Trump Learned NOTHING from the “Liberation Day” Disaster
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
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Summary
Andrew Egger and Catherine Rampell look back at the first anniversary of Trump’s “Liberation Day,” the administration’s infamous tariff rollout. From tariffing penguins to gold bars from Switzerland, "Liberation Day" has proven to be a bust. The Supreme Court ruled them illegal and companies are still waiting for refunds, while the White House fiddles with new versions of the same failed policies.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. Welcome to the bulwark. I am Andrew Eger. I am joined by our economics reporter, Catherine Rampel, to talk about the first anniversary of the most important economic day in U.S. history, according to the President of the United States, Liberation Day. |
| 0:14.8 | This is Liberation Day. April 2nd, 2025, a day that will go down in history. Again, according to the president, |
| 0:22.7 | as the day America's golden age began. In fact, the day that the economy basically took a nosedive |
| 0:29.5 | from which we have yet to really recover, setting aside everything else that has happened |
| 0:34.5 | since then. That was one year ago. Today, we're here to |
| 0:37.6 | talk about it. Catherine, can you just kind of roll back the clock for us? I mean, this is like the |
| 0:42.6 | signature economic policy of Trump 2.0. We have had all kinds of twists and turns with this story |
| 0:50.2 | in terms of the White House putting stuff on and taking it off. And I mean, there's been such a crazy tariff story over the past year. |
| 0:58.1 | Can you just kind of walk us through the broad strokes of what happened a year ago today |
| 1:02.0 | and how we got from there to hear? |
| 1:04.4 | I will do my best. |
| 1:05.8 | But first, I would like to wish Liberation Day a very happy birthday. |
| 1:09.6 | It's now a toddler, right? It's age one. |
| 1:13.9 | Yeah. So what has happened in the past year? Trump declared that he was a tariff man, |
| 1:19.3 | that he was going to renew the American economy, which was apparently in the dumps, was dead, |
| 1:26.2 | all of these other horrible adjectives. And the way he was |
| 1:30.5 | going to do that, the way he was going to revive manufacturing and other economic activity was |
| 1:35.5 | through these tariffs. Instead, of course, we have seen lots of economic wreckage in the wake of Liberation Day. So Trump has done a bunch of different |
| 1:47.1 | versions of tariffs. He's used different tariff authorities that are maybe allowed to him in the |
| 1:54.9 | law. The Supreme Court says maybe not. But the biggest set of tariffs came exactly a year ago on April 2nd of 2025. |
| 2:04.0 | And they were through this kind of bullshit formula that had the trappings of academia. |
| 2:11.9 | Like it was supposed to look like, oh, this is the reciprocal tariffs that we are putting in place on every country on earth. |
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