Trade Wars at the Ballot Box
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 1 October 2018
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Most Republicans would go into the 2018 midterm elections boasting of low unemployment and economic growth. Donald Trump is not most Republicans. The President has an affinity for protectionist tariffs—most recently including two hundred billion dollars on Chinese-made goods—and while he says that trade wars are “easy to win,” they have become a hot issue in some key Senate races. In states like North Dakota, Ohio, and Tennessee, those tariffs—and China’s sixty billion dollars in retaliatory duties—could possibly give Democrats control of the Senate. John Cassidy and Sheelah Kolhatkar, both staff writers, parse how candidates in both parties are navigating a new economic order.
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| 0:50.4 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's John Cassidy and Sheila Kolhatkar discussed |
| 0:56.8 | President Trump's trade policies, which were supposed to help the Republican base, but may be |
| 1:02.9 | contributing to Republicans' midterm woes. |
| 1:07.9 | As if the Republicans didn't have enough to contend with, including allegations against Brett |
| 1:12.9 | Kavanaugh, that have made this the ugliest Supreme Court nomination for a generation, |
| 1:18.4 | they have a president who tends to undercut them on the economy. |
| 1:22.7 | Most Republicans want to stick with the positive numbers they have. |
| 1:25.6 | They can boast about strong employment and |
| 1:28.3 | economic growth, but Donald Trump, in case you hadn't noticed, is not most Republicans. |
| 1:33.5 | Trump feels that tariffs and trade wars are a winning issue with his base, and he doesn't |
| 1:38.6 | really care what economists think either. Even economists in his cabinet. he's just imposed another enormous round of tariffs on |
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