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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics, power, and prejudices.

This year, 2024, is an election year in America, a presidential election year.

And so we will be doing two podcasts a week, rather than our usual one, because we want to and because we know you can't get enough Americano in your life.

I am delighted to be joined today by Christopher Butler, who is executive director at

Americans for Tax Reform and at the Tholos Foundation. And we're going to be talking about what

Trump's trade policy might look like in a second term. That might sound like a dry subject to some of you,

but try and cast your

minds back to how crazy a lot of the world went about Trump's trade policies when he was

president from 2016 to 2020. And think about what might happen from 2025 to 2028-9, because it's going to be a big, big factor of Trump's presidency,

and it's going to be something that people are very worried about.

Indeed, they already are.

Christopher, Trump 2.0, I've heard it called, as far as trade policy is concerned.

There's this policy of a 10% tarry off on imports from

all countries, friend or foe, that a lot of economists are expressing concern about. How concerned

are you, as somebody who's interested in free markets, about what a Trump second presidency

might do to trade policies?

Well, if we were starting out from the baseline of the Obama administration,

I might have some concern.

But the fact is that Biden has in general gotten rid of almost none of the trade barriers that Trump put into place.

...