From New York Times opinion, I'm Ross Douthand, and this is Interesting Times.

Just in time for the day of this show, almost as if he planned it that way,

Donald Trump has taken a sledgehammer to the global economy,

as his new tariff regime yields crashing stock markets, rising global uncertainty, and widespread fears

of a recession.

So to try and understand where this radical policy came from and where it might be taking

us, our 401ks, our unemployment rate, I'm joined by Oren Cass, who's the founder of American Compass, a populist conservative

think tank that has for a while now been arguing for tariffs and for some kind of dramatic

change in America's relationship to global trade.

So Oren Cass, welcome to Interesting Times.

Thank you. It is indeed a pleasure to be living in interesting times.

I hope it is. So a podcast, like everything, is a moment in time. And the moment in time in which you and I are speaking is Monday morning.

The markets are open and down so far for the third day since Donald Trump announced

the Great Liberation of America from the Foreign Yoke. And this podcast, therefore,

may not cover events that transpire between now and Thursday morning when it's released.

But we're going to try and have a fairly

high-level discussion about the condition of the U.S. economy, where the tariff debate centers

in before we get into the Trump tariffs themselves, so that hopefully the conversation will

still be of use, even in a future in which the audience knows more about how all this plays out than we do.

So that's the plan. And I want to start with a big picture question. When Donald Trump was

reelected and entered office, a lot of people thought he had gotten very lucky, that he had

inherited an economy that was in really good shape with low unemployment,

...