since the Civil Rights Act. And a lot of people feel that we lost something when we moved into that era. And so effectively, some of this is trying to reclaim that visage of that sort of pastoral past that we lost. Rosin: Ah. Okay. Okay. I'm starting to understand how this fits more broadly into 'Make America Great' and what the attack on universities is actually about. So we haven't said yet: Who is Christopher Rufo, and how did these ideas start to spread? Harris: Yeah, so Christopher Rufo is a conservative activist who around 2020, not long after the murder of George Floyd, started looking into diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. And he started writing a bunch of blog posts and articles that really examined the DEI in several different areas. He would pool some of the most jarring examples and sort of use those as a way to indict the entire apparatus that has grown up out of the civil-rights movement. But by September of 2020, some of those articles, some of what he said on TV gets to President Trump during the end of his first term, and that really launches this broader interrogation that we've seen since then into diversity principles and sort of these ideas of equity. Rosin: Okay. So it's diversity principles, but it's also diversity principles as filtered through universities. Harris: Yes. Rosin: But it's essentially creating an intellectual road map of all these executive orders, these things that Trump is putting together—there is a grand idea behind them. Harris: Yes. There's a grand idea behind them. Rosin: And as Trump is elected and starting to pick his cabinet, you as an education expert, what did you notice? Like, what did you start to pay attention to in university news? Harris: Yeah. Well, around December, actually, there was a piece that came out in the Washington Examiner by a conservative education scholar, Max Eden, who argued that Linda McMahon could do a couple of things upon being confirmed as the education secretary in order to overhaul higher education and to ensure that institutions sort of got into line. And one of those things, he argued, was to take a 'prize scalp.' Rosin: A 'prize scalp.' Harris: A 'prize scalp,' and that's a quote-unquote. And he said that institution would be Columbia University, that the administration should go after Columbia as hard as it can. If Columbia did not comply, it should remove its Title IV funds. If Columbia did comply, then they should find another way or they could find another way to remove funding from the institution. And so when one of the first institutions to receive a big hit on their funding, $400 million, [was] Columbia, the first thing that came to my mind was, Oh, this is a part of the playbook that they talked about in December. Rosin: So how did Columbia fit into the playbook? Harris: Yeah. Well, over the last, you know, year and a half, really since October 7, when students started protesting the war in Gaza, Columbia has become the sort of poster child for the ways that higher education is doing things wrong, right? Rosin: Out of control. Harris: Out of control. You know, The student protestors are controlling the institution. The leadership doesn't really have a wrangle on its faculty. There were criticisms of the curriculum—all of these things. And Columbia and most Ivy League institutions aren't necessarily places where people are gonna jump to defend them, right? These are places that have multibillion-dollar endowments. When people say that they don't trust higher education, they don't mean their local community college. They don't mean the public regional down the road. They mean Harvard and Columbia because it seems like an unattainable place where the elites are developed anyway. And so over the last two years, really, you've seen these attacks on Columbia and how they've handled anti-Semitism on campus. Or you've seen attacks on Columbia and what they're teaching to students. And the imperfect plaintiff nature of Columbia makes it easier to say, Well, everyone has said you're not handling this well, so let's go ahead and remove your funding. And it would be one thing if they sort of stopped at Columbia. It would be one thing if they came into office, did a long investigation into what's going on—because that's typically what happens, right? As someone who's covered the education department for the last, you know, seven, eight years, anytime you have a Title VI investigation in cases of discrimination, those typically take months, if not years, to complete. And upon their completion, the removal of funds has never really been on the table. Rosin: Okay, so if it didn't go through the usual process, it didn't seem to be about what they said it was about. So you, as someone tracking this, what do you think it was about? Like, why remove Columbia's funding? What was that first move about? Harris: Yeah. So in that piece that I mentioned from December, the argument was: You remove the funding from Columbia in order to scare other institutions into compliance. And if those institutions don't immediately comply, then they also know that, Well, I can get my funding taken away too. We have seen, now, $150 million [taken] away from Penn within days, right—at least paused at Penn within days—of launching or announcing an investigation. And so, really, these timelines just don't necessarily comport (1) with the way things are done, but they also don't comport with a proper or legitimate investigation, given the amount of staff they have now at the Department of Education. Rosin: Okay. So they're not following the rules of a proper investigation. They're just trying to get universities to comply. But comply with what? Harris: Yeah, so there are a couple of various—it was interesting because the administration has gone farther than just saying, Hey. You need to get everything in check. Figure it out, Columbia. They've actually