Trump’s Tariff and Immigration Policies: A Second-Term Power Play

Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for negotiations. “Well, we’re not looking at that.” Reporter: Backtracking on tariffs … “I think the word would be flexible. You have to be flexible. I did a 90-day pause for the people that didn’t retaliate.” Reporter: … while doubling down on deportations. “Those monsters can now be hunted down and expelled from this country with speed, force and efficiency.” Reporter: It’s been a volatile week in Washington. “These are real consequences for the American people. This is amateur hour, and it needs to stop.” Reporter: As two of Trump’s signature policies were tested by the markets and the courts, from The New York Times, this is The Roundtable. I’m Zolan Kanno-Youngs with Hamed Aleaziz and Jonathan Swan. All right. So, guys, I feel like a lot has happened this week and especially on two, on these two issues that we’re going to be talking about: tariffs and immigration. So, Hamed, you are an expert on immigration policy, and so much of the policies that we’re talking about goes even further than what we saw in the first Trump term, right? What do you think is the reason for that? I feel like they believe they have a mandate from the American public to carry out a mass deportation campaign. They look at the poll numbers. They see that Americans were not pleased with the way the Biden administration was handling immigration, and they support deportation. So, I think that makes them feel like, OK, this is our time to throw everything against the wall. And at the same time, you have leadership like the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, who’s very aggressive. The first go-around, we had, obviously Kirstjen Nielsen and John Kelly. These were people who were, compared to other Trump officials, more restrained. And later on, they had career officials running the Department of Homeland Security as well. This go-around, Kristi Noem is willing to do whatever – “To go to a prison in El Salvador while there’s deportees there.” Exactly. “And essentially do a photo op there.” Exactly. “Do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” Go on ICE raids with ICE agents wearing the tactical gear, carrying weapons. This is something that we’ve never seen before. And I think that’s the main difference, is now the leadership in place is willing to take it. You mentioned the career officials. Is this by design, Jonathan, that you now have a cast around Trump that’s less likely to push back on some of these policies? Very much so. When he left office in 2021, his biggest regret from the first term was who he hired. Just think about it from Trump’s perspective. Term one, comes in, businessman never been in government. Doesn’t really know what he’s doing. Picks a bunch of people who he’s never really met before. A lot of them were Washington establishment-type figures who fundamentally disagreed with him on economics, foreign policy, national security, a number of issues. Trump resents that. He makes a bunch of decisions that he’s later quite angry that he allowed these advisers to talk him into X, Y and Z. So for a second term, he doesn’t want that. He wants to do it his way. And just think about it from his perspective. Everyone has told him you’ll never be president again. You’re finished after Jan. 6. He gets indicted in four different jurisdictions. He gets criminally convicted, he gets shot, and then he becomes president again. Can you imagine the level of confidence that you take into the White House, someone who’s already extremely self-confident? The ability of Trump to overcome all of that, I think, has supercharged his confidence. He has no opposition. Congress is not really – you could hardly describe it as a separate branch. I mean, it is basically Trump staffers. The leadership certainly is doing exactly what Trump wants. He’s not going to get impeached. He’s also immune. The Supreme Court has conferred broad immunity upon him. It’s total impunity and unaccountability. So, Jonathan, if my friend comes up to me at a bar and asks me like, what just happened with this tariff saga with the president, what would you what should I say? Was it a capitulation? What do you think made him freeze, it right? When I think of Trump this Trump term, I think of somebody who hasn’t backed down in some instances and continued to charge forward. What made him in this instance, you and our colleagues on the White House team have been reporting a lot about this. I was having a conversation like a couple of months ago with our colleague Tom Friedman on the opinion desk, and he said, I don’t really believe in politics anymore. But I believe in physics. And I would tweak that quote slightly to say, I believe in the bond markets. OK? Like, Donald Trump was staring down a potential financial panic. “People were jumping a little bit out of line. They were getting yippy, you know? They were getting a little bit yippy, a little bit afraid.” All the signals were highly alarming to his team. There was basically a loss of confidence in America and a sense that this could really spiral out of control into a full-blown crisis. I mean, $10 trillion was wiped out of the stock market. You know, that’s a bit of pain to