Name: Donald Trump's tariffs: Is there a plan? | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-04-12T09:42:09.000Z
Duration: 28 min 44 s
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Wednesday was quite a day quite a day for podcasters

Transition words & phrases

We had recorded all sorts of wonderful stuff which we had to junk because it all got very quickly out of date

The issue was this an announcement on truth social from Donald Trump that dropped most of the high tariffs around the world down to 10% except for China and they had a hundred and twenty-five percent and here is how he explained what he was doing

Jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know, they're getting a little bit yippy a little bit afraid unlike these champions

Because we have a big job to do no other president would have done what I did

No other president. I know the president's they wouldn't have done it and it had to be done

What was happening to us on trade not only with you know, if you look at it, not only with China but China was by far the biggest abuser in history and

Somebody had to do it. They had to stop because it was not sustainable. So tariffs apparently paused for now

Has Donald Trump rode back from the brink? Welcome to America's

Hello, it's Anthony in Arlington, Virginia and it's Justin at home in South London and it is Mariana aka

Misinformation in the worldwide headquarters. Okay, it is one o'clock in the afternoon in

London on the 10th of April and I say all of that because who knows where we will be by two o'clock in the afternoon

Or wherever and we've had to junk everything we've already done. So we're kind of we're meeting aren't we in temporary?

Studios around the world, but that doesn't matter because there is so much to talk about that is

Itself temporary you never quite know with Donald Trump how long anything is going to last

So I think it's kind of fitting isn't it?

Actually that we're all in temporary places and also Mariana that all of this is happening because of social media posts

It is in order to figure out what is or isn't going on inside Donald Trump's head the million-dollar question

It seems like truth social is your best portal. That's Donald Trump's own social media site. Um, and

Yesterday so we're recording on Thursday. So Wednesday of this week you had Donald Trump saying

Well, the be cool was in capitals just just so you've got the message the USA will be bigger and better than ever before and then and then four hours later the be cool message had slightly evolved and

He essentially said based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the world's markets

I'm raising the tariff charge to China by the United States of America to 125% effective immediately and he then issued what he called this of 90-day pause on

The other tariffs that he'd imposed and brought them all to this 10% level. Um, so

Well, you know remember just a couple of days ago

There were those reports about a 90-day pause the stock market

Surged and the White House came out and said no, we're not even considering that that's ridiculous. It's fake news

And here we go two days later. We have that 90-day pause and the stock market

Rebounded quite dramatically just within minutes of Donald Trump's truth social announcement

I think ultimately some of the major indices here in the United States were up about eight or nine

Percent made up about half of the losses that we've had this entire week

At least investors seem to think Donald Trump is backing away from this kind of global restructuring of trade policy even as he is

Leaning into China and a fight with China and trying to make China the villain here and as ever he had his own

Explanation for what he had done. Let's listen to that and I

Think it probably came together early this morning fairly early this morning. Just wrote it up. I didn't we didn't have the use of

We didn't have access to lawyers or it was just wrote up. We wrote it up from our hearts, right?

It was written from the heart and I think it was well written too, but it was written from the heart it was written as something that I think was very positive for the world and for us and

We don't want to hurt countries that don't need to be heard and they all want to negotiate

The only problem is you know, you can only do so many at one time. It's like

It's we want to do it, right? We want to get it, right?

We want to take care of them, but we have to take care of our country. So but this was something certainly we've been talking about for a period of time and we decided to

Pull the trigger and we did it today and we're happy about it and Anthony on the domestic politics

It's really important. Isn't it that China never mind the kind of effect on geopolitics, but on domestic politics

He's singling out China and that is something in in domestic

American political terms you can do because the argument about whether China is an abuser of trade practices has sort of been one hasn't it that the Democrats would sort of fold in with

That and I think most Americans would believe even people who don't follow these things very much

Would sort of have an understanding of what they think is malpractice from China that that deserves to be punished

Right, they view China as a major international rival not just economically but also militarily politically

It fits much more neatly into kind of the broad strokes of American foreign policy over the past ten

So it fits with what Joe Biden was trying to do he left

Terrorists that Donald Trump put in in his first term on China. He worked more to organize

US allies in the Pacific region to position themselves to resist Chinese

Expansions so all of this makes sense in kind of a cohesive American strategy in a way that

Those massive tariffs on the EU and on South Korea and on Japan and on all of these other

Countries that the United States is supposed to be working closely with just never did I mean it's funny

He talks about you know, he didn't consult with lawyers. He wrote it from the heart

I mean, I think that's pretty obvious because you know, there was so much confusion after this announcement came in

There was you had Steve beset the Scott beset the the Treasury Secretary standing there at a press gaggle saying

That these tariffs applied to Canada and Mexico

It actually would have raised tariffs on Canada and Mexico then they had to come back and say no actually they don't the old

Tariffs apply there. I had to clarify whether the specific industry targeted tariffs were affected by this

They weren't what level of tariffs there were coming out

It was just it was chaos and you could see it in our in our

BBC chats trying to figure all of this out as the story unfold and you could see it in the coverage from reporters and the questions from reporters at the White House

I was gonna say that I am appreciating that phrase it came from the heart which seems to be a kind of pretty spot-on way of describing almost every post on social media, but particularly

Semi-capitalized posts on truth social and and there's something about I don't know

I think it's quite interesting the kind of emotional slant that that Donald Trump has put on that like the kind of this idea of like

We felt like doing it like we sort of decided and you know

We don't want these other countries to be like in trouble or harmed and we've decided we felt like it was the time to do

Does a u-turn exist in the world of Donald Trump and if it does is this what it looks like?

Isn't that interesting a u-turn doesn't exist. He's the kind of postmodern

Rightist you think of all those people on the left in American politics who claim, you know their own experience and their own their own kind of vision of who they are and and all the other things that people kind of on the postmodern left claim

He's the equivalent on the right, isn't he? There is no such thing as objective truth

There is only his truth just as some people on the left say there is only their truth about their experience and all the rest

And I just I think you raise a really fascinating point kind of central political point about

Trump which is that he does because of who he is and because of the way he is

He manages to get away with so much more than any kind of ordinary

Person would do and I we ought to hear what the Democrats were saying

I don't know what we all thought of this but Chuck Schumer who's still there still plugging away poor guy

Sounding I thought a bit knackered actually the Democrats leader in in the Senate doing his best to sort of whip us all

Into a frenzy of outrage at what Donald Trump had done

His advisors are fighting among themselves calling each other names and you cannot run a country

With such unpredictability with such lack of understanding of what's going on in the world and the facts

When there's chaos already damage is done

Irretrievable damage is done so I think Schumer was picking up there on on the chaos that happened after this announcement of the

Confusion as well and try to paint that as a broader picture of the Trump administration not just with these terrorists

But with everything that they're doing that they don't know what they're doing