given them a list of things that they could do in terms of disciplinary measures for students. They said that one of the academic departments needs to be put under a sort of academic receivership, meaning that someone comes in from outside of the department to serve as the chair and look over their curriculums and things like that. So there are these sort of very specific guidelines for what can and cannot be said on campuses. And once you start restricting speech in one manner, that sort of means you can restrict speech in a lot of different spaces. So if you say, Well, you can't have these pro-Palestinian protests in a specific area, and if you do, then we're going to take your funding away. There are a lot of things there that are reminiscent of the ways that Southern governors used to say that students at Alabama State couldn't have sit-ins, otherwise they were going to remove the funding from Alabama State College. It's adjudicating specific behaviors and speech that students are making, which is really a threat to all of the principles of an institution. When an administration can come into an institution and say, You have to do this very specific thing. These are the policies that you have to implement, the principles of shared governance, the principles of academic freedom, the principles of a sort of free system of higher education really go away—and those same principles that are sort of the bedrocks of our democracy, right? The First Amendment is literally about free speech. When those sorts of things go away, it becomes a very dangerous environment that limits what people can say and do. [] Rosin: After the break: the narrowing of the American higher-education system—and who will get left out. [] Rosin: You started out by saying the ultimate vision was building a conservative elite. So is the way you put this entire picture together, is that essentially: You break down, you take away their funding? I mean, now I just sound kind of paranoid and conspiratorial, but maybe this is the plan. Like, you take away funding—in this way, it's a little confusing, because some of the funding is for science so, you know, it's not all completely directed. But you take away the funding. You therefore shock the university into stopping behaving the way it has, and then what? What's the ultimate—I don't know what happened in Hungary, so— Harris: Yeah. So that vision that Rufo discussed sort of happened in Hungary, where they're trying to get back to the cultural traditions, the cultural values that the nation had—those sort of ideas of Christian faith, the ideas of family life. In the same way, it sort of embodies that notion of 'Make America Great Again.' And so the question has always been, Well, when exactly was America great? And over the last several years, there has been an argument that has built up in conservative circles that America was better off in terms of these ideas of personal liberty and the freedom of association before the Civil Rights Act was signed, that this sort of administrative state that has built up to enforce the rules of the Civil Rights Act—so you think about things like race-conscious admissions, which was just voted down at the Supreme Court. You think about these reassessments of curriculums, which prior to the 1960s were legally allowed to obscure and/or omit the contributions of African Americans, of Natives, of Mexican Americans. You consider the programs that were meant to diversify the workforce more generally—those are some of the programs and things that conservatives are trying to attack in certain ways by saying that they basically discriminate against white people, that it's reverse discrimination to include those policies, which is why you see a part of this, alongside that $400 million from Columbia, was that broader letter, that 'Dear Colleague' letter that said, Hey—if you use race in scholarships, in hiring, in your sort of faculty committees, in your student groups, in any of these things, then we are going to investigate you, and you are going to be in violation of Title VI. And when an institution hears you're going to be in violation of Title VI, they will start thinking, We're going to get our funding taken away in the same way that Columbia did. And so this push to eliminate the Department of Education runs alongside this broader push to get higher education under control, right? These are sort of parallel tracks that end up forming a double helix, right? They go right together. It's like if you're going to say that you're going to investigate anti-Semitism with a vigor that no one has ever investigated it with before, and you remove half of the staff at the Office for Civil Rights that actually investigates anti-Semitism, the thing to do wouldn't be to remove people who are investigating those complaints. The thing would be to beef up that staff so that they didn't have 20 to 25 cases on their load, so that they could have those five to 10 complaints they were really focusing on. Rosin: Right, because they could find examples of anti-Semitism. They could find examples of other kinds of discrimination. But it's obviously not what you're actually after if you're eliminating the office. Harris: Exactly. Rosin: You know, as you're talking, what's chilling about this is that I do, in fact, associate higher education with the opening of the mind and the broadening of the views. Like, that is what I think university is for. I mean, that is what education in the U.S. does. So it would be a profound shift to think of education as inculcating a very narrow or particular set of content, you know? Harris: Yes. And you know, it's interesting. Over the last several years, right, the last couple of decades, actually, there's been this argument that institutions don't teach students how to think; they teach students what to think. Rosin: That's what conservatives say. Harris: That's