Tariffs Trigger Turmoil & Anti-Trump Protests Erupt | 4.7.25

Wall Street remains shaken as President Trump seeks to reset trade terms around the world.

A lot of our trading partners, including some of our allies, have not been good partners.

If tariffs are so bad, why do they have them?

As the White House defends the tariffs, how are world leaders responding?

I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

It's Monday, April 7th, and this is Morning Wire. While Trump urges Americans to hang tough amid the economic turmoil, economists debate the president's high-risk gamble.
The economy just doesn't work like a light switch, and that's the risk he takes if he is negotiating, is he could get something that looks like a good deal in the end and it could be too late for the economy. And left-wing protests pop up all around the country in anti-Trump and anti-Musk demonstrations.
Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned.
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Markets have tumbled as President Trump's historic tariffs bring an unprecedented reset to global trade. Daily Wire senior editor Cabot Phillips is here with the latest on how the White House and world leaders are responding to this seismic shakeup.
Hey, Cabot. So let's start with the markets, which have been getting a lot of attention here for good reason.
What's the latest from Wall Street? Well, it's more bad news on that front. In the 48 hours following Trump's Rose Garden announcement, more than $6 trillion was wiped off the stock market.
The Dow Jones saw its worst 48-hour period since COVID lockdowns in 2020, plunging more than 3,900 points, while the S&P 500 fell another 6% Friday when 486 of its 500 stocks lost value. Zooming out, the S&P is down 17% since February.
The Dow is down 14%. JP Morgan now says there is a 60% chance of a global recession

by year's end due to what they call, quote, disruptive U.S. policies.
But for his part,

President Trump took a rosier outlook, saying Friday, quote, this is a great time to get rich.

How has the president and his administration responded to all this turmoil?

So it's worth noting they've been saying all along that there would be some disruptions from the start. Remember, President Trump said prices would temporarily go up after Liberation Day.
He compared the tariffs to a surgical procedure that took some recovery time. In a Truth Social post over the weekend, he said, quote, this is an economic revolution and we will win.
Hang tough. It won't be easy, but the end result will be historic.
Now, more broadly, the White House argues the stock market is not indicative of overall economic health and that the vast majority of Americans care more about high-paying jobs and affordable goods than a booming stock portfolio. Here's Treasury Secretary Scott Besson on Tucker Carlson making the case that middle and lower class Americans benefit far less from the market.
The top 10% of Americans own 88% of equities, 88% of the stock market. The next 40% owns 12% of the stock market.
The bottom 50 has debt. They have credit card bills, they rent their homes, they have auto loans, and we've got to give them some relief.
Now look, it's impossible deny. That is a very different message from Trump world than we heard during his first term when the president routinely lauded the record stock market growth we saw from 2016 to 2020.
The fact that he's willing to risk a market disruption, a serious one, shows how much he's prioritizing their efforts to revolutionize the economy, in his view, from the bottom up. It's a risk, but when the White House is confident we'll pay off.
Besant went on to say President Trump inherited an economy that might have had the appearance of health, but was rotting from the inside out. It's almost like the bodybuilders taking steroids.
Outside looks great. You're muscular.
Inside, you're killing your vital organs. That's what was going on here.
But it would have been easy to keep pumping up the economy, borrowing a lot of money, creating a lot of government jobs. There was no controversy when we're doing all that, but you were going to end up in a calamity.
Others in Trump's cabinet reiterated that we must endure short-term pain in order to bring back American manufacturing, not just to protect our economy, but also to improve national security. Here's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on CBS.
We don't make medicine in this country anymore. We don't make ships.
We don't have enough steel and aluminum to fight a battle. We've got to stop having all the countries of the world ripping us off.
Now, President Trump is hoping the Federal Reserve will extend a bit of a jolt to the economy by cutting interest rates. He posted on Truth Social Friday, quote, This would be the perfect time for Fed Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.
He is always late, but he could now change his image and quickly. Cut interest rates, Jerome, and stop playing politics.
Powell refused to respond to Trump's comments, saying the Fed was, quote, Well-positioned to wait for greater clarity on the economy, but he did say the tariffs were, quote, significantly larger than expected. Ultimately, rate cuts will likely rest on how much inflation spikes as a result of the trade war, and perhaps more importantly, how long these tariffs stay in place.
Now, the president has said the longevity of the tariffs will be determined by how other countries respond. What are we seeing internationally thus far? Yeah, it's important to note the White House says if our trading partners want those rates knocked down, they'll have to make concessions beyond just lowering tariffs.
They want them to address, quote, non-tariff cheating, mainly value-added taxes, and outright bans on certain products. For example, much of Europe does not allow any American meat to be imported.
We've seen other examples with similar products around the world. Some countries dug in for a protracted trade war.
China slapped 34% tariffs on all American imports, while the EU said they would pursue, quote, countermeasures, likely more tariffs. But many countries have come to the negotiating table.
Taiwan, for example, said they would not implement any retaliatory tariffs and would instead pursue a, quote, zero tariff deal U.S. Vietnam, one of our largest trading partners in Asia, sent a letter to Trump Saturday offering to remove all tariffs on U.S.
imports if Trump would agree to pause our own tariffs for 45 days. All told, the White House says privately our trade partners have been blowing up the president's phone looking for a deal.
In the meantime, the big question still remains, will this past week be a short blip on the radar and the dawn of an economic renaissance or the start of a recession? And the question on everyone's mind at this point. Cabot, thanks for reporting.
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Again, that's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash MorningWire for $1,000 off. While the Trump administration is calling for calm amid the tariff-sparked turmoil, economists are debating the short-term and long-term impacts of the president's America First policies.
Joining us now is one of those economists, David Bonson, founder and managing partner of the Bonson Group. David, thank you for coming on.
We try to hear from a variety of perspectives in this show and wanted to hear your angle on these retaliatory tariffs. You've been generally critical of them.
I want to ask you first about the stock market's response thus far to these tariff announcements.