endure. But Donald Trump doesn’t want to be the person held responsible for a recession. That’s what drove this decision. It was a fear-driven decision. All his aides are now out there saying this was the strategy all along, the plan all along. “This was his strategy all along.” “This was not a walk-back. This was not something that the bond markets were cratering and you were worried about it.” Total garbage. Total. Yeah. Like, let’s be, like, let’s be respectful of our audience. Completely absurd. This was forced upon them by really serious concerns about financial panic. “I haven’t spoken to the president since. .. “So the trade representative hasn’t spoken to the president of the United States about a global reordering of trade.” “Yes, I have. And I’m in a hearing with you, sir. …” “But yet he announced it on a tweet. WTF?” I saw various Democrats pointing to Trump’s Truth Social post in the morning where he seemed to say, paraphrasing, but now is the time to buy. We had a bunch of different Democrats saying, accusing the administration of market manipulation. “We need to get to the bottom of the possible stock manipulation that is unfolding.” “I think we need a full, independent investigation into who was trading, who made money, who knew what and when they knew it.” I wonder if this moment could be one that also prompts the Democrats to sort of coalesce around a unified message, because they’ve kind of been picking their punches thus far. It seems like they’ve been cautious thus far. What do you think? Yeah, I still await evidence that the Democrats can get their act together. If there’s ever an opportunity, it’s the economy. And when you talk to a lot of Democratic strategists, their analysis, a lot of mainstream Democratic strategists, their analysis of the election was we lost the debate on immigration. We lost the cultural debate. But they all acknowledged that if prices stay high, if the economy is wobbly, if families are feeling stressed, that this is a real danger zone for Donald Trump. And remember, it’s true that many Americans don’t own stocks, but a lot of people are invested in the stock market through their 401(k)s, and there was, again, the reason Donald Trump made this decision is this could have bled into the real economy. If the economy is one issue that the president, you could argue, won the election on, the other is immigration here. So do you think like this expansion that we’re seeing is an effort to sort of make good on political promises, or is there something more there in terms of the motive? I think they’re trying to make people feel uncomfortable. I think they are not so far, they have not conducted a mass deportation campaign. The numbers that were promised during the campaign have not been realized and are not on track to be realized. How do you get there? You get people to feel uncomfortable and decide to leave on their own accord. That’s why you’ve seen lately them talk about self-deportation repeatedly, right. You see them say, don’t make us come to your home and arrest you. Leave , leave by yourself. And this is a message that Tom Homan is spreading. This is a message that the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, is spreading. “So we will help you buy your plane ticket and your travel documents so that you can go today.” That is potentially their only way of getting to those high numbers. One thing we haven’t talked about yet is the administration’s use of this wartime authority to continue to try to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process. This law we’re talking about, the Alien Enemies Act, we’ve had some back and forth with the courts here. But I think one thing is clear is this administration is not going to shy away or back down from using this policy at this point. They’re still determined to continue to use this, right? Definitely. I think this is something that they’ve been planning to use for a while, and they feel like the path has been laid for them to continue to use it. And it helps a lot. Ultimately, it’s very helpful to deport people without little, without much due process, because that due process bogs down the system and makes it harder to get those deportation numbers up. Are you hearing from anyone on the inside who’s uncomfortable with what they’re seeing, rattled by what they’re seeing thus far? Definitely. It feels like for folks that I’ve talked to a sense of, you know, what’s next. What else are we going to be asked to do. What was surprising to me was seeing him target college students. These students who have protested on campuses, pro-Gaza protesters that the Trump administration targeted, picked up. And these were people who were here with green cards, visas, and they were thrown into ICE detention. And the administration right now is arguing that we need to remove them because it serves foreign policy of the United States. This is something I had never heard of before. And one thing that’s much different this time, I would say as well, is the general attack on federal employees is also on D.H.S., the D.H.S. secretary has talked about repeatedly that they will root out leaks. And one way to do that is to polygraph people. That didn’t happen the first Trump administration. And at the same time, there’s a real fear around losing their jobs, people losing their jobs through the general reduction in force that Elon Musk and others has pushed. So you have a really, a bad culture right now at the department. People feeling uneasy on all levels. Is that culture, that same sort of anxious vibe, inside, is that shared by some of the president’s economic advisers or is it just full loyalty? Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, was not thrilled, to say the least, about the tariff roll-out last week and the aggressiveness and the breadth of the tariffs. I mean, even a person like Howard Lutnick, the Commerce secretary, who publicly is a cheerleader for the tariffs, privately was arguing strenuously for more exemptions. So yeah, 100 percen, there are disagreements and tensions on the team. But nobody’s arguing for no tariffs. No one who’s working for Donald Trump at this point is like, Oh you know what? Maybe we could talk him out of this tariff thing. It’s like, no, no, that ship has sailed. So it’s arguments that are about the level of the tariffs, the breadth of the tariffs, the targeting, et cetera. No one’s saying, sir, we shouldn’t do tariffs. So if that’s the feel from his economic advisers, Jonathan, I know one thing you’ve been tracking too is the response from the business community when it comes to these tariffs, whether it’s some private law firms, the private sector too. What’s the business community’s reaction been so far to this saga? Well, I mean, they hate the tariffs, of course. But if you’re a C.E.O. with any perception or intelligence, you realize that attacking Donald Trump publicly, while it might be principled, is probably not going to get you a good outcome. And what we’ve seen taking, setting tariffs aside for a second, I mean, this parade of business people offering him money, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, it’s pretty clear that they’re all worried about him targeting them. And the Trump people weaponized this very effectively. They monetize it, actually. It’s not just that Trump collects the million-dollar check for his inauguration. His people will then hit them up again, phone call and say, hey, it’d be real nice if you gave us $10 million for our PAC. I mean, it’s just basically saying, hey, guys, you might want to give us some money. I mean, the law firms is just brazen and Trump. I mean, Trump’s very proud of it, which is basically, we are going to go after you unless you promise us – the number keeps going up, I think it’s now like 100 million, $125 million worth of pro bono work to support our causes. “So I have a lot of legal fees I could give to you people, but, and we might as well use them. Hopefully I won’t need that many legal fees or that much. I may.” I mean, this is astonishing. What’s astonishing, just in terms of comparing this to term one, I mean, I remember the word resistance getting thrown around so much, remember law firms filing lawsuits. To see it to this level, where now you’re seeing this money go out. But it’s something else on the thing we’re working on, myself and a number of my colleagues is: term one, his retribution was haphazard. It was often informal, off the cuff. A lot of it was done secretively. Now it’s just, it’s streamlined. It’s formalized. It comes in the form of public presidential decrees. He signed executive orders directing his government to examine the activities of two of his critics who used to work in his administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor, former D.H.S. official, too. He just named them. Just named them. It’s very out in the open, and the message to his critics and his adversaries is, you could be next. All of these pre-emptive capitulations that you see, it’s just how can I get out in front of this. How can I not be next. How much of that is a motive behind his tariffs. Does Donald Trump also just like the action of threatening tariffs, hanging it over nations and watching to see what they’ll do. As we talk about retribution, as we talk about Trump asserting his power over these various aspects of society, just how much of the tariffs are actually about him kind of wanting to see these countries come to the White House begging? I think two things can be true. I think it’s indisputably true, Trump says it himself, you can see how much he’s enjoying, he says they’re all kissing my ass. They’re all coming and begging – real quote, by the way “I’m telling you, these countries are calling us up, kissing my ass. They are. They are dying to make a deal. Please please, sir. Make a deal. I’ll do anything. I’ll do anything, sir.” He literally said that on the record. And he loves this, I call it a begging economy that he’s kind of created. But it’s also true that he’s been talking about tariffs for 40 years. And it’s an issue he actually does have a belief in, a deep belief in and a pretty consistent belief in, which is unusual for Donald Trump in that he believes that foreign nations have been ripping America off. America has been led by stupid people who’ve squandered American wealth, squandered American jobs. And he sees tariffs as this almost magic solution for – there’s no problem that can’t be solved with a good tariff. If it’s that central to his identity, going back to his business days, too, is he