what conservatives say, yeah. It was one of the first things that Betsy DeVos said when she became the education secretary, was that colleges are teaching students what to think as opposed to how to think. And in some ways, this effort is actually trying to do that. It is trying to teach students, This other stuff is out of bounds, right? But this is the acceptable sort of curriculum for your class. These are the acceptable things that you can say. And even if they're not saying it explicitly, institutions are taking it as such. We've already seen some colleges, such as High Point University, when that Dear Colleague letter came out that said, Make sure you're not using race or using discriminatory language in any of these things, they sent out a letter to their faculty, to their staff and said, Remove all of these. They gave them more than 40 words and said, Remove them from everything. Get rid of them in your PowerPoint presentations. Get rid of them in your curriculums. They ended up walking that back. But you see the sort of chill that that already starts to have when administrators are thinking, I don't want to lose my funding, and so I'm going to go ahead and say, 'Let's just get rid of all of that in our curriculum.' Rosin: Now, the administration created a task force, and there is this growing list of universities that are up for investigation. Is there any criteria? Do you see any pattern in the universities? Because it does seem to include both elite and less elite. You know, big-city schools, small schools. Like, can you detect anything in what they're looking for? Harris: So it's difficult to detect a trend there. There is a way that you can sort of have a veil of legitimacy on any investigation. And so if you have received a complaint from a school of anti-Semitism, you can say that, Okay. That's going to be the school that we are going to investigate. And knowing that all it took was 14, you know, 15 days for the administration to go ahead and remove all of $400 million of Columbia's funding, those institutions may be more likely to say, Whoa. Whatever they're saying for Columbia to do, let's go ahead and do that— Rosin: So that they won't come after us. Harris: —so that they won't come after us. Rosin: So merely putting a university on the list—and actually, maybe even the arbitrary nature of the list—actually spreads the fear more widely. Maybe this is what I'm realizing now. It's a very common tactic. Harris: Exactly. Rosin: If you just put Harvard and Columbia on the list, then other places wouldn't have to worry about it. But if you spread it far and wide, then everybody follows your orders. Okay. That's obvious. So I see now very clearly putting the pieces together, putting the bigger picture together of how they're scaring universities. I want to know what's happening inside the universities and how they're responding. As someone who doesn't follow higher education as closely, it's not that clear to me how important this funding is or how reliant universities are on federal funding. Harris: Yeah. So for an institution that is, say, more tuition dependent, they rely on the students paying their tuition and that tuition helping them to meet payroll. Title IV funding is incredibly important because if you are not allowed to take loans from students, if you're not allowed to get Pell Grants from students, then a tuition-dependent institution is going to go out of business. For bigger institutions like Columbia, these are institutions that have federal grants from, you know, the NIH, that have federal grants from the Defense Department, that have USDA grants, that have grants from the, you know, Education Department, right? So it's very varied, and their tentacles are all through the federal government. There's this idea that's sort of been bubbling up that, Well, these institutions have big endowments. Why don't you just start using that? There's a fundamental misunderstanding about endowments. That's not just, like, fungible money that you can say, Oh, well, that's $50 billion. We can spend $10 billion and make up for it tomorrow, because most of that money is tied to very specific things. Say a donor made a $400 million donation to the School of Fine Arts: If you start using that for payroll generally, you can guarantee you're never gonna receive a single dollar ever again, because people can't trust you to be good stewards or faithful stewards of that money. They can also sue you. And so there are some colleges that, you know, from 30 to 40 percent of their budgets really kind of come from the federal government, but that's not to say that this is a completely foreign system. There is not a successful higher-education system in the world, really, that is not sort of subsidy driven, that doesn't receive significant government subsidies. Rosin: That's interesting. I think of the United States as having a largely private university system and that other, you know—I am always jealous of overseas, how they have more public universities. But I never quite put together that, in fact, there is a strong interdependence between public institutions and universities of all kinds. So now I see why that makes them extremely vulnerable. I've watched university presidents—I mean, it mostly feels like they're scrambling. You know, Columbia was a probably terrifying example for a lot of college presidents because it does seem that even when university presidents comply or try to comply with Trump orders, they still get punished. Do you see any responses now, like, as you've watched, maybe since October 7 and then through Trump's election? What kinds of discussions are they having about how to handle this situation? Harris: So there's been a lot of sort of internal back-and-forth at institutions. You haven't really seen many public responses, in part because there's a sort of 'keep your head down and hope that it's