This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 31st, 2018.

I'm Keeble Brown.

Shortly after declaring tariffs to be the greatest, the president sat down with

European Union leaders to begin the conversation to move toward lowering tariffs

between the EU and the US. Does it mean anything?

Cato Policy analyst Simon Lester says it's a step in the right direction, but lacks the

substantive reduction in trade barriers we might hope for.

Donald Trump has taken a lot of criticism correctly from our trade department and others for his apparent support of tariffs.

He says they're the greatest and has imposed because of congressional abdication a whole lot of

tariffs on goods coming into the United States from China and Europe meeting with Mr Juncker of the European Union, there appears to be some movement on at least with the US relationship with Europe, some of that possibly changing.

After having read what these two gentlemen agreed upon, what do you say?

I say that yesterday was a good day after many months of bad days in US trade policy.

As you said, most of what we've seen this year is terrorists and threats of terrorists and harsh rhetoric.

But then all of a sudden yesterday President Trump and President Juncker of the European Commission

got out there and we're all friendly and we're talking about working together on

trade working together towards zero tariffs zero barrier zero subsidies on

certain industrial products and you know I'll take it that that that's that was a good day. I don't know where this is going

But maybe it's a change in direction at least slightly. I don't think that the Trump administration is going to back off its tariffs on China.

That's still a problem to be worked on.

But if the US and EU are getting along, which they should be, we've moved in a better direction.

All right, so what were some of the details here that were less than clear in your view?

Yeah, it's pretty skimpy.

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