I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source, staring down the global trade war with Mark Blythe at Brown University.

He is the People's Economist from Scotland, who takes us home to his village pub in Dundee every once in a while,

to tell all of us what the powers that be are up to. Mark, we've been bracing for a universal trade war,

not just China, but Canada, France, Mexico, you name it, uninhabited islands where only penguins

and seals live will be touched. President Trump's ultimate weapon of choice in such a war

is a 125% tariff on most of what comes from China,

raising prices, of course, but the Trump line also says that the flood of new tariff income

could pay for what he calls his big, beautiful tax cut.

Almost nobody you can read thinks Donald Trump is right

about these tariffs, Mark.

But is he serious?

That's the $64,000 question, isn't it?

Is he serious?

All right, well, think about this, Chris.

Everything you said is right, and also simultaneously incorrect, because all the

tariffs were rescinded once the bond market crapped itself on April 9th, and then we were in a 90-day

holding period, but then some tariffs came back, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't really know. Now,

here's how I like to think about this, and I think it's a useful way to orient ourselves and all this disorientation. What's the problem that Trump and people around him are trying

to solve? He's trying to offer a people a version of the future, which isn't just exactly the status

quote. Now, you might say it's one that harkens back to an economic politics of the 50s, a social politics of the 40s, and an imperial

politics of the 19th century. But it is nonetheless different. And the idea behind the whole thing

is reindustrialisation. Now, Biden did this, or tried to do this, with the Inflation Reduction

...