not you,' you know, some of the smaller institutions, maybe public institutions. For some of the public state institutions, they're trying to fight things that are going on in their own states, right? Consider a place like Ohio, where they have a bill that's supposed to reform higher education. Florida, Texas, North Carolina, all of these states: There's this big federal thing that's going on, but you also have these state reforms, whether that's to tenure, whether that's to establish a conservative center on campus, whatever it may be. They're also thinking about those issues, as well. And so a lot of presidents are in sort of a, Keep your head down. Try to avoid being noticed. And if it's happening over there, then it's not happening to us, and we're already thinking about our budget for the next year, as opposed to a cohesive pushback to say, This is an attack on higher education more broadly rather than these singular institutions. Rosin: And do you think that's a realistic thing to ask of university presidents? Because it is disheartening to see them fall, one after the other—I mean, both in congressional hearings, in all sorts of ways. And then there'd just be deadly silence. But there's also silence on the streets. There's silence in a lot of places. And so I just wonder: Is that a realistic hope? Harris: It should be. Rosin: You want to hold onto it? Harris: I do, because we've seen institutions in the last few years be pushed into these policies that say they won't make public statements about political events, right? In Ohio, in that bill, it said that public colleges can't make statements about partisan or ideological statements outside of celebrations of the United States and the flag—like, really sort of jingoistic, patriotic statements. And pushing back doesn't have to look like a president being out in the streets, but it does look like reaffirming your institutional principles and living up to your institutional principles, right? Because a principle's only a principle when it's tested. Rosin: Right. Harris: And a belief is only, like—you only actually have a value and make public that value when that value is under attack. And so if higher education doesn't believe in the principles that it was founded on, then institutional leaders should remain silent. But if they do, then there's a kind of obligation there. It's one of the reasons why they get paid so much. Rosin: Whoa. Okay. Harris: (Laughs.) Rosin: No. I mean, you're clear. I appreciate it. Just one final thing: We started by talking about the ultimate goal of this to be the creation of a different kind of elite in the U.S. I wonder if they have a fully fleshed imagination of what a conservative elite would look like and act like and believe. Like, is the end of the vision real? Harris: I don't know if it's a fully fleshed-out view, but they have pointed to certain institutions and said, This is what it could look like. Those institutions are Hillsdale College, the College of the Ozarks. I actually went to the College of the Ozarks when Pete Hegseth was speaking, and there was this really, you know, sort of telling quote that he gave during his speech that was just like, I went to Harvard. I went to, you know, the Ivy League institution. Those places have lost their way. This is the sort of place that's doing it right. This is the future. And you look across the student body—it's majority white and not even, like, a slim majority. It's students who, when I spoke to them, talked more about the idea of it being a place where they could go and not have to have a ton of loans on the back end of going to college. But it was also a place that has—it's the only college in the country with a vice president of patriotic activities. Every student is required to take a patriotic-education course, where it's a mix of current events and the founding documents alongside, like, military training. And it's not a military school. So I don't know that there's a fully fleshed-out idea, but I know that there are institutions that they point to as examples of what a college should be, and there are also places that they can point to, like a new college now, and how to make that happen. Rosin: What ended up happening in Hungary, by the way? Has it broadened into a vision beyond that individual college? Do they have a conservative elite? Harris: In a lot of ways, yes. And if it's not a sort of fully fleshed-out one to this point, it is much further along than it was when Orbán launched his assault. I think one of the other things that was really interesting about that piece that Rufo wrote was that he talks about the ways that things seemed normal— Rosin: And what did he mean by 'normal'? Harris: By 'normal,' he talks about, Oh, people talk about it as if it's, like, an economic backwater, but, you know, business goes on as usual. But there's this quiet administrative, instructional war that's going on in education, sort of reshaping things. And so it's like, Make everything seem as normal as possible while also launching this assault that transforms the way that a country fundamentally operates. Rosin: And feels and what young minds accept as excellence, basically. Harris: Exactly. Rosin: Right. Well, Adam, I think the only option after this conversation is to join you in holding out hope that some group of university presidents stand up for what a university is. Thank you so much for helping us understand that. Harris: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. [] Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. We had engineering support from Rob Smierciak and fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Listeners, if you like what you hear on Radio Atlantic, remember you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at That's I'm Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening. Article originally published at The Atlantic
