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Bulwark Takes

Trump’s Understanding Of The Economy Is Like A Toddler

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Donald Trump is scrambling to spin the latest round of bad economic news—negative GDP growth, a sinking stock market, and growing trade war fallout. On this episode, Andrew Egger is joined by Will Saletan to break down Trump’s erratic responses, his blame-shifting tactics, and the increasingly surreal attempts to convince voters that tariffs have nothing to do with the downturn.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Building a coffee business?

0:01.9

Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new sumup terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the sumup point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.com.com. To learn more. Hey, guys, it's Andrew Eger with the

0:21.8

bulwark. What else is new? We've got another day of bad economic news, slow GDP growth

0:27.7

numbers coming out this morning. And Donald Trump has been reacting to these in kind of a flailing,

0:33.5

amazing way. Here to talk about it with me a little bit, our own Will Salatin. How you doing,

0:37.8

Will? Great, Andrew. This is crazy. This up, down, Trump's got all sorts of crazy positions on it.

0:43.7

It's wild. Yeah, he really is kind of an amazing guy, right? Let's just start with the tweet, right?

0:47.9

I mean, well, the headline news is, you know, basically the trade war has so scrambled markets

0:53.0

that people, companies are dramatically

0:56.4

importing goods in order to, you know, get out ahead of the tariffs that we're going into,

1:03.0

going into effect. That's been happening all quarter. And the result of that, one of the

1:06.7

results of that is that GDP growth was actually negative in the quarter that we just got data on this year.

1:13.3

Obviously, markets have been having a really hard time lately in general off of the trade war, and they are continuing to sink today off the back of this news.

1:20.8

Let's just go right to the Trump tweet. This is Trump this morning at 9.13 a.m. ready to drop a truth bomb on us all at truth social. This is Biden's stock market,

1:30.8

not Trump's. I didn't take over until January 20th. Tariffs will soon start kicking in and

1:35.2

companies are starting to move into the USA in record numbers. Our country will boom, but we have to

1:39.5

get rid of the Biden overhang. This will take a while, has all caps, nothing to do with tariffs, only that he

1:45.7

left us with bad numbers, but when the boom begins, it will be like no other. Be patient.

1:50.7

So other than just kind of pure blame shifting and hopium, which is most of it, obviously,

1:55.2

what do we have going on here? Well, what's Trump up to? So, okay, so Trump is a, when it comes to tweeting and truthing and this stuff,

2:03.1

Trump is a machine, right? He's got an algorithm and the algorithm is, was the news today good or bad?

2:09.2

Was the stock market up or down? And therefore, will I take credit for it or will I cast the blame on Biden?

...

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