Is this a blip or are we in for long-term pain in the stock market?

It's so hard to answer when you don't know and markets don't know how long-term the actual implementation of the tariffs will prove to be.

It's one thing that some would argue is by design, but it's one thing that is characteristic of President Trump's kind of approach to this is a little bit of uncertainty, a little bit of chaos. No, I do not think stocks are due for a quick recovery if we are really moving to a long-term 34% impairment of global trade.
We are really looking at taking potentially $500 billion out of US GDP in a year. Those things that they were really to happen, you could argue that stocks have much more repricing to go.
But of course, the upside risk is that you could also get an announcement in 48 hours that they got some concessions or some sort of headline announcement that is reversing course on a lot of this. So it's all in flux when it comes to markets.
And we're seeing some of those deals being worked out with Vietnam and Taiwan with some signs of other deals coming soon. Now, Treasury Secretary Besant described our economy as one that has seemed outwardly robust enough, but is actually quite unhealthy at its core.
Do you agree with Besant and Lutnik as well that there are some fundamental problems that have needed to be addressed, particularly related to trade in American-made products? I like what Secretary Besant has said to me privately and what he has said on the record publicly in the past about the fundamental problems in the economy being related to too high of debt and too low of gross. I do not believe that one of the fundamental problems is what Secretary Lutnik is saying, that we as a country that exports more services to the rest of the world than anybody, but buys a little bit more goods from the rest of the world than we sell to them, that that represents the core economic dysfunction of our economy.

Our economy is growing at some part growth because the government debt is too high a percentage. So myself, as one who really believes in the robustness of the private sector, the efficiencies that come from private market resource allocation, not a command control economy, I see this as a non sequitur.
I'm not looking for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to run the economy. And that includes decisions as to what types of industries we want to prop up and what industries we want to prop down.
If we were to be effective, which I do not believe they will be, but if we were to be effective in bringing more domestic manufacturing to America, they can't do that without hurting services. And I would rather that our federal government not be in the business of picking those winners and losers.
Final question. What should the American people expect in the coming months in terms of how their pocketbooks are going to be impacted? I know there's lots of factors here.
What's your best guess at what's going to happen over the next few months? My best guess is that some products are going to go up immediately. Some products will lag before they see a price increase, but that the bigger problem to the American kind of middle-class economy will be declining economic growth.
I'm a supply sider, and I firmly believe that economic growth comes from the production of goods and services. And that innovation, that capital investment, they're going to be declining in the months ahead.
That leads to downward pressure on jobs, downward pressure on wages, and downward pressure on corporate profits doesn't matter. They're going to find out that corporate profits are the mother's milk of economic growth.
Well, let's hope we see the kinds of progress the administration believes that we'll see in sooner rather than later. David, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you for having me. Anti-Trump activists gathered in cities across the country over the weekend in the largest show of protests since Trump took office.
Here to talk about the protests is Daily Wire reporter Tim Pierce. So Tim, a lot of activity over the weekend from these apparently multiplying protests.
What was the main message from the protesters? It didn't seem like they had any concrete goals. Many protesters said they just wanted to be heard by the people in power and show others that they aren't alone.

The mass action was vaguely named Hands Off, which gave protesters a pretty broad platform to layer their grievances on top of.

According to organizers, there were over 1,200 protests across all 50 states.

The protest in Washington, D.C. took place on the National Mall and featured Democratic lawmakers, union officials, activists, and many others.

Here's some of California Congressman Eric Swalwell's remarks on Saturday.

And he's not just disappearing people. He's disappearing rights.
And to that we say, disappear, we're still here. There were also a lot of demonstrations against Elon Musk.
There were protests outside of Tesla dealerships, chance to deport Musk, and all sorts of anti-Musk signage, much of which essentially called him a Nazi. Now, has it been confirmed that George Soros is funding a lot of this activism? The demonstrations had dozens of sponsors, but yes, the Soros-funded group Indivisible has taken a leading role.
Its co-executive director, Ezra Levin, promoted the protests on networks ahead of April 5th. Here was Ezra on MSNBC with Rachel Maddow last week.
One of the beautiful things about this is it's meeting people where they are. We're all coming to this for a different reason.
We can say hands off the Department of Education, hands off our Social Security, hands off our Medicaid, hands off trans kids, hands off our communities, hands off our civil rights, hands off our democracy. Indivisible funded part of these protests.
The group's local affiliates bused activists to protest sites, and the national organization offered a reimbursement program for protest costs for everything from audio and video equipment to chicken suits. Now, what's the administration's response been? Borders are Tom Homan was on Fox News over the weekend, and he said a protest popped up outside his house in New York, though he wasn't home at the time.
Here's Homan. Well, look, they're protesting an operation up there that was conducted by HSI and Border Patrol, a criminal investigation and child predator that was arrested.
And there was people that were detained for material witness and possible victim statements. So people that are, you know, concerned about the way this operation was conducted.
I don't make decisions based on protests and hate mail and rallies, but it's unfortunate that they don't listen to the facts of the case. So not a lot of sympathy for the protesters from Tom Homan.

All right, well, we'll see if they continue

after Musk steps back in May.

Tim, thanks for reporting.

Good to be on.

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