listening to anybody on it? It’s not that he’s not listening to anyone. Obviously, what they saw in the markets caused him to have a pretty dramatic reversal. But it took the blinking red lights for him to pull back. What about on immigration? Who does the president listen to? We, us three talk about this a lot. Let’s tell folks who are the inner circle that can really advise the president on immigration? Well, I think Tom Homan is a key figure. This is somebody that President Trump has talked about fondly for years. During the first Trump administration, President Trump was talking about him repeatedly when Mr Homan was running ICE. He sees him as one of the loyal figures in the administration. And he’s the, I think he sees Homan as somebody who knows his stuff, who’s a lawman, who’s been in federal law enforcement for decades and believes in the Trump policies, in cracking down, in mass deportations. Who else, who else in terms is the president…. Stephen Miller is the architect. Yeah, he’s the architect. And he has the longest exposure to Trump on this issue. I mean, when Stephen Miller came onto the campaign in 2015, he traveled around with him, was a very small team, and he has been obsessed with immigration since he was a high school student. And the issue looms so large for him above every other issue. I mean, Stephen Miller is in charge of all domestic policy from the White House, deputy chief of staff in charge. That’s a difference from first time. He has broader power, much more power. But for Stephen Miller, every issue always links back to immigration. A lot of what he told us on the record then is what they’re exactly what they’re doing right now. And Trump trusts him. He’s got his ear. You could make a case that he is the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful unelected people in the country. I mean, he’s the most powerful unelected people in the country – 100 percent – and do you think he distinguishes between legal immigration and illegal immigration? He definitely distinguishes between them. But there are certain categories of immigrants that are legal, but Steven views as illegitimate. Steven Miller views like a temporary protected status or something like that. They would view them all generally as people who shouldn’t be in this country. The student visa, kind of I think, almost factors into that description, too, because one thing that we’ve heard a lot from Trump’s aides is, as this crackdown has gone on, they’ve said, look, a student visa is a privilege. It is a privilege that can be revoked. As, and we’re seeing it revoked when – Which is true – Obviously, like obviously true. No one’s suggesting what they’re doing is illegal, is it, on the student visa stuff? I suppose there’s a free speech component to it. Yeah, I mean, some of this is going to be tested in federal courts, is whether or not you can broadly say that you can take away somebody’s green card because the secretary of state says so. Yes, it’s true that you can revoke a student visa, that you can rescind a green card if you’re charged for a crime, a violent crime. But what we’re seeing here are also college students that have participated in protests, pro-Palestine, anti-Israel protests in some cases, and we lack evidence for a lot of these cases because the administration hasn’t presented it or provided it. It does seem to be a free speech issue. Here again, they’re citing another obscure statute that basically says that these folks engaged in activity that undermined U.S. foreign policy. Therefore, we will rescind your student visa, rescind your green card. That seems very broad to me. Activity that undermines foreign policy. They’ve argued antisemitism thus far. But are your sources telling you how much further they could take the use of that statute? I haven’t heard that yet, but I think you’re right, that that statute could be used broadly. And I think it’s important to think about this. The way they’re talking about these people is in the frame of threats, terror threats. These are people who are terrorist sympathizers, who are potentially liable to do damage to our country. But when it comes to this provision being used, we’ve never really seen this be used on a repeated basis like we’ve seen in the last few months. It’s completely new. Totally new. There have been a lot of local stories across the country about college students losing their visas. Outside of the context of what we heard a few weeks ago, where people were getting their visas revoked for protesting, this appears to be a broader effort where hundreds of students and campuses across the country are getting their visas revoked, and there is no clarity or transparency from the government on what this is all about. And what specifically is happening is something that really has not been answered yet, and it’s causing mass panic amongst international students. You’re talking beyond just the protests? Definitely beyond the protest, beyond the protest. This is where on campuses where there wasn’t a mass, mass protest happening, right. What we’re seeing in almost every state, I mean, we’re hearing about this every single day. I know we’re reporting nonstop. But appreciate you guys joining. Jonathan Swan, Hamed Aleaziz, thanks so much. Thanks for having us.