CNBC reporter torches Trump’s ‘insane’ tariffs ‘at risk of my job’

CNBC’s Steve Liesman torched President Trump’s stiff tariffs as “insanity” in a rant he claimed put his job at the network at risk.

The longtime business journalist on Tuesday tore into Trump after the president threatened to hike tariffs on Canada’s aluminum and steel imports to 50% unless the neighboring country agreed to become the “Fifty First State.”

“I’m going to say this at risk of my job, Kelly, but what President Trump is doing is insane,” Liesman, CNBC’s senior economics reporter, told anchor Kelly Evans.

“It is about the eighth reason we’ve had for the tariffs, and now he’s saying he’s putting 50% tariffs on Canada unless they agree to become the 51st state. That is insane.”

Trump had threatened earlier that day in a post on Truth Social to double the tariffs on Canada’s steel and aluminum products, as well as increase taxes on car imports to “permanently shut down the automobile manufacturing business in Canada.”

“The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State,” Trump wrote in the post on Tuesday. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear.”

Yet the aluminum and steel taxes took effect Wednesday morning at the original 25% rate.

Liesman nodded to a headline in The Wall Street Journal – “The Trade War Will Pound Stocks,” an opinion piece by Greg Jensen, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, who argued hefty tariffs will hurt US assets.

“The gentleman from Bridgewater is 100% right,” Liesman said. “We need massive amounts of capital if we want to fund our deficits, pay for the things we want to pay for, sell our bonds and have high stock prices, and it seems as if this administration is doing everything it can to chase the foreign capital away.”

He argued that Trump’s “insane” warnings to Canada are evidence that the president is unrestricted this time around in office.

“It’s very different from [Trump’s] first administration, where there were people around him who seemed to – I don’t know what the word is – but seemed to smooth over some of the edges,” Liesman said. 

“The other thing that’s not talked about, Kelly, is what’s going on within the administration in terms of how they’re treating the constitution and laws,” he added.

Evans tried to save the conversation, saying with a laugh: “Well, we can go into insanity as a strategy.”

But Liesman retorted: “Insanity is not a strategy, I’m sorry.”