From 'The Conversation': Trump’s tariff czar speaks | Jamieson Greer

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

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Summary

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is no stranger to President Donald Trump’s tariff-forward trade agenda. Greer served as chief of staff to Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative in Trump’s first administration. But now, it’s Greer who’s at the helm of the president’s tariff implementation strategy — one that has drawn both criticism and praise from surprising places. “I've also had members of Congress come to me, people who maybe weren't fans of tariffs two years ago, and they said, ‘This is actually real money that's coming in that can be used to pay down the debt or pay for other things or finance our reindustrialization,” Greer said. In this week’s episode of The Conversation, Ambassador Greer sits down with POLITICO’s Dasha Burns to explain why trade policy defies political labels, the particulars of how deals are shaping up globally and the strategy behind reconfiguring seven decades’ worth of international policy. Plus, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, joins Dasha to explain how the battle for school funding continues to unfold, the intrinsic relationship between education and democracy and why the well-being of students should be at the top of the president’s mind.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Only in America does half of every dollar spent on brand medicines go to entities that don't make
0:05.5	them. While PBMs and 340B hospitals drive up costs, America's biopharmaceutical companies are doing
0:12.1	what these middlemen don't, investing $500 billion in new infrastructure and manufacturing
0:17.7	here at home and helping patients buy medicines directly at lower prices. Tell
0:22.4	Washington to end middlemen markups and put American patients first. Visit phrm.a.org
0:28.9	slash middlemen. The president wants deals, but he only wants good deals. Whenever you present a deal
0:33.6	to the president, the question is, am I better off with just having the tariff?
0:45.1	Hello, hello, and welcome to the conversation. I'm Dasha Burns, Politico's White House Bureau Chief, and every week on this show, I invite one of the most compelling and sometimes
0:50.2	unexpected power players in Washington and beyond in for a chat to find out how they are
0:56.1	navigating and shaping this incredible era of American politics. And this week, we're focusing
1:01.8	on two topics that are pretty fundamental to all Americans, the economy and education.
1:08.4	Tariffs have become the top tool for President Trump. He believes that
1:12.5	resetting our trade relationships is key to America's economic prosperity, but he also sees tariffs
1:18.7	as leverage for foreign policy, for peace deals, and much more. And that's why I've been so eager to
1:25.4	sit down with my first guest this week.
1:27.7	U.S. trade representative Jameson Greer.
1:30.8	He is the key player on Trump's trade agenda.
1:33.7	He's a former trade lawyer and actually served as chief of staff to Robert Lightheiser,
1:38.4	who was the last guy to hold this job in Trump's first term.
1:41.9	Greer breaks down the strategy for dismantling 70 years of trade policy,
1:46.7	one deal at a time. A bit later on in the show, I talked to Randy Weingarten. Wynegarten is the
1:52.8	president of the American Federation of Teachers, and she's been at the center of